COLLOQUY

Their argument is that using educational technology must require a "pedagogical deficit" in the results. But academics have elected to not do original research to support that hypothesis. Instead, they rely on taking in each others wash as in a "survey of the literature does (or doesn't) show" the claimed results.

It is instructive to note that it is just now beginning to be easily shown that the so-called computer "Productivity Paradox" does indeed lack the basis of real-world facts, primarily because academic economists chose not to change the category rules of data collection in spite of a demonstrably changing real-world. For example, one wild exaggeration is: "If some [poor] states would swear off buying computers for their schools that have to be replaced every three years and software that has to be upgraded every six months, they'd be able to afford a lot of good teachers, books, paper and pencils." This simply ignores how cheap, ubiquitous and powerful today's microcomputers are. These observations represent common complaints but ignore reasonable prescriptives for using our rich cultural resources.

Victor Hugo wrote: "The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of all revolutions; it is humanity's mode of expression made completely afresh; it is human thought casting off one form and donning another... ...In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, and indestructible. It pervades the air... ...Now she is a flock of birds, flies abroad to all the four winds of heaven, and occupies at once all the points of air and of space..." (Victor Hugo, 1831)

So -- tell me again -- what is electronic (virtual) publishing?

Can we afford an intellectual conceit lazily wrapped in 500 year-old Gutenberg technology of the printed word on "primitive" paper? Must we not be able to easily transport thought and ideas through virtual paper or through books and journal on paper as though they were, indeed they are, just another electronic form -- known as hard copy. Otherwise our kids will be cheated.

Is it perhaps naive for us to have claimed book reading technology as superior to film or TV or computer technology? To do so would be to hold that Shakespeare's greater art lies in the printed text and not on the limelighted stage, or that James Whitcomb Riley's words leap to life best from a paper page and not in the cadence of a spoken or recorded voice. The interactive media of today, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web, are no less humanistic than Gutenberg's printing press machine. Our cultural literacy is no less critical in either.

The newest media configurations of the World Wide Web are powerful, inexpensive, highly interactive, individually controlled for self-pacing, ideally suited for independent learning, and ultimately empowering to the user. As this discussion shows technology has already swept over us. It is no longer a technological argument but rather a cultural change.

I conclude that not requiring modern library skills or the communicating skills of using virtual text (nee, pen & paper?; chalk and slate?) is not just educationally risky, but is academically and pedagogically unsound.

Would Victor Hugo now in 1998 opine about thought transformed by technology, as "In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, and indestructible. It pervades the air... ...Now she [thought as virtual text?] is a flock of birds, flies abroad to all the four winds of heaven, and occupies at once all the points of air and of space..."

Is it a conceptual failure to not "see" the extension? Is it enough to merely gossip about imagined pedagogical deficits?

-- Glenn Ralston, commentator (posted 2/16, 11:35 a.m., E.S.T.)

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