Reflection Essay

This essay is a reflective statement of my time in the Distance Education Master's program at the University Maryland University College. I have spent a very long time in that program by most standards, taking seven years to reach the Capstone course where I now am. In that time I have moved from thinking that Distance Education was a form of learning that would increase the liberation of the human spirit in general by making knowledge freely available to everyone, to a position that education, especially in the last 200 years, as an institution is not about open learning, and human development, but about selection and control within a society. Education re-enforces the status quo and discourages changes in paradigms and ruling structures.

I came to the program with great expectations. I saw it as a way to spread the world of learning and knowledge I inhabited at St. Alban’s School for Boys in Washington, DC. I thought it would allow me to spread that world beyond the reach of only those who could afford it because I did not understand at the time how school was a selection process for a society. I did not truly know that where you went to school and who you went to school with would determine your place in society. I was beaming with enthusiasm to learn how continue to expand the engagement with the world that I thought education was, an engagement that started on the front porches of Kermit Avenue when I played game after game of chess, Risk, Diplomacy, Avalon Hill war games and other historical simulations, where I relived event after event through books and imagination, to continue human liberation on the seemingly unstoppable road that it seemed to travel. I had no real idea how limited my learning world had been in those days before the Internet. I confused education with learning.

I thought that I had found the formal organization and method to make the learning ethic that I discovered in Steven Levy’s Hackers (Levy, 1985) a reality, and tried to live by that ethic in my face to face teaching, that would allow me to expand my belief in hands on student directed learning. I was right and I was wrong all at the same time. School was not about the hands on imperative or the sharing of knowledge. Your value in this world did not depend on how much you knew but instead on who you knew, and where you went to school.

In 1988 I sat down at a computer terminal connected to an acoustic modem that sent text at 300 baud/sec from my classroom to the Government and Politics department's computer at the University of Maryland College Park which hosted an international relations simulation (Project ICONS). I guess you could call it my first distance learning experience as a teacher though I would not think of it that way for years to come. For the first time the students and I were interacting with human beings, freed from the confines of time and space as well as the tyranny of curriculum and proscribed content. Instead of telling the students about international relations and the countries of the world as the curriculum viewed them, we were touching them and engaging in them by becoming them within our simulated world. I had no idea at this time of the formal world of distance education. I had no idea that what we were doing would come to be called computer mediated communication. I had no idea that what we were doing would come to be known as a Multi-user Role Playing game. All I knew for sure was that we were having fun and learning. The students would spend hours preparing the "diplomatic pouch" and "diplomatic messages" for the nations of "our world". It followed naturally for me from the games I had played as a child and young adult of connecting books to the world in hands on way. This was not a made up world but a world based on our gathering of data and becoming actors in the drama where success was measured in real world terms of negotiations and drama.

I’ll never forget the feeling of liberation when I opened my first Internet account on the WWW with Netscape and followed that with the purchase of an exorbitantly expensive 2400 baud modem. To see my voice in the first web page I constructed and not needing any one’s permission to publish it was one of the freest moments of my life. I had discovered the Internet and the Freedom that it would bring to all who could access it. The World Wide Web was still in the future but nothing would ever confine me within four walls again at a specific time and place. I had entered the world of Anytime, Anywhere learning. The ICONS experience was my first experience with computer mediated Role Playing and in effect Distance Education. It was the first time that high school students were involved in this computer simulation of negotiation and conflict resolution. It was my first real experience with simulation and distance learning from a teacher’s standpoint in my career. It was also the first time I had truly witnessed learners create content and offer it to their peers rather than to the teacher for evaluation. My fascination and interaction with the Internet grew from there and continues to grow to this day.

Trained as an historian, I was very taken up with the ideas of R. G. Collingwood, particularly expressed in The Idea of History. In that great work Collingwood articulated the idea that historians gather individual bits of information that they can ascertain to be facts, and then weave the cloth of history by imagining it as it could have been. Historians, in fact, construct history, individually and then settle on a collective vision of that history. (Collingwood, 1935). History is an imagined reality whose shape and form changes with the perspective that it is viewed from. There is only a constructivist history.

This discovery of the freedom and power a human being acquires on the Internet began a life changing relationship with cyberspace that would draw me to the Distance Education Masters program at the University of Maryland University College in an attempt to learn how to do “Distance Education”.

In 1999 I read Don Tapscott’s, Growing Up Digital (1997) and was so moved by it that I went to the Microsoft 1999 AnyTime AnyWhere Learning Conference in Dallas, Texas. After that conference I knew that the Internet would become the primary communication medium of teaching and learning. I was firmly committed to putting a laptop computing device in everyone hands. I would settle for nothing less that 1-1 computing. I began to explore distance learning as the best means of using those laptops and decided to enter the program at UMUC.

When I came to the program I thought that print learning had already given way to e-learning in distance education. I loved creating content for the world wide web and had created several web pages for classes I was teaching face to face. Sarah Horton, at Darthmouth at the time, had a great influence on me and my disdain for formal Learning Management Systems. I was active in the newsgroups and participated in several listservs. Blogging had captured my attention and I used it regularly and the Open Source movement dominated my thinking about software and sharing.

