Enhanced Learning

Michael Brint
Associate Professor and Director, Integrated Program in Humane Studies
Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio

I. The Experience of Education in Digital Life

In his 1995 book, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte signals what many believe to be a paradigm shift from “atoms” to “bits”–from an “atomic” orientation to the world consumed by material interactions to an orientation unburdened by such impediments as space, time and atomic weight. Racing unfettered at blinding speed over vast distances of space, the bit, the smallest unit in the “DNA of information,” [1] has done more than help usher in the post-industrial age of information. According to Negroponte, it has become the basic commodity of interaction in the post-information age–an age in which the possibility of digital living has become increasingly viable:

The industrial age, very much an age of atoms, gave us the concept of mass production, with the economies that come from manufacturing with uniform and repetitious methods in any one given space and time. The information age, the age of computers, showed us the same economies of scale, but with less regard for space and time… [By contrast,] in the post-information age, we often have an audience the size of one. Everything is made to order and information is extremely personalized… The post-information age is about machines’ understanding individuals with the same degree of subtlety (or more than) we can expect from other human beings.Such customized digital living entails more asynchronistic communications (like e-mail), billions of bits of information on demand (in such forms as TV programs, videos, music, and news), and less and less dependence on being in a specific place at a specific time. [2]

In examining the educational implications of living digitally, Negroponte captures many of the central pedagogical points now being advanced by prominent policy analysts urging the development of distance learning opportunities. [3] In most instances, such approaches consist in the creation of highly individualized asynchronistic learning programs accessible on demand. This form of delivery is said to particularly aid the growing numbers of non-traditional students whose lives require that learning be less and less dependent on one’s ability to be in a specific place at a specific time.

Whether delivered to a classroom, laboratory, workplace or home, learning digitally as an experience is said to be one of individual exploration, experimentation, and expression. Emphasizing the benefits of computers as learning tools, Negroponte notes that

While a significant part of learning certainly comes from teaching–but good teaching and by good teachers–a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself. Until the computer the technology for teaching was limited to audiovisual devices and distance learning by television, which simply amplified the activity of teachers and the passivity of children. The computer changed this balance radically. All of a sudden, learning by doing became the rule rather than the exception. Since computer simulation of just about anything is now possible, one need not learn about a frog by dissecting it. Instead, children can be asked to design frogs, to build an animal with frog-like behavior, to modify that behavior, to simulate the muscles, to play with the frog. By playing with information, especially abstract subjects, the material assumes more meaning. [...] Anecdotal evidence and careful testing results reveal that this constructivist approach is an extraordinarily rich means of learning, across a wide range of cognitive and behavioral styles.[4]

“Learning by doing,” “finding out for oneself,” “playing with information,”–Negroponte’s orientation sounds a lot like an updated version of John Dewey’s educational approach. Stressing similar ideas, Carol Twigg, a senior analyst for EDUCOM and one of the leading advocates of distance learning, claims that “what we know about high-quality learning, cooperative learning, and discovery learning-implies a learning-by-doing model rather than the passive, classroom-based model that typifies the teaching infrastructure.”[5] Against such passive learning, Dewey notoriously stressed the importance of experience as an active process. “To ‘learn from experience’ is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequences. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction–discovery of the connection of things.” [6]

In a similar vein, discovery labs for physics and other natural sciences (like the CUPLE program developed at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) stress the experience of discovery through exploration and experimentation. By using a studio approach to learning, computer simulations allow students to discover scientific principles through their own active engagement. Jack M. Wilson, Director of the Anderson Center for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, explains the basic premise underlying such initiatives: “The focus is on student problem solving and projects,” he tells us, “and not on presentation of materials. The emphasis is on learning rather than teaching.” [7]

While the CUPLE program uses multimedia tools authored by experts for student use in the discovery, experimentation and exploration of science, multimedia offers new domains of student expression as well. “We are entering an era when expression can be more participatory and alive,” Negroponte tells us. “We have the opportunity to distribute and experience rich sensory signals in ways that are different from looking at the page of a book and more accessible than traveling to the Louvre.” [8] Rather than simply interacting with a designed exercise, students can become their own authors–designing and architecting multimedia projects that integrate both different disciplines and media.

CITYSCAPES at Kenyon College is just one example of a course developed to focus on the student as the creative agent of learning.[9]From a literary walk through the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to an analysis of the role of women in the agricultural economy of Nairobi, students in this course become authors of multimedia projects that focus on specific themes related to particular cities or regions of the world. In addition to the Internet and library resources, these projects, currently produced as a CD-ROM, combine videos, photographs, recordings, interviews, and journals made by the students themselves. As authors guided by both local scholars and distant experts in various fields related to their study, students become increasingly fluid in coherently drawing together and creatively comingling function and form, method and subject, narrative and design.

Along with their expressive and experiential potentials, many see the greatest advantage of computer learning environments in terms of their potential for customization. Course materials can be delivered to fit the different learning styles of students and developed to help students realize their unique potentials and capacities. According to Massy and Zemsky, the two most fundamental advantages of information technology are the new “economies of scale” it offers and its ability to provide what they term, “mass customization.” “Technology allows faculty to accommodate individual differences in student goals, learning styles, and abilities, while providing improved convenience for both students and faculty on an ‘any time, any place’ basis.”[10]

In the post-information age, most surmise, the advent of sophisticated and customized simulations across the curriculum will increasingly provide the basis of experience for engaged learning. Many who are helping to lay the foundation for the future of information technology and education advocate the creation of a National Learning Infrastructure that could deliver these sophisticated simulations “anytime, anywhere, to anyone.”[11] If these trends continue, the experience of education in digital life may well be one of more convenient asynchronistic communication, customized educational services on demand, and less and less dependence on being at a specific place at a specific time. Yet, for all of the Deweyean-sounding practices that are supposed to accompany these educational delivery services–learning by doing, exploration and experimentation, play and discovery–I doubt it is time to begin celebrating the realization of Dewey’s educational philosophy in the post-information age.

