Moving Away from the Digital in a Smartphone-Altered Universe | One Flew East

Moving Away from the Digital in a Smartphone-Altered Universe | One Flew East

MOVING AWAY FROM THE DIGITAL IN A SMARTPHONE-ALTERED UNIVERSE

One of B. F. Skinner’s teaching machines. Silly rabbit [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D

Never were online courses adequate substitutes for face-to-face teaching. Like correspondence courses before them, they do fill a need and they can provide motivated students with a viable alternative. But they should never have been preferred or seen as a blanket equivalent to direct interaction with a professor. That is more true today than ever before, primarily because of the stunning success of the smartphone

Yet, because they are cheaper and because they reduce the power of the faculty, online courses are still beloved by administrators and funders. They simplify educational structures and remove vexing questions of space utilization. They also reduce responsibility: When there is no direct oversight, the distant overseer can step aside from blame when the student fails.

At the same time that digital platforms for learning were digging their claws into our educational structures–far too deeply–the milieu in which education operates was also changing. Changing to the point where the new smartphone milieu is standing the assumptions of educators dedicated to the digital on their heads.

Soon after developing his teaching machine (maybe even before), B. F. Skinner realized he was not creating a replacement for teachers but a new tool for them. He always appreciated the need for direct human interaction as a part of teaching. Education administrators who have bought into the various digital-platform models, on the other hand, have long seen their avenues of digital instruction as a way to reducereliance on teachers by regularizing curricula through digital replication and turning the teachers into overseers, people there simply to solve problems as students take more and more control of their CONTINUE READING: Moving Away from the Digital in a Smartphone-Altered Universe | One Flew East