WHAT DOES IT
MEAN TO LEARN ON-LINE?

Does the fact that you read text off of a screen as opposed to a printed page mean that you're learning on-line? How many sites must you visit before you can fairly say you're "educated" on a certain topic? How many times do you click?

We have been conditioned by the new-speak of Internet culture to believe that any and every on-line counterpart to an off-line experience is faster and easier. While it may often be true, this attitude will only limit one's ability to self-educate themselves on-line. If it's fast and easy we want then let's get serious about it and start plagiarizing. Education is an art, a delicate procedure whose quality will surely suffer if it is rushed.

There are, as we must be abundantly aware, reams upon reams of truly wonderful resources and valuable information available on-line. We can point them out to you, describe their functionality, outline the differences between different types of information and we will, but that is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what to do with the information to make it into knowledge and, once knowledge is acquired, applying it.

In order to understand what it means to learn on-line, let's begin by asking ourselves what it means to learn where most of us have allegedly engaged in learning- school. In school we absorb lectures given to us by subject matter experts (let's just say) and read material written by subject matter experts. These experts are more or less assigned to us when we enroll and the material we absorb is of coarse assigned based on the expert's opinion of what material will offer the greatest amount of subject matter understanding when used in conjunction with the verbal lecture, class assignments, discussions, etc. We go through this process whereby we form relationships with static material (books, articles, essays, etc.), lectures, facilitated discussion, and exposition(?)(writing papers, performing experiments, etc.) and through it, we may convert information into knowledge.

Assuming then that the subject matter experts we are listening to know what they're talking about and that the material they assign is created by people who know what they're talking about, this process is thought to be advantageous over self-education for a few reasons.

First, it relieves a bit of the personal bias of the learner. The learner, being new to the topic at hand, doesn't really know what to study and may miss something if they simply start tapping resources without someone tofacilitate their curriculum. Having someone who is at least familiar with the discipline and discourse behind the topic at hand to guide the learner can be very valuable when it comes to making sure that the learner covers as much of the basis as possible.

Second, It acquaints the students with the mistakes of the past. Many many brilliant people have studied many of the things that we, today may wish to study. These people have proven themselves as experts, even geniuses in their field. These are the people who have changed the world with their contributions to humanity's body of knowledge and every single on of them,at one time or another, has been shown to be gravely mistaken in some way by some new blood that comes along. My high school physics teacher, Mr. Smith had a great saying about Aristotle. "The man was brilliant, usually wrong, but brilliant!" The advantage of listening to people who are familiar with academic discourse is that they can acquaint the learner with a vast history of knowledge that, at the time it was presented, may have been controversial or even unbelievable but now, in hindsight, is easier to understand. The notion here is that it is more important to understand the discourse as quickly as possible so that we may contribute to it, than it is to enter into a field with nothing; entering "cold". While entering cold may provide the learner with first hand understanding of the early steps of a discipline, he/she would be prone to make the same mistakes as those that came before them. The idea of the academic process is to prime the learner so that they will be perplexed by questions that no one knows the answer to as opposed to questions we've already spent centuries unraveling. The idea is to unravel where the line is still tight.

Lastly, the academic process familiarizes the learner with the means and materials necessary to contribute to the public discourse on the topic at hand. Little Johnny could know more about astrophysics than a NASA engineer but if he doesn't know how to create a document suitable for publishing, if he hasn't "paid his dues" by logging official time in the academic world then few will take him seriously. Perhaps the worst thing about this fact is that Johnny could write up the specs for faster than light travel and be ignored while the NASA engineer gets published for designing a toilet whose flush always swirls clockwise.

But what if we assume that the experts don't always know what they're talking about? What about the mistakes that have been missed along the way? What about a learners natural inquisitive spark that promotes the urge to learn in the first place? Should a learner have the freedom to create their own assignments, choose their own material, seek out and interview their own experts? Wouldn't this be more encouraging and in turn make subject mastery more of a natural attainment, an inevitable one?

Prepared by David Perez and Hai Dai