II. Learning as a Social Environment

If many proponents of distance learning follow Dewey’s lead in emphasizing experiential and constructivist models of education, few follow his views regarding the inexorably social and relational nature of learning. Most of their accounts portray distance learning (at least at the level of higher education) as a highly individualized process of self-development, driven by the student’s own initiative toward the successful acquisition of specifiable skills.[12]

For Dewey, no matter how individualized or customized the material that is being explored, learning is not an isolated enterprise that takes place within the self or between the individual’s mind and the material it confronts, but a social activity that takes place within the context of a social environment. “As matter of fact,” Dewey tells us,

every individual has grown up, and always must grow up, in a social medium. His responses grow intelligent, or gain meaning, simply because he lives and acts in a medium of accepted meanings and values. Through social intercourse, through sharing in the activities embodying beliefs, individuals gradually acquires a mind of their own. The conception of mind as a purely isolated possession of the self is at the very antipodes of the truth. The self achieves mind in the degree in which knowledge of things is incarnate in the life about him; the self is not a separate mind building up knowledge anew on its own account. [13]

From Dewey’s point of view, even the ideal of education as self-development must be understood as a social process achieved through interaction and relation with others. Rather than fostering this ideal, advocates of distance learning, particularly those who stress self-paced, independent study, tend to reinforce individual isolation. “The effort at isolated intellectual learning contradicts it own aim,” Dewey claimed, for it “precludes the social sense which comes from sharing in an activity of common concern and value.” [14] In examining the economic efficiencies gained by computer innovations, Massy and Zemsky tellingly report that without a supportive social environment, “the students who would most benefit from self-paced learning have the least motivation to do so.”[15]

The prevailing attitude toward teaching is also particularly telling on this point. In Twigg’s words: “Because of the widespread availability of self-paced learning materials, direct faculty intervention throughout the learning process will lessen.”[16] Like a small country being invaded by a foreign power, the idea of faculty interaction is not said to be condemned simply because of the enormous costs of the labor involved (although one suspects that this is the most significant issue). Rather advocates of information technology assume a notion of independent learners at the center of the enterprise who simply do not depend on faculty as the primary source of their learning. While Dewey was among those to argue against a teaching-centered model of education, he would certainly reject the radically asocial dimension of distance learning as it is currently being discussed. [17]

Once again, Dewey’s position is that the social environment–the interdependence and engagement of individuals in the performative acts of learning–is a necessary condition for developing the unique capacities of individuals. Even if such a model as the National Learning Infrastructure could develop an individual’s dispositions for distance learning; in its current direction toward individualization, it would be difficult to account for the experience of sharing in a common activity that is central to Dewey’s understanding of both the social environment of learning and the social aims of democracy.

In contrast to Dewey’s concentration on the social functions of education, the individual ends of distance learning are most frequently described in terms of the acquisition of definable skills. “It seems to me,” Carol Twigg writes,

that our definition of learning is changing in a number of ways… Increasingly, viewing a college education as mastery of a body of knowledge is becoming outmoded. Instead we recognize that graduates need to have acquired skills… along with such abilities as finding needed information and working well with others.[18]

With this emphasis on acquired skills, we are also beginning to see more stress placed on educational outcomes. “Because of its capacity to focus on individual assessment,” Massy and Zemsky note, information technology “will make the teaching and learning enterprise much more outcome-oriented.”[19] In large measure this growing emphasis on skills and outcomes is related to a greater consumer orientation to education. Increasingly students are looking “for increased competition between higher education providers to work to their advantage as consumers.”[20]

While Dewey too understood the importance of acquiring skills, he would no doubt be disturbed by the instrumental and pecuniary ends of distance learning. In his essay, Individualism, Old and New, he claimed that “the development of a civilization that is outwardly corporate–or rapidly becoming so–has been accompanied by the prevailing mentality of the ‘business mind’” and the prevailing standards of value derived from pecuniary success alone.[21] On the educational front, the ability to buy economic success is understood in terms of the acquisition of skills of technical mastery sold at the best price. Yet paradoxically, Dewey argued, even if these skills are quite broad and fluid, such narrowly conceived individualist attempts to find economic security in an increasingly insecure economic world produces the conditions under which individuals become increasingly lost, unable to “find support and contentment in the fact that they are sustaining and sustained members of a social whole.”[22]

For Dewey, a highly individualistic or libertarian model of learning severely narrows and restricts the meaning and practical effects of education’s social function. In his view, the purposes of education in a democracy are necessarily both individual and collective in nature. They consist in developing individuals’ natural capacities and acquisition of skills in concert with their preparation for the activities of engaged citizenship and reflective thought. Indeed, without pathological effect, the growth of the individual–the unique development of the individual’s talents and skills– cannot be separated from the social environment of shared activities, values and common interests within which the individual is sustained and grows.

Although information technology has the potential “to increase learning productivity in the areas of codified knowledge and algorithmic skills,”[23] it may not serve these larger social purposes. Indeed, even if one could argue that sharing in common activities that are primarily non-algorithmic can take place within the social environment of distance learning, Dewey would strongly criticize the disembodied nature of such a “social” environment.

For Dewey, learning digitally may well push Cartesian dualism to new heights as minds connect over vast distances without the inconveniences of time, place and body. In his view, the separation of body and mind culminates “in a sharp demarcation of individual minds from the world, and hence from one another… [This] dualistic philosophy of mind and the world implies an erroneous conception of the relationship between knowledge and social interests, and between individuality or freedom and social control and authority.”[24] In educational practice, it often assumes the form of a body of knowledge distinct from its social purposes and a mind free from its social context and physical constraints. As Sidney Hook explains, a dualistic theory of mind and body, according to Dewey, “converts functional distinctions in the ‘moving unities of experience’ into separations of existence. Thus mind is considered separate from the body, whose activity is viewed as an alien influence on how the mind learns and the self is divided from its environing physical and social world.”[25]

Even as a real time-interactive-talking heads-model, being digitally educated decontextualizes the experience of learning and realizes in practice what Descartes only separated philosophically: Minds communicate through bits, bodies move through atoms. The most elemental dualism of the post-information age is thoroughly Cartesian. Detached from the motion of our bodies and disengaged from our local physical and social surroundings, education in the post-information age does not connect, but separates the self from the world, and thus from others. Rather than fulfilling its promise, learning digitally seems only to compromise the most significant elements of Dewey’s educational philosophy.

