Virtual Walden: Where I Taught and What I Taught For in Cyberspace

Dr. Thomas L. Long [longt@tncc.vccs.edu]

Professor of English

Thomas Nelson Community College

I went to cyberspace because I wanted to teach deliberately, to front the essential facts of teaching, and see if I could not learn what cyberspace had to teach, and not, when I came to retire, discover that I had not taught. What I have learned, the subject of this paper, is the necessity for colleges and universities to reflect carefully on the nature and purposes of liberal education, to examine thoroughly the educational methods and practices that promote student learning, particularly in light of learning styles or learning modes theories, and to allocate judiciously the resources necessary in order to make higher education accessible through information technologies. I will urge here that liberal education entails more than achieving competencies and thus is generally not well served by exclusively on-line instruction. However, any institution that chooses this method of teaching and learning, a medium that does extend the reach and accessibility of higher education, must therefore devote sufficient resources in order to do it well. By "do it well" I mean provides instructional faculty with a cross-functional team whose expertise includes instructional design, media design, and technical support in order to engage students disposed to different modes of learning.

With a great deal of enthusiasm, therefore, during the 1999-2000 academic year I devised an on-line Web-based two-semester Survey of World Literature, a course I had taught in a regular classroom for many years, at Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, Virginia. The course fulfills general education college transfer requirements in the 23-college Virginia Community College System. I decided to take advantage of the millennial year and my decade-long research into Western apocalypticism in order to offer this as a world literature course devoted to apocalyptic and millennialist texts, employing on-line electronic texts available on the Web in the public domain, weekly notes on the assigned readings and interactive asynchronous threaded discussion forums. Using the college's main Web server for content (lecture notes, images, links to readings) and a specially designated distance-learning server for the weekly forums, I composed Web pages using Microsoft FrontPage, having spent the previous summer researching on-line texts. This was a solo project for which I received no released time from the five-course, 15-credit-hour-per-semester teaching load that is our norm.

As a result of a decade of investment of the Commonwealth of Virginia's Equipment Trust Fund and the community college system's information technology initiatives, Thomas Nelson Community College enjoys a generous supply of on-campus computers distributed among faculty offices, networked classrooms, and a large open academic computer center available to students daily. Unfortunately, this cybercopia is both blessing and curse. While funding has been available for hardware and software licensing purchases, it has not been increased for staffing, with the result that the academic information technology service consists of only four full-time staff members: two administrators and two support technicians who maintain over a thousand computers. The college devotes two additional staff members to the design of its Web site, but their duties also include other art and design activities for the college's public relations service, thus constraining their involvement with faculty in designing Web materials. Therefore, faculty who take the initiative to establish a Web presence or to teach an on-line course do so with little technical support from the college. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of the college's limited commitment to on-line instruction occurred during the spring and summer of 2001 when an administrator of the college asked me if I still needed an outdated index page on the distance learning server that I had used to create asynchronous threaded discussion forums for the on-line world literature courses (archiving those forums for presentations such as this one) and that I had continued to use for a similar purpose with courses meeting regularly on campus. I acknowledged that I hadn't used it regularly and blissfully went about my business, only to discover during the summer that the entire server had been reformatted (all my archives erased in the process) and that no one had ever run a backup--one of the most habitual security practices in the information technology profession. On other campuses, heads would roll as a result of such a failure; on ours, they merely shake.

One chronic disadvantage of this resource limitation for our faculty is that we lack various kinds of expertise that permit employing Web-based instruction to its fullest potential as a multi-media, interactive space. For example, without an instructional designer to translate my normal classroom activities into appropriate on-line learning protocols, the course Web site that I composed might charitably be characterized as earnest "shovelware," that is, simply HTML-coding of printed handouts, "lectures," and the like. Similarly, without a media designer I was less able on my own to create Web pages that employed the still-emerging rhetoric of page design, much less to create multi-media. These considerations are not simply a matter of presenting a glossy Web presence. The insights of education theorists working with concepts of learning styles or dominant learning modes suggest that a college classroom is populated by students who learn in different ways, and it is likely that few community college students are predisposed to the dominantly verbal learning that my limited means afforded. The multi-media and interactive capabilities of Web page technology (such as streaming video, audio, and interactive effects) are potentially valuable in providing rich learning experiences for students who do not thrive in "chalk-and-talk" courses. However, producing those effects requires a cross-functional team, including instructional designers, media designers, and technical support for hardware and software, who work along with the instructor. In addition, effective on-line instruction requires a significant investment in hardware, software, and technical support to ensure that these Web technologies work. I have not mentioned the enormous investment of time that the professor must make in preparing to launch an on-line course and the additional time it requires to conduct the course, both of which should require an adjusted teaching load. Any institution that attempts on-line instruction without these resources is doing a disservice to its faculty and students, jeopardizing the quality of learning, and compromising education.

In the fall term 1999, 25 students initiated the first course, Survey of World Literature I, and in the spring of 2000, 21 students registered for the second course. Retention and productive grades in both courses, always a concern with community college students but more problematic with distance learning courses, were particularly disappointing. Fewer than half in each course completed the courses productively, the rest either withdrawing from the courses or earning a failing grade of D or F. The complex lives of community college students produce a variety of conflicts with course completion, much less academic success, so those personal factors as much as particular weaknesses of this Web-based course may have determined the outcome.

The college's Assessment officer conducted a terminal survey of students in the first course, involving both Likert-scale responses to statements regarding the course and open-ended responses to prompts. Asked what they liked about the course, several students commented on its accessibility and convenience, as well as the opportunity that I had provided to meet me and each other and in collaborative group projects. Asked what they did not like about the course, several reported technical problems with the college's Web server, the difficulty of reading texts on line, and their unrealistic expectations about the work and discipline that on-line learning required (Flythe). The few students responding to this survey make data unreliable, but they square with a more thorough survey with a larger statewide sampling conducted by the Virginia Community College System.

