Friday, March 15, 2002

Philosopher's Critique of Online Learning Cites Existentialists (Mostly Dead) By MICHAEL ARNONE Hubert L. Dreyfus got the idea for his latest book, On the Internet, partly from a lunch he had with one of his former students. The student worked as a venture capitalist and had remarked how great it would be if people could leave their physical bodies behind and live entirely on the Internet. Mr. Dreyfus didn't find the prospect appealing. "I thought, Gee, that doesn't sound good to me," he says. Mr. Dreyfus, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, specializes in phenomenology, the study of how people experience the world. In On the Internet, (Routledge, 2001) he argues that the Internet's promise of extending and improving human interaction through the digital medium isn't everything it's cracked up to be. He specifically criticizes distance education -- which offers the possibility of learning without the physical presence of a building, instructor, or other students -- as an overhyped, misunderstood trend that could backfire and result in worse education, not better. To prove his point, Mr. Dreyfus calls in some unorthodox allies -- existentialist philosophers from the 19th and 20th centuries, most of whom never saw a computer or heard of the Internet. But he argues that their conclusions are relevant because they refuted the ideas upon which much of the Internet and online distance education are designed. One of the premises of distance education on the Internet is that people can learn without being physically present with their teacher or fellow students, Mr. Dreyfus says. That assumption is a modern legacy of the philosophy of dualism espoused by the Greek philosopher Plato and the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, he says. Their argument -- that the mind is self-sufficient and better off without the body -- severely limits understanding of how the mind, and learning, actually work, he says. He turns to Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher, and Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher, to argue that the body plays a crucial role in learning. "Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are arguing for the importance of taking risks, of being involved and enjoying or suffering the rewards of involvement," Mr. Dreyfus says. The two men -- who are credited with starting the existentialist movement in philosophy -- proposed that involvement in situations can take place only through the physical body. Andrew L. Feenberg, a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, agrees with Mr. Dreyfus that taking risks is important in learning, but says that the risk of embarrassment in a committed online group is the same as in a face-to-face group. "He's underestimating the power of imagination to bind people into groups," Mr. Feenberg says, and overestimating the difficulty of making strong personal contacts over the Internet. Mr. Dreyfus also draws on 20th-century existentialists such as Martin Heidegger and especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who argues that the body plays a crucial role in all elements of life, from perception to politics. Without physical bodies, people can attain only intellectual competence in skills, Mr. Dreyfus says. They cannot proceed further to mastery of those skills, which involves having an intuitive understanding of using the skills in real situations that entail real risks. Without the emotional investment and visceral connections that come only from actually being somewhere and doing something, people lack the commitment to learn as much as they can. Ultimately, physical presence and action are the only ways we have to acquire skills, learn what information is relevant, know reality, and have meaningful lives, he says. Online pedagogy is still developing, and instructors are learning the constraints and appropriate behavior for online teaching, Mr. Feenberg says. For example, classroom teachers must learn to face students and speak loudly enough so that students can hear them, he says. Once appropriate online-teaching practices are established, instructors and students can form the strong personal and intellectual connections that enable high-level learning. Mr. Dreyfus takes pains to show he is neither a Luddite nor a categorical opponent of distance education. He has recorded his lectures as MP3's and has broadcast one of his courses on the Web. He argues that the structure of the Internet and distance education makes excellence in learning online potentially difficult to achieve, but not impossible. The obvious truth, he says, is that distance education is better than no education, or instructors and students bored in a classroom. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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