In my time in the program I discovered several intellectual strains that have encouraged me to try to take learning to the next level that goes beyond the educational institution and have also witnessed several, of what I might call, counter-revolutions to what I thought the was the promise of Distance Education. It is important to remember that I was a teacher of high school and elementary students and that a great part of my teaching responsibilities were technology related. This skewed my view of people’s ability to use the technology for learning. The kids I taught used it in ways that amazed me time and time again. My students did not have to be taught how to use technology; they just picked it up and did it. I believed then and still do today, that a person with a laptop computer, Microsoft Office or something like it such as Open Office, a web browser, and a connection to the Internet can access the sum total of knowable human data and remix it into anything that they want it to become. I thought that the Distance Education program was very trapped in the past.

I may have left the UMUC program a long time ago without my Foundations of Distance Education course. That course introduced me to the idea of transactional distance and student-teacher-content interaction. This came at the same time as I was discovering the idea of constructivism and networked learning. It also re-united me with the idea of the British Open University and with Empire State College in New York State. I also felt like a practicing professional whose viewpoint was respected and argued with. It was in this course that I also discovered my tendency to “listen” to the discussions in the conferences much more than I did in physical life. I learned to slow down and think about what other people said before voicing my own views.

The next course almost did drive me from the program. Technology in Distance Education seemed to me rather childish and not for a teacher who loved the Internet. It seemed to be designed for people who were not really interested in discovering new knowledge but in the best way to make more money on the job. To be honest I thought the course was dated. It was also the first time I was directly punished for not meeting the prescribed quota of conference postings. “Lurking” was not allowed.

Distance Educations Systems in the spring of 2006 firmly rooted me in the systems design model of education. It is where I discovered Peter Senge and systems thinking. It was also my introduction into the industrial mode of course creation and that knowledge value might not be scarcity based any longer. I also discovered the Lone Ranger method of course creation which was what I actually used in my real life. It helped me to begin to form the idea in my head that the behaviorist mode of teaching and learning was not the way that human beings best learned.

The best moments of my time in the program would come in the last two years of study. Instructional Design and Course Development became a laboratory where I could practice my ideas on imagination and constructivism. I was ready to quit again because I had begun to chafe under the idea of course objectives and curriculum development. The idea of time restraints and specific requirements to complete a course seemed so misplaced in distance education until I realized that education was the problem. I began to develop the idea that a course or learning community should go in the direction of the learners and not the teacher if the school was to be truly learner directed and meet the needs of the learners. A teacher’s job was to discover the interests of the students and then connect those interests to the subject under discussion. The curriculum should be determined by the interests of the students and what they wanted to learn and not by the teacher and what he wanted to teach. I would like to publicly thank Som Nadu for encouraging me to think through these ideas and to go for it in this class. It works. It can be done, it is hard, but it works out best for everyone.

Where did these ideas come from? If you notice in the progression of my courses, I did not take a course in 2002. Skipping this year seemed almost like the kiss of death in my formal studies. I actually attempted Instructional design in this year but chaffed under it regime and actually received an F because I could not bring the class to completion.

During that year, and the time since, I have read widely in the pedagogy of and philosophy of teaching and learning. I have become fascinated with Multi-Media and its place in E-learning I discovered and devoured Pablo Friere, Ivan Illich, Roger Schank, Marc Prensky, Clark Aldridge, James Paul Gee and other theorists of hands on learning. I have thrown around the ideas of Grenville Rumble, Peter Senge, Otto Peters, Gene Rubin, and other thinkers in the field. I have been fascinated with ideas of Web 2.0 and the ferment that it is causing within the educational world. To use Shanks term, just tell me a story.

All of the courses had some value in my development as a theorist of learning. My explorations of Multimedia in Learning and Teaching with Multimedia helped me to understand the power of the Internet and the allure of gaming as a viable teaching method. Training at a Distance helped me to understand that the flat world that we now inhabit no longer needs schools or training departments based on the old tell and test methodology but instead will replace them with viritual worlds that help us all to create new identities and personas that will allow us to escape the content driven education system we have today.

I am not sure that what happened to me while I was in the distance education program is what the program intended to happen to me. I thought outside of the box that the program presented to me. If one stays in the box of institutional design I am afraid you may be prepared for a world that no longer exists. I know that I missed some of the hoops. I hope I still finish the program.

I believe that school, whether it be Distance, Face to Face or some hybrid of the two, is no longer an effective way to learn things. School tries to control content through curriculum and selection which tends in my view to retard the progress of the human race. School is for the industrial world that demands order and control in order to produce things. Learning is not an orderly process.

Ivan Illich wrote:

"A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational"

Everyone should be able to find the answers to the questions that they want to address. Everyone should be able to address whatever questions they desire to address. I believe it can be done and what I have learned in the Master’s of Distance Education program at University College will help me to do it.

I think Illich foresaw the Internet, which could very well make all of this possible. Instead of Distance Education maybe we could call it Digital Free Learning.





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