LiberalArtsOnline Volume 3, Number 1
January 2003
by John Ottenhoff
Professor of English
Alma College
Distance learning is the best thing that's happened to liberal arts education in decades.
No, don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to sell you a new techno-enthusiast's version of liberal arts online. I just think distance learning and the buzz created by emerging technologies have clarified educational priorities like nothing else.
Start with the way new technologies have, in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's terms, become an "intellectual forklift" for colleges and universities. That is, if content delivery is the name of the game -- and it has been across much of higher education -- new technologies perform the role more efficiently and often more effectively than huge lecture-hall presentations. Who's to blame consumers and savvy administrators for finding new technologies seductive, given that paradigm? Distance education might just serve the useful purpose of laying bare the inadequate, unsatisfying "delivery view" of education, with or without forklifts.
The contrast of purposes has never been clearer: as the edu-tech forklifts become more ubiquitous, the distinctiveness of liberal arts education becomes clearer, and education that is transformative, reflective, and integrative becomes more important.
The World Wide Web and the technology boom also have forced liberal arts colleges to think through easy slogans about producing "well-rounded" students. Consider how the ubiquitous Distributive Requirement system, a primary mechanism of establishing this broad training, resembles web browsing, as students pick up bits and pieces of information that may or may not be connected. Consider, too, how having a world of information at our fingertips challenges easy assumptions about needing to know certain pieces of knowledge, key facts of the well-rounded universe. If one can find factual information about almost anything through simple web searches, if one can attain shallow pools of knowledge about an infinite set of subjects online, then the World Wide Web qualifies as a superb liberal education. Unless, of course, we think liberal arts education is about more than acquiring a broad smattering of information and instead about attaining knowledge and wisdom and understanding.
But certainly emerging technologies can produce more than cautionary lessons and bracing clarifications. Consider, for instance, how "pedagogy" is now a word used widely in the profession, not just in education departments. Whether spurred by true or faddish innovation, technology has prompted a more sincere and far-reaching discussion about how students learn than anything else in the past several decades. Classrooms are now much more open, revealing through online syllabi, assignments, and reading lists the choices we make about pedagogies that may or may not promote inquiry, interaction, and collaboration.
Still, we need more positive and definitive understanding of how we can learn to harness the immense power of emerging technologies to foster practices at the heart of liberal arts education. If liberal arts education aims to integrate and connect, we should seriously explore how the superb linking capacity of the Web might foster our aims. We might consider, too, how technology can enhance existing communities or truly foster active learning and collaboration, making students more than consumers of information. That is some of what the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts hopes to do in two upcoming inquiries about the role of technology in liberal arts education (see the description at http://www.wabash.edu/cila/home.cfm?news_id=1414). It is the least we can do in response to all the good -- and bad -- wrought by the distance-learning revolution.
LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.