III. Learn Locally, Think Globally

Although information technology, like the printing press, opens up radically new options for education, Dewey would remind us that computers are, after all, tools. And, like all other tools, they provide ways of getting around and fulfilling one’s purposes in one’s environment. The question is how can we best use the tools of information technology for our educational purposes and aims?

In terms of delivery, advocates of digital learning often argue that information technology provides a better option than the traditional university. With its relatively fixed economy of scale and centralized location, the university has become a legacy of the industrial age. In Twigg’s words: “Our institutions of higher education are reminiscent of other kinds of industrial age organizations such as the factory and the department store–characterized by size and centralization–in contrast to the distributed, networked organization and mail-order shopping services of the 1990s.”[26] Twigg predicts that the ability to transmit through networked organization high quality learning tools customized for the individual student will begin to replace the traditional (teacher-centered) functions of the university. While there will still be a role for faculty and institutions of higher education in terms of certification, student services, and some collaborative experiences, she suggests, its centrality in the process of learning will significantly change as students become more independent and self-reliant and as physical contact becomes “less important to them.”[27]

Although Twigg may well be correct in arguing that the industrial designed university no longer provides the best option for educational delivery, her vision of the future predicated on independent learning, as we have seen, is not without its serious defects. In analyzing the profound implications of the printing press in America, Dewey noted that localism with its infinite variations and specific contexts tends to become stronger as the world (or at least information about it and our connection to it) grows closer.[28] And just as industry and politics are witnessing a tendency toward both decentralization and globalization, the best option for educational delivery may well be the more local community and small college system with new neighborhood and workplace learning centers further developed to meet the educational needs of both traditional and non-traditional students. Within these small colleges and decentralized institutions, the physical proximity of students and faculty would help to embody learning and knowledge as a social process.

To learn locally and think globally, students must have access to the tools of technology. Information retrieval, communication systems, and independent and collaborative learning tools are now necessary and even elemental parts of learning. But they are not sufficient. They must be contextualized within a learning environment. As most agree, learning tools can “stand in” for a physical and social environment, but they cannot replace it. One simply cannot replace the direct and palpable gravity of social interaction that is intrinsic to the atomic weight of learning with weightless bits traveling at blinding speed through thin fine fibers of glass.

As global communication systems eviscerate time and space, digital learning may transform the mode of educational production and delivery. It may even make the traditional university and large state institution obsolete. But as our access to the tools of technology become less dependent on space and time, as distance learning increases, the proximity of social interaction in the process of learning should increase proportionally: The more distant the means of delivery, the more proximate the learning experience should be in terms of the intensity, relation, and quality (if not quantity) of interactions between faculty and students. Rather than becoming less so, the physical and social environment may become more important as distant learning tools become more available. As in the case of localism and globalism, physical proximity and intensive social interaction may both compliment and counterbalance distance in learning. Although learning digitally may promise to make us less dependent on time and space, it is only within a social environment of learning that we can begin to celebrate the experimentation, exploration, and expression–the idea of learning by doing–central to the spirit of John Dewey.

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Endnotes

[1] Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, (New York: Borzoi-Knopf, 1995), 14.

[2] Ibid., 163-65.

[3] For example, see William F. Massy and Robert Zemsky, “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity” 4.

[4] Ibid., 199f. Return to text

[5] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure” 5.

[6] Dewey, Democracy and Education, in John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 147.

[7] Jack M. Wilson, “The CUPLE Physics Studio,” The Physics Teacher.

[8] Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 224.

[9] A description of CITYSCAPES can be found in “Strengthening Teaching and Learning in the First Two Years,” PEW Charitable Trusts (Number 9, January 1996), 4.

[10] Massy and Zemsky, Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity,” 2. (www.educause.edu/ir/library/abstracts/nli0004.html)

[11] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure.”

[12] Although one of these skills may involve collaboration, it is nevertheless described as a kind of “pull yourself up by your own boot straps” social environment of independent learning.

[13] Hook, “Introduction to Democracy and Education,” 304.

[14] Hook, “Introduction to Democracy and Education,” 44.

[15] Massy and Zemsky, “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity,” 4.

[16] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure,” 8.

[17] On the role of the teacher and the social purposes of education, see Dewey’s The School and Society in The Middle Works, vol. 1.

[18] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Infrastructure,” 1. See also, Jeremy Shapiro and Shelley Hughes, “Information Technology as a Liberal Art,” Educom Review (March/April):31-35.

[19] Massy and Zemsky, “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity,” 3.

[20] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Infrastructure,” 4. Return to text

[21] Individualism, Old and New in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol 5, p. 67f. Return to text

[22] Ibid. Return to text

[23] Massy and Zemsky, “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity,” 2.

[24] Hook, “Introduction to Democracy and Education,” 300.

[25] Hook, “Introduction to Democracy and Education,” x.

[26] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure,” 5.

[27] Ibid., 8.

[28] See “Americanism and Localism” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, vol. 12, p.12-16.

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Laurie Finke
Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio
Date of publication: 1997

The Culture of Virtual Communities

In one passage from A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s fictional narrator finds herself walking across the grounds of an Oxbridge college deep in thought, contemplating an essay by Charles Lamb on Milton’s “Lycidas.” She remembers that the manuscript of that famous poem that Lamb cites in his essay is housed in the library of the very college whose grounds she walks. She imagines herself literally retracing Lamb’s footsteps “across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept.” Finding herself at the door of the library,

I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel, barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction. (Woolf 7-8; emphasis in original)

The narrator’s response shows how quickly alienation follows from exclusion, how quickly intellectual curiosity can become indifference: “Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe and locked within its breast, it [the library] sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep forever” (Woolf 8).