That statewide assessment reports that in an on-line survey employing open-ended questions, of the students responding to the question "What did you like best?," the vast majority cited various reasons that could be characterized as entailing the courses' convenience or accessibility (including convenience, flexibility, working at one's own pace, working at home, availability, and accessibility). Of the students who responded "yes" to the question "Would you take another [on-line] course?," most indicated motives that might be similarly characterized as convenience (including "convenience/flexibility/access" and "work at home/ work at own pace"). Of the students responding to the question "What did you like least?," almost half cited the loss of contact with the faculty member or peers ("lack of interaction" and "lack of timely feedback from instructor"). Of those responding to the query, "What would you change?", better than a quarter (the highest percentage of all responses to this question) indicated that they would like more interaction with faculty and students (Schulz 35-37).

Employing a similar methodology, the Virginia Community College System surveyed its faculty. Faculty observed that students enroll in on-line courses because of their convenience and flexibility and during the courses want frequent communication and timely feedback. Faculty also remarked on the low success rate and suggested that there is a "lack of vision for distance learning in the VCCS" and that "content and delivery methods need to reflect effective practices for online learning" (Schulz 37, 38). Permit my stating the obvious: neither students nor faculty indicated that improved teaching or enriched learning were motives for taking on-line courses.

It is also significant that both students and faculty in these surveys noticed that on-line instruction changes the kind of interaction that students have with each other and with the professor, and they commented that they did not like it. My final point in this paper is the contention that complex, real-time, actual-space socialization is the nucleus of Liberal Arts education, not narrowly defined "competencies" and certainly not the "delivery" of "instructional content." A liberal education is an introduction to a variety of discourse communities in which our bodies learn to occupy space with other bodies by entering a ceaseless conversation that began before the codex and will continue long after our pixels fade into nothingness. While teaching the two on-line courses and in the semesters since, I have observed the ways in which students and I socialize with each other, formally and informally, and I conclude that much of that socialization is phatic, that is less about content or a conative function and more about testing or sustaining a communication channel, in which the students are often simply talking themselves into understanding, emboldened or challenged by the presence of a listener. In a world in which information is more readily available on demand, education is even more than ever before about creating experiences rather than conveying competencies, context over content.

All of these blurry anecdotal observations and personal conclusions came into sharp focus for me last year when I came across a book published by the Harvard Business School Press, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's The Social Life of Information, a book that I recommend as the education book of the year, although its intended audience seems to be business managers and executives. Debunking the endism of technomanes--the computer means the end of the paper office, the network means the end of meetings and classrooms, the Internet means the end of courses and degrees--Brown and Duguid assert that knowledge is a messy, social, reiterative, and phatic affair. In other words, it is not "delivery" of "instructional content." Keep in mind that their focus is the business workplace and its practical knowledge when they assert that learning is initiation into a community of practice:

The talk made the work intelligible, and the work made the talk intelligible. As part of this common work-and-talk, creating, learning, sharing, and using knowledge appear almost indivisible. Conversely, talk without work, communication without practice is if not unintelligible, at least unusable. Become a member of a community, engage in its practices, and you can acquire and make use of its knowledge and information. (125-26)

Using a distinction articulated by Jerome Bruner, they argue that learning to be is as important as learning about (128), that is, knowledge is both socialization and information. Brown and Duguid debunk the neat systems fantasies of organizational re-engineers in favor of a view of knowledge as a "sticky and leaky" exchange among redundant "communities and networks of practice." Learning, in other words, is a "demand-driven, identity forming, social act . . . [that] binds people together" (140). Proposing a more subtle concept of an "ecology of knowledge," Brown and Duguid assert that:

[W]hile . . . information technology is very good at reach, it is less good at the sort of dense reciprocity needed to make and maintain such strong and informative informal links. And it is these informal links running along networks of practice that allow knowledge to flow to where . . . it belongs. (169)

If the water cooler, the lunchroom, and the carpool trump email and video conferencing, the same can be said of the classroom over the Web page. May I add that I found this book in a Waterstone's Booksellers in the Atlanta airport on my way to a conference? The store's dark wooden book presses, distressed leather chairs, and rich wallpapers suggested that corporate culture recognizes that learning needs to be a rich social and sensual experience, not simply an efficient use of space, that "content" needs a "context."

I left cyberspace for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more classes to teach, and could not spare any more time for that one. I have continued to employ Web technologies to enhance classroom experiences--creating content-rich sites and interactive forums as supplements to our meetings in real space. However, I have also learned to enrich the opportunities for socialization and enculturation that occur among my students and me in a regular classroom. Cyberspace learning requires real space socialization. Institutions considering or reconsidering Web-based instruction must do so prepared to examine their assumptions about learning and to assess their financial commitment. If the advantages of access, especially in rural settings, prevail, they must not do so at the expense of liberal learning.

Works Cited

Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information. Boston: Harvard Business School P, 2000.

Flythe, Fran. Email to Author. 2 Nov. 2001.

Long, Thomas L. ENG 251 Survey of World Literature I Home Page. Fall 1999. <http://community.tncc.edu/faculty/longt/e251/e251-2000info.html>.

---. ENG 252 Survey of World Literature II Home Page. Spring 2000. <http://community.tncc.edu/faculty/longt/e252/index.htm>.

Schultz, Carole. "Surveys of Distance Learning in the Virginia Community College System." Inquiry: The Journal of the Virginia Community Colleges. 6.2 (Fall 2001): 34-38.

© by Thomas L. Long, 2001

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