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(The following article appeared in it's entirety in the New School publication DIALog, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1995. That was back when we weren't yet using a graphic or web-based interface -- can you even imagine!? -- just text, so pardon some of the outdated references and refreshing if corny enthusiasm.)
The following is a conversation that took place between Meg Foley McCabe, Manager of DIAL Curriculum Development and William R. Pace, DIAL screenwriting instructor. While the names have not been changed, the dialogue has been completely fabricated in the interest of entertainment. Besides, fiction contains a larger truth anyway.
INTERIOR - DIAL OFFICE PARTY - NIGHT
MEG MCCABE FOLEY, an attractive and bright woman, spies BILL PACE, a prematurely graying Ichabod Crane-like creature stuffing his face on free food. She moves in for the attack.
DISSOLVE TO:
NIGHT BEFORE THE ARTICLE IS DUE
WHITE, filling the screen. Camera SLOWLY PULLS BACK to REVEAL the white is Bill's Mac Powerbook, devoid of anything except a blank screen. His face reflects pretty much the same.
Then inspiration seems to fight its way to his bleary consciousness. He begins typing, slowly at first, but then with more speed and purpose. As he continues typing, we MOVE IN and FOCUS on the words:
The DIAL environment... Well, let's see. It's like a... living, breathing community bulletin board, one that magically answers your postings, creating a branching tree of responses, new questions and new directions!
True, true, but not quite it. Hmmm... Well, it's a bit like TV: the flat two dimensional plane of the "classroom" continually "crawls" up your screen like the title credits of some old, late night movie. Plus, you sit too close to it and spend a lot of time absorbed in it. Of course one major difference is this "TV" only receives the "educational channel." (And, believe it or not, it's exciting!)
What about like a William Gibson cyberpunk novel (NEUROMANCER, JOHNNY MEMNMOIC, etc.) come to life: an electronic freight train of knowledge slamming into your neurons as you "jack" into "cyberspace" and "upload" your responses and "download" other people's replies?
Actually, it's quite a bit like all the above, plus more. The DIAL environment ventures into new, uncharted territory, creating a bold new cyberspace where educator and educated commingle into co-educationalists, neither one quite whole without the other. In other words, it's an education experience like no other.
Interactive learning challenges all old precepts while finding new ones wanting. It is an exciting area utilizing the classic elements of teaching a "live" class in a "synchronous" mode and extends them to a "space" where no one need participate at the exact same time. And while these classic teaching elements hold universal truths, interactive learning demands we adapt them into ingenious twists and turns.
Guiding myself and my students through my first DIAL class this past semester, I found myself employing elements of all the metaphors mentioned earlier in an attempt to discover the "best" way to teach in this new forum.
The class "lessons" themselves are set up like a community board with instructors (or education facilitators as a fellow DIAL instructor prefers to be called)"posting" lectures and assignments while students respond by "posting" questions and their lessons. And, like a bulletin board, the key is to keep the messages short and sweet sitting at an computer terminal for an hour or more reading a lecture is not the prime way to use the setting. Some people say this shows how interactive learning is pandering to the supposed shorter attention span of the younger generations, but I say... I'm sorry, what was I saying? Oh, yeah, I don't buy this.
As the term implies, the classes should be interactive; the goal is not to back up a dump truck of information and just pile into students' laps. Instead, teachers should engage students in a dialogue by giving them enough information to intelligently discuss a subject (with the teacher helping guide these discussions), ask better questions and converse with their fellow students. This way they learn through their own processes, not by rote memorization. The bulletin board analogy facilitates this you want to post short, succinct and informative "lessons" and responses so you ignite give-and-take discussions. If you don't, you may get what I received after posting two ten pages long lectures: the equivalent of an electronic, blank, unblinking, glazed-over stare. Silence in the classroom is bad enough, but at least you can hear them breathing. Online, all you hear is your own breathing and the very quiet noise of your computer chuckling at you. In cyberspace, no one can hear you pull your hair out.
I use the TV metaphor in remembering how the classes are "delivered" to the students: via computers hooked up to monitors, which, let's face it, are TV's. Does that mean we have to become MTV and send fragmented, sex-drenched, radically edited images in epileptic-inducing, unsyncopated rhythms? No. (But if anyone knows how to, please email me privately!) But I think it's important to remember the environment people are receiving a class in. As Caucus (the DIAL class software) works now, when I enter my "classroom" and punch up the new material, it "crawls" up my screen until the screen is full and then waits for me to hit return before showing the next segment. Realizing this, I try to make use of the medium. If this article was coming into your computer right now, I'd probably do something different rather than typing the lines in neat little tight rows. I could skip several spaces by continually hitting
word...
at...
a...
time.
What does this accomplish in an educational sense. Well, it might make sure the recipient pays closer attention or, if I'm really lucky, make them laugh. But I think the more you can personalize the sometime sterile and distanced setting of the medium, the more you work toward making a connection with people. And a big part of teaching is instructor and instructee making a connection; hey, we're human, that's the way we work. Some people worry about the removal of the human factor from the classroom, and I believe that's a legit concern. But the computer is only a tool, an electronic extension/version of ourselves and our classes; it does not automatically vivisect us of our humanity, it merely requires us to find different ways to express it.
And as for the cyberpunk analogy, well, that's just me being wishful. The Caucus interface is not quite yet up to Hollywood's computer graphics standards; think of Caucus as the Conestoga covered wagon of the "Information Highway." Sometimes the road is bumpy and the ride stiff, but the trip is inspiring and the destination worthy beyond measure. Hey, we're all education pioneers, pardner!
And on that metaphor...
The camera PULLS BACK from the now full computer screen and FOCUSES IN ON Bill's smiling face:
(Another, little touted advantage of being in an online class : ASCII cyberart!!)
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