Marc Edmundson wrote of "The Trouble with Online Education," in a New York Times op-ed column on July 19, 2012. He attempted to make the point that online education is a monologue while a traditional college setting offers more opportunity for dialogue. This is my reply.
Edmundson's notion that dialogue separates in-person from
online education presumes that dialogue is an exclusive characteristic of the
in-person educational environment. We all think we know what dialogue is, but
it’s a little more elusive when we try to define it. Since the time of Plato,
(and maybe before), we have taken dialogue to be a two way exchange of ideas.
Read any of Plato’s dialogues, however, and we see a dominance of the
conversation by Socrates. Enough utterances are made by Socrates that the
dialogues of Plato are given the special name of “Socratic” dialogues. Socrates
is the originator, moderator, and gatekeeper governing the flow of ideas. And
few since Socrates have handled the combination of tasks better. We do not, in
the best of our dialogues, see two-way flows of ideas moving in equal
quantities in both directions.
The typical lecture follows the pre-Gutenberg tradition of
conveying information from one informed participant to a multitude of
listeners. A classroom is made only slightly more democratic by modeling
dialogue after the way that Socrates did it. It winds up allocating time for
idea flow of maybe 5-10% to the reverse direction for questions of
clarification and challenge. Before we agree with Edmundson that online
education cannot adequately support dialogue, we need to bear in mind that the
dialogue that it is being asked to support is a new form of Socratic dialogue
with roughly the same percentages.
From a technological viewpoint, online learning easily
supports this level of dialogue. It easily matches the classroom conversation
in which 20 people sit quietly while two students ask questions within 10% of
the time and the professor responds. It goes beyond this by facilitating the
contribution and evaluation of the 20 quiet students by moving their ideas to
an online discussion board in written form where they have been able to
formulate their thoughts in an editor that is available to them exclusively up
until the time of posting. They receive the thoughtful (and formulated) replies
of their peers. This is as much or more dialogue than they will receive in a
classroom where the use of synchronous time is allocated to only a chosen few.
Allocating space for expression to all students makes online learning a more
dialogical experience than can be offered in the walled classroom.
Edmundson, M., The Trouble with Online Education, New York
Times op-ed page. (July 19, 2012)
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