I found myself returning to this scene again and again when I was asked to think about the consequences of emerging information technologies for the teaching that I do in a Women’s and Gender Studies program, particularly in relation to the kind of student-centered pedagogy that we, for the purposes of this project, are calling “proximity learning,” and opposing to the “distance learning” so often extolled as information technology’s future (Twigg, Alley). Surely such scenes of exclusion as Woolf describes in 1928 could not be repeated in an American university at the end of the twentieth century? No student of ours–female or male– would be turned away at the doors of our colleges’ libraries by kindly silver-haired librarians guarding the doors and rebuffing the unwelcome. Yet the refrain heard constantly among cyber-touts these days is that the locus of the library is rapidly changing. Soon the “treasures” about which Woolf writes so eloquently will reside not in atoms–in weighty volumes stored on scores of shelves in monumental stone buildings–but in ethereal bits, floating around in a non-place we’ve come to call “cyberspace,” capable of being disassembled and reassembled at our merest whim in any format we desire (Negroponte). Knowledge–or at least information– will no longer be “locked away” and apportioned out by the gatekeepers of culture, but will be available anywhere, anytime at the press of a button or the click of a mouse.

This enthusiastic assessment of the democratizing potential of information technologies, however, merits closer scrutiny. What will the effects of this dematerialization–this transformation of information from atoms to bits–be? In particular, we ought to pay close attention to the rhetoric of the sales pitch through which the benefits of cyberspace are being promoted. While the term is often used rather loosely to refer to everything from computer games to the World Wide Web, “as though each computer screen were a portal to a shadow universe of infinite, electronically accessible space” (Markley 2), it is worth noting how the experts talk about the concept. Michael Benedikt defines cyberspace as “a globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multidimensional, artificial, or virtual’ reality” (Benedikt 122). Marcos Novak characterizes it as “a completely spatialized visualization of all information in global information processing systems, along pathways provided by present and future communication networks, enabling full copresence and interaction of multiple users, allowing input and output from and to the full human sensorium, permitting simulations of real and virtual realities, remote data collection and control through telepresence, and total integration and intercommunication with a full range of intelligent products and environments in real space” (Novak 225,226). What both definitions have in common is their thorough erasure of human agency in the transition from a material to a virtual reality ^[1]. In both definitions machines are remarkably lively and intelligent. They “network,” “sustain,” and “generate.” They provide access; they “enable”interaction, “allow” input and output to circulate, and “permit” simulations. Humans, on the other hand, have almost entirely disappeared or are completely passive. Indeed we no longer have people attached to computers at all, but “human sensorium.” People have become little more than inert receptacles for “input” and “output.” As Donna Haraway writes, “Our machines are disturbingly lively and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (Haraway 152). This way of talking about computer technology is not limited only to VR visionaries. Most educators writing about the benefits of information technology use the very same rhetoric:

• IT will change teaching and learning profoundly, no matter what the response of traditional higher education institutions. (Massy and Zemsky 2)
• IT enables students to work at their own pace with continuous assessment, in contrast to the traditional post-secondary education method which can be described as batch-processing with episodic assessment. (Massy and Zemsky 4).
• For not only will information technology accelerate the move toward a process focus and collaborative learning, it may change the fundamental relationships and understandings we’ve developed during the era when most information was stored on paper. (Batson and Bass 44)

In the first sentence, information technology is characterized as having the power to transform higher education in spite of whatever paltry resistance its institutions might mount (notice it isn’t educators, but only institutions that resist). Human agency can amount to little more than a pallid and ineffective imitation of computer efficacy (“batch-processing with episodic assessment”). In fact, in the technological determinism that marks most writing of this kind, human actors appear only as obstacles to the electronic transformation of higher education. Faculty and administrators who resist the inevitable digitalization of the university are seen as the problem to be solved: “faculty will have little interest in IT’s capacities to boost academic productivity to the extent that they lack an appropriate vision of learning productivity” (Massy and Zemsky 6). Sentiments like this are so common nowadays that they fly by unnoticed. But their consequences for how we think about information technologies and for the problems we gloss over are profound.

The effect of this discursive logic that endows machines with agency while erasing human actors is to write out of existence a whole host of material and cultural institutions and practices that create and sustain information technology, but which also determine who is allowed access to this information. Gone from the analysis are the programmers, designers, factory workers, sales workers, service technicians, patent and copyright lawyers, policymakers, executives, college faculty and administrators, as well as the hardware, software, electricity, and raw materials necessary to keep the production line moving. A whole host of technoscientific, economic, social, and cultural practices that regulate both knowledge of and access to information technology simply become invisible. Those who extol the democratizing potential of new information technologies rarely talk, for instance, about the complexities of copyright law, the economic costs of access to this information, or the inevitable pattern of breakdown, repair, and obsolescence involved in maintaining electronic equipment, all material practices that involve human actors who serve as gatekeepers, determining who will have access and who will be denied.

Even the most superficial examination of the material practices that sustain the illusion of “cyberspace” reveal that far from being a cultureless and egalitarian meeting place in which “status, power, and prestige are communicated neither contextually. . .nor dynamically,” in which “charismatic and high-status people may have less influence and group members may participate more equally” (Taylor et al. 18), emergent information technologies, because they are situated in networks of material and cultural practices, institutions, and economies, replicate all of the inequities and hierarchies that currently plague academia and the larger world of which it is a part. As colleges and universities celebrate the
promise of brave new technologies that will fundamentally change the ways in which faculty and students interact, it is important to keep in mind the very real danger that some of our students, because of where they are situated in these networks, may, like Virginia Woolf, find themselves locked out of the technological campuses of the future.

