On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 10:03 PM, Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com>wrote:
> This kind of thing is great, I think, and iTunes is chock full of great
> stuff. MIT also has the opencourseware thing, which is less exciting than
> it sounds, but still informative.
>
> That being said,
>
> (1) I'm thinking of "taking a course" as different from "listening to a set
> of lectures." That actually (to go back to my apparent conflict with shag)
> scales. If it's just about lectures or reading, sure, shit-tons of scale.
> But giving people lectures or reading seems to be different from teaching.
> Otherwise, we could essentially broadcast it. And that doesn't make it
> useless. At all. It's good, and I've taken advantage of such things, and
> even incorporated bits into my own courses. But still. Not what I want to
> do, and not what I thought we were talking about.
>
> (2) skip anything offered by Donald Kagan. Just do.
>
> (3) love the ad from University of Phoenix at the top there. :)
>
> j
>
I almost wrote something like what I think Jeffrey's pointing at here earlier in the thread... the kinds of web classes Jeffrey praised (the vast minority of them in my experience) and the kinds of process I see Joanna advancing in the open university realm seem to run counter to some aspects of the self-education component of the discussion. Carroll laid out the parameters of my concern here in his discussion of schooling/teaching vs. education... and it relates to the social aspect of teaching/schooling by contrast to the potential for isolated autodidacticism within the realm of self-education.
Even in the realm of self-education, I prefer to do it with other people... whether as a means of tapping into what they bring to the issue that I can't/don't or as a means of enriching both/all of our learning by means of open-ended discussions. With respect to the issue of teaching/mentoring, my dad always seemed to have five or six ways to approach math and science problems - each incrementally reformulated, taking a different tack, or drawing on other images/metaphors/examples/cases - so that one of the approaches would, in the end, work for me or that the combination of different tacks would accumulate/be synthesized in my mind in my own way.
Here I thought Jordan's challenge to nathan tankus' position that people don't have the ability to learn on their own was spot on. My students frequently fail to show their ability to learn - an ability they clearly evidence in other areas of their lives - because they see no reason, personal or institutional, to do the work to learn what I am teaching... and who can blame them given the kinds of alienating experience most have had in school, or with coaches, or with mentors, or with any number of different kinds of authority. When I talk to either the "poorer" or "superior" students in my classes about things THEY are interested in I get to see all kinds of abilities to learn any number of things - many really quite difficult and/or arcane, and a bunch with academic and/or political resonance and meaning. Its not the ability to learn that's at issue, its the institutional character and socialized meaning of learning that makes "learning" an alienating experience such that my students do see a great deal of the learning they do as learning... and don't translate those abilities into arenas where they've been taught they are supposed to learn.
The best teachers and professors I had did the stuff my dad did for me at home (and my mom did with literature and the social sciences) and I seek to do it in my own teaching... to discover through discussion (or protestation against material in readings or my presentations) the obstacles to collective self-education en route to assembling a range of different tacks, cases, illuminations, arguments, or comparisons so that the material's coherence, strengths and weakness are understood in diverse terms useful for as many folks in the room as possible. In a good session, clearly, those with more experience learn different things differently than those with less. This clearly isn't only about the classroom, it is about bicycle or computer repair, throwing or kicking balls, hiking or canoeing, cleaning kitchens or planting vegetables.
This is all desperately incomplete but so is just about everything I submit here.