I believe that both faculty and students can use computer mediated communication (CMC) and IT to teach and learn in new ways that are more collaborative, interactive, and ultimately more effective, but I am also wary of the very real possibility that gender, race, and class hierarchies will (and have) all to easily become part of the “circuitry” of the new information technology on our campuses. I worry that these technologies could have unforseen and undesirable consequences for the politics of gender, race, and class in academia. The question I want to pose is, as teachers, how do we responsibly integrate new information technologies into our classrooms without excluding or alienating the very students we want to empower? My answer is that we can do so only when we pay attention to the material and cultural practices that accompany the adoption of new technologies.

The cultural practices that have sprung up around computer mediated communication (CMC) and information technology (IT), far from being gender-neutral, are, if anything, more male than the culture they mirrors. By almost any measure we might choose, men dominate the computer world through sheer numbers. 87% of all doctorates in computer science go to men (and two-thirds of all bachelors degrees); 92% of all computer science faculties are male (and 97% of all tenured faculty) [Shade, Simmons]. These numbers suggest that those who are designing hardware, software, and networks, supporting and servicing them, and teaching about them are most likely to be men. This is not to suggest, however, that women have nothing to do with computers. Women figure heavily in the global production lines of the computer industry (Taylor et al., 15), in data entry, and in secretarial positions. In other words, they cluster disproportionately in those areas of computer technology that are low-paying, repetitive, and routinized, those areas that are least likely to influence decisions about how CMC and IT will be used and who will have access.

On the internet, the heart of the revolution in information technology, depending on how you count, men outnumber women in proportions that range from 2 to 1 to 9 to 1. If you measure access men outnumber women only by two to one. If you measure actual use the disparity can be as high as 10 to 1. A survey conducted in 1994 by the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center (GVU) at Georgia Tech showed that male internet users outnumbered female by a ratio of 9 to 1. A year later, the same survey showed that , at least in the U.S, the disparity had begun to shrink; women accounted for 29.3% of users in the 4th Annual GVU Survey. However, to be counted in a survey of this kind a user would have to find the GVU web site and complete the questionnaire. To avoid the potential biases that might result from self-reporting, Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS) and Texas Internet Consulting sent electronic surveys to the domains representing organizations on the internet. These surveys counted the numbers of men and women who could send e-mail outside the domain. In 1994, this survey showed only a two to one discrepancy between men and women who had active email accounts (64% to 36%, MIDS Survey). John Quarterman and Smoot Carl-Mitchell suggest that the proliferation of email on college campuses explains the smaller gap between male and female users in this survey. Students have become the largest proportion of internet users and the average university student population is pretty evenly divided between men and women. But the MIDS survey still leaves a 2 to 1 “gender gap” even for relatively simple electronic technology like email. Collectively what these studies suggest is that while men and women are becoming more equal in opportunities for accessing the internet, there are still wide disparities in how men and women use electronic media.

The reasons for this disparity, I believe, are not all that well understood. Much of the research on women and computing, even the feminist research, begins with the assumption that women are disadvantaged and even deficient users of computer technology. Such analyses locate the problem in the resistance of users rather than in the technology they are being asked to use, or better in the network of material and cultural practices that sustain the technology. Women, in this view, are intimidated by the technology and the communicative style of the internet because they communicate differently from men: men are comfortable with the kind of adversarial exchange characteristic of the internet, while women prefer a more supportive communicative style (Herring). Indeed, women’s and men’s communicative strategies are
so different that they inhabit different cultures (Mulvaney). Such views, however, are based as much on stereotype as on any empirical evidence. Michele Evard’s research on fourth and fifth grade children using a netnews-like forum in a classroom setting suggests that, before they encounter the culture of the net, boys and girls act in CMC in almost identical ways: girls speak as often as boys, they give instruction in equal numbers, and they flame just as often as boys (Evard). This study suggests that what ever discrepancies exist between men’s and women’s use of CMC and IT result less from profound psychological differences between men and women than from the practices, values, and institutions that
constitute and are constituted by the virtual communities that have sprung up on the internet.

To understand the discrepancies between male and female computer use and their implications for classroom use of CMC and IT, we must investigate the material practices that discourage women from participating. These include:

• Economic barriers. Access to information technology requires hardware, software, and, increasingly, internet access, all of which require a significant financial output. Since women on average make less than men, they may be more disadvantaged as buyers of computer services (Shade, Simmons). Cost may have less impact on college students as the cost of some (though certainly not all) of these services are borne by colleges and universities. Nevertheless, as educators we must constantly remember that the increasing dependence of higher education on electronic technology will always work to the benefit of more advantaged students who can afford the cost of cutting edge technologies.
• Lack of familiarity with computer technology. As children, girls are often have less access to computers than boys. When they do, their use of the computer is almost exactly the same as boys (Evard). The computer game industry, however, is notoriously male-oriented, producing few titles that would appeal to girls.
• Learning styles. While the literature on infotech frequently promotes the potential of technology to appeal to a variety of learning styles (Negroponte, Batson and Bass, Alley), it is not always clear that training in the use of infotech accommodates a variety of learning styles, especially when the learner in question is resistant to technology or anxious about it. For some users (and here I would include myself), the rapid obsolescence of technologies once learned can be quite daunting and a disincentive to investing the time required to learn still newer technologies every six months.
• Harassment and pornography. Information resources like the internet are not always friendly places for women. The kind of harassment that often plagues women in face to face communication  has, not surprisingly, become perhaps too frequently a fact of life in CMC (Anderson, Brail, Kendall). The libertarian, anything goes culture of the Web has made it an attractive place to sell and disseminate pornography. Without advocating censorship or indeed any reigning in of the Web’s decentralized (non) organization, I would point out that the climate for women on the web can be chilling; one need not actively look for pornography to find it. Recently I logged onto a popular search engine, looking for information on “women and the internet” for this piece. My query
  yielded some fifty entries, half of which advertised “the hottest women on the internet,” “lingerie lounge,” “Asian playmates,” and “SEX PORN XXX FUCK ADULT GAY WOMEN VIDEO.XXX.COM” repeated over and over in capital letters (the electronic version of shouting). My students have reported similar experiences. Women on the internet are both subjects and sexual objects.
• Discursive inequalities. Although CMC was supposed to eliminate status markers like race, age, physical appearance and physical abilities, empowering those in low status positions,(Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, Taylor et al. 54, Stone), gender seems to be a status marker that persists even in  electronically mediated situations^[2]. Recent studies of usenet groups show that, even when the subject matter focused on women’s issues, in mixed sex groups men contributed significantly more posts and that when women’s participation rose above 30%, they were perceived as dominating the discussion (Taylor et al. 17, 55, We). In a study of the relative participation of men and women in usenet groups devoted to women’s issues (where we might expect women’s interest, and hence their participation to be higher than elsewhere), Gladys We reported the following discrepancies between men’s and women’s contributions:

Newsgroup	#responses	%female	%male	%unknown
Alt.feminism	303	11%	83%	6%
Soc.women	292	13%	78%	9%
Soc.feminism	47	53%	40%	7%

These findings validate the experiences many women have had in internet discussion groups and raise questions about the consequences of their use in a classroom setting.

The Pedagogies of Virtual Communities

As colleges and universities invest more heavily in information technology and as IT becomes more integral to our teaching, educators need to think about those we may be leaving behind. And yet such discussions seem to me to be precisely what is missing from the literature on information technology’s pedagogical potential. Although much of this literature discusses forms of faculty resistance to classroom uses of IT (Twigg, Massey and Zemsky, Gilbert), rarely does it acknowledge that student resistance will also be a barrier to the successful integration of electronic media into our teaching. In fact, students will show the same diffusion curve in adopting IT that experts predict of faculty; there will be a small group of early users, the majority will only follow once a critical mass is reached, and the resistors are in real danger of being left behind altogether (Green 29). It would be useful to have some information on, for instance, how gender, race, and socioeconomic class affect these categories. Are men really more likely to be among the early adopters of IT? Are economically privileged students with access to the resources required to access cutting edge technology more likely to be represented among early adopters? Are women more likely to resist the change to electronically mediated classrooms? Are there students or even entire institutions who lack the economic resources to participate in the IT revolution? It would be preferable to rely on some empirical data to answer these questions rather than on stereotype. Once patterns of student use have been established, educators have the more difficult task of determining the causes of resistance. As I have tried to suggest above, resistance to IT among women students (and faculty) may result less from deficiencies in the individuals than from their resistance to the culture they are being asked to enter. Overcoming this resistance will require paying attention to the developing cultures of virtual communities.

We must also pay attention to the pedagogies we adopt within these virtual communities, and the assumptions that underlie those pedagogies. Enthusiasts of IT will often point to the shift electronically mediated learning requires from a teacher-centered classroom to a student-centered one (Twigg, Alley). As Carol A. Twigg quotes Alan H. Leader, dean of the School of Business at Southern Connecticut State University:

The purpose and outcome of our educational enterprise is learning, not teaching.
Teaching is what we do. Colleges do not exist in order for us to teach but so that
students can learn. . . .The focus must be on the student, not the instructor (Twigg 13).

The pedagogical writing about IT and distance learning extols the advantage of student-centered learning, but what is its vision of student-centered learning? Critiques like Twigg’ s of the traditional teacher-centered classroom, in which the scholarly expert, having distilled the truth from the best minds in the field, transmits it to students, identify real problems in traditional teaching methods. But what do they offer in place of what Paolo Freire has described as the “banking method” of teaching in which teachers
make deposits of knowledge in their students’ minds (Freire 1968)?

Even the most sophisticated writing on distance learning and the pedagogical applications of IT, as, for instance, Twigg’s call for a national learning infrastructure, views the primary goal of education as the delivery of information transplanted from the teacher’s brain into the student’s (Freire’s “banking method” of teaching under a slightly different guise–the scholarly expert has been replaced by a
computer). Such transfers, educational analysts like Massey and Zemsky or Twigg claim, may be more efficiently accomplished with greater convenience to students (who may even be able to learn in the comfort of their own homes) by computers in an individualized, asynchronous learning environment, which is an elaborate way of describing a student sitting in front of a computer terminal. (see “Being Digitally Educated: Dewey, Technology, and Distance Learning“) And if this is all education is about, they are undoubtedly correct. Computers can more efficiently convey information than human instructors. They can store, search, sort, transfer, transport, organize, replicate, and compute information much faster than any human can.

But do these enthusiastic claims about information technology confuse knowledge and information, transmitting with educating? Does student-centered learning refer only to students’ passive assimilation of data or does it require more active participation from them, more interaction both with their teachers and with their peers? Perhaps we cannot substitute a computer for the social interactions we claim occur in
proximity learning anymore than we can create a computer program to parent or an electronic therapist. Like parenting or therapy, teaching (and learning) does not involve a simple exchange of information. Information gathering is not the central activity. Like parenting or therapy, education integrates students into particular social networks–in the case of education we call these social networks disciplines. These social networks have customs, rules, procedures, and specialized languages. Some
of these are explicit, but many are unstated, taken for granted by those who have already been integrated into the social network. These rules, procedures, customs, and languages dictate what questions can be asked, what counts as an answer, what counts as evidence or explanation, who may speak at any given time, whose answers count, and how information is gathered. Students learn the customs, rules, and procedures of their chosen social networks or disciplines by acting as participant-observers, by learning the “culture” of their discipline, and not simply by acquiring the discipline’s content. A students become a member of the social network as she learns to create new knowledge, not as she learns to regurgitate information ( Brown and Duguid). The goal of higher education then only partly the transmission of knowledge; it also requires the creation of new knowledge.

Missing, then, from discussions of the technological classroom is a sophisticated analysis of pedagogy that unpacks the social networks students must learn to navigate during their college years. Those pedagogical discussions are, however, available in many other places. Feminist scholars, for instance, have explored these issues and their impact on women for nearly two decades. For two decades they have mounted a challenge to teacher- and information-centered models of education which has been remarkably successful at many institutions. That challenge has gone unnoticed in the literature on classroom uses of IT, this despite a virtual explosion of information on the subject. In the 1970s, feminist teachers, convinced that a female-friendly education required not only a transformation of the content of higher education but of its method of delivery as well, began to explore new teaching approaches. They found useful strategies in many different sources: the consciousness-raising practices of the early women’s movement, the progressive tradition in American education created by John Dewey (see “Being Digitally Educated: Dewey, Technology, and Distance Learning“), and the liberatory teaching promoted by Paulo Freire and others. What makes feminist pedagogy unique, however, has been its attention to the particular needs of women and its grounding in feminist theory as the basis for its multidimensional view of how classroom knowledge is constructed through the formation and maintenance of social networks (Tetreault and Maher). This information is voluminous and readily accessible ^[3].

Yet, despite this wealth of information, discussions of both feminist pedagogy and information technology’s impact on the women who constitute upwards of 50% of our students are notably missing in most mainstream discussions of the IT revolution, which tend to treat students as largely featureless and interchangeable cogs.

Obviously I believe that IT and CMC can and utlimately must have a place in a feminist classroom. I have use these tools–e-mail, electronic discussion groups, the internet, multimedia programs– on a daily basis in my own classes. And my experience has taught me that these tools, along with the networks of social, cultural, and material practices in which they are imbricated, will change how we teach. But finally it is up to us as teachers (and as members of our own social networks) –and not the technology–to determine the nature and extent of these changes. It is my hope that by understanding the particularities of our students, the nature of the social networks to which they seek access, and the nexus of material and cultural practices that IT both embodies and sustains, that we will not, to paraphrase Anne Fausto-Sterling, create an electronic academy in which cyberspace seems an illegitimate place for women and gender issues seem an inappropriate enterprise for the gatekeepers of infotech.

Bibliography

Albright, Julie M. “Of Mind, Body and Machine: Cyborg Cultural Politics in the Age of Hypertext.”

Alley, Lee R. 1996. An Instructional Epiphany. Change. Mar: 48-54.

Anderson, Judy. 1996. “Not for the Faint of Heart: Contemplation on Usenet.” In Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds. Wired_ Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Seattle, WA: Seal Press.

Brail, Stephanie. 1996. “The Price of Admission: Harassment and Free Speech in the Wild, Wild West.” In
Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds. Wired_Women: Gender and the New Realities in Cyberspace. Seattle WA: Seal Press.

Brown, John Seely and Paul Duguid. 1996. “Universities in the Digital Age.” Change. July/August: 11-19.

Cherny, Lynn and Elizabeth Reba Weise. 1996. Wired Women:Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Seattle: Seal Press.

Evard, Michele. 1996.”‘So Please Stop, Thank You’: Girls Online.” In Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba
Weise, eds. Wired_Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Seattle WA: Seal Press.

Finke, Laurie A. 1993. “Knowledge as Bait: Voice and the Pedagogical Unconscious.” College English 55:5-25.

Finke, Laurie A. 1994. “Pedagogy of the Depressed: Feminism, Poststructuralism, and Pedagogic Practice.”
Teaching Literary Theory, eds. Dianne Sadoff and William Cain. MLA: 154-168.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Herder and Herder, 1 968

Gilbert, Steven W. 1996. “Making the Most of a Slow Revolution,” Change. March/April: 10-47.

Green, Kenneth C. 1996. “The Coming Ubiquity of Information Technology.” Change. March/April: 24-29.

Grusin, Richard. “What is an Electronic Author? Theory and the Technological Fallacy.” In Robert Markley.
Virtual Realities and Their Discontents. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996: 39-54.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991 “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Herring, Susan. “Gender Differences In Computer-Mediated Communication: Bringing Familiar Baggage To The New Frontier.”

Kendall, Lori. 1996. “MUDder? I Hardly Know ‘Er!: Adventures of a Feminist MUDder.” In Lynn Cherny and
Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds. Wired_Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Seattle WA: Seal Press.

Kendrick, Michelle. “Cyberspace and the Technological Real.” In Robert Markley. Virtual Realities and Their
Discontents. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996:143-160.

Maher, Frances A. and Mary Kay Teatreault. 1994. The Feminist Classroom: An Inside Look at How Professors are Transforming Higher Education for a More Diverse Society. New York. Basic Books.

Markley, Robert. Virtual Realities and Their Discontents. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996.

“History, Theory, and Virtual Reality.” In Robert Markley. Virtual Realities and Their Discontents. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996: 1-10.

Massy, William F.and Robert Zemsky. “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity.”

Milroy, L. 1980. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Mulvaney, Becky Michele . “Gender Differences in Communication: An Intercultural Experience.”

Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. Being Digital. New York: Vintage Books.

Quarterman, John S. and Smoot Carl-Mitchell. “Is the Internet All Male?”

Shade, Leslie Regan. “Gender Issues in Computer Networking.” ftp://cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/leslie_regan_shade.txt.

Simmons, Susan. “Democracy, Women, and the Internet.”

Stone, Allucquere Rosanne.1991. “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures.” In Benedikt, Michael, ed. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Taylor, H. Jeanie, Cheris Kramarae, and Maureen Ebben. 1993. Women, Information Technology, and Scholarship
(Taylor et al.). Urbana, Illinois University Press.

Twigg, Carol. “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure.”

We, Gladys. “Cross-Gender Communication in Cyber-Space.” ftp://cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/we_cross_gender.

Woolf, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Endnotes

[1] I am indebted to Richard Grusin for this point (see Grusin 1996, 40-41).

[2] Though “computer crossdressing” in CMC is by no means unheard of and given the lack of bodily cues, relatively easy to achieve, it is not at all clear whether such behavior has challenged or simply reinforced traditional gender stereotypes, see Stone, 82-85, Kendrick 155-159, and Kendall.

[3] A gopher site maintained by the Women’s Studies librarian at the University of Wisconsin contains a searchable bibliography on women and information technology with seven hundred entries. (gopher://silo.adp.wisc.edu:70/00/.uwlibs/.womenstudies/.infotech/.infofull)

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It’s sometimes easy to underestimate the impact that  the latest new online concept will have.  For most of us now, the internet is no longer new, shiny and exciting – it’s pretty much part of our everyday lives.  We shop, bank, browse and entertain ourselves online – in my house at the moment five people are using the internet in a variety of ways from typing this article to blowing up some sort of huge alien spaceship – yes I have teenage boys!

However I suspect that many of us have not quite appreciated the impact that online education could have on our world. The concept is far from new, I myself took a online course in 1997, although it was only text based and certainly wasn’t as slick as today’s offerings.  But over the last year or so, there have been a huge surge of possibilities – the biggest Universities in the world are now taking this very seriously.  There are now thousands of online courses available from some of the best educators on the planet in a wide variety of sectors.  For the most part a lot of these are still free even though you may be listening to a Harvard professor over the internet.

The commercial aspect is bound to increase as it inevitably does with all web based enterprises.  I would expect the offerings in the US to end up being restricted to those accessing from a US IP address range eventually, but for now it all seems pretty much open and accessible to all.  If it does switch – this site will show you how to keep up your education.

There are of course other options, this is the internet after all -

This video is available on YouTube, which you can find here entitled – Hide IP Address. It’s extremely sad that the internet has become a place where your location affects what you can do, but alas it’s true.

But the exciting aspect in my opinion is how education will become more accessible across the world especially the less developed countries.  Imagine a brilliant maths student living in Africa with limited educational opportunities.  Perhaps for financial or personal reasons that student has no way of continuing their education and so they live with that underused skill never being developed.  Here there is at least a chance to harness and utilise that talent, through the medium of the internet.

Of course it relies on availability of an infrastructure and a PC, laptop or other devices to access the courses.  But the very possibility of a brilliant maths student being mentored in a remote vilage in Africa by a world leading professor has got to be a good thing surely.  Of course we’ll have to how all these developments go, but for now you must excuse me – I have a lecture in Artificial Intelligence to attend online !

 

The world of internet based education is certainly picking up steam.  Everywhere you look the big Universities across the world are stampeding to offer their course online.  The latest development is from Hong Kong, where classrooms are being introduced to education using YouTube.

The video sharing site have launched the Hong Kong Digital Academy, which should allow schools to upload and share teaching and educational classes in video format.  There is a dedicated channel to ensure that only educational material is uploaded.  the idea is that it empowers students to tailor their learning.  Firstly you have the flexibility of where you listen to the course material – sitting at home, a classroom or a library.  Perhaps even sitting on a hill outside the hussle and bussle to the city.

There is also the matter of when you listen to the material.  This could be equally as important, as anyone who has ever sat through a lecture they really weren’t ready for can attest to.  Will it lead to a more independent and effective learning process?

It’s obviously early to say but certainly many organisations have been delivering effective material online and in video format for some years.  One of the pioneers is the British broadcaster the BBC who deliver lots of educational material online.  This includes specific learning material and their normal programs.  There’s certainly a great attraction for the science and natural history programming which is probably among the best in the world.  This has been difficult to access outside the United Kingdom though because they normally block access from abroad.  However there are always ways to circumvent these restrictions -for example this post on how to set up a BBC VPN on the iPad.

Obviously the educational establishments in Hong Kong are really keen to see these videos work.  One of the big advantages for them is freeing up valuable space in schools and colleges.  There would be more room and more flexibility for the teachers too.  If they are not teaching classes every day they can focus on more specific learning perhaps with individual pupils who are struggling.  So the flexibility extends in all ways for the student, the education organisation and the teachers themselves.

It’s certainly one to watch and will be interesting to see if YouTube becomes a big player in the online learning space.  The possibilities here are endless if this concept works, YouTube is the obvious source of delivery but there are many other ways of distributing video online.   Have a look at this video about the Media site Netflix -

It’s hosted on Youtube entitled – How to Watch American Netflix, the site is extremely popular across the globe and is available on Smart TVs and a host of devices that you’ll find in living rooms across the world. Why travel miles to a lecture room when you watch a video feed of the same lecture in your living room, makes sense on so many levels.
 

Have you ever considered a career in the dental industry? There are some wonderful jobs as a dental laboratory technician. This unique position entails creating dental prosthetics including bridges, crowns, and dentures that are used to replace damaged or missing teeth. Part of your education will include on-the-job training, but you will also need to enter an accredited school to receive an Associates of Applied Science in Dental Laboratory Technology degree.

With this job you will create the browns, veneers, dentures, and other oral prosthetics needed by dental offices. As a dental lab technician, you will craft each prosthetic individually with the aid of a model and tools. Computer-aided equipment is also a part of the job to help with precision and you will either use measurements provided by the dentist or from the models to complete your work.

 

1. Start Early

The best way to determine if this is the right area for you is to shadow a dental laboratory technician. You may also want to prepare for this career in high school by taking courses in math, art, woodshop, and computer technology which can increase your skill set needed for this area.

2. Complete a Dental Laboratory Technology Program

The ADA has a list of 24 accredited programs that can be viewed on their sight. There are also multiple community, vocational, and dental schools which offer degrees in this area. At these programs, you will learn fabrication procedures, dental materials, oral anatomy, and gain some practical experience. Although only 24 schools are available, it may be to your advantage to go to one of these schools so consider attending one if possible. Going to an ADA-accredited program makes certification and finding a job easier, although certainly not impossible, after graduation.

3. Find a Job

The demand for dental laboratory technicians is growing as more people are wanting cosmetic and restorative dentistry procedures. For the 10-year span starting in 2008, a 14% increase was projected by the BLS. The majority of jobs in this area are through commercial laboratories where, depending on the size, you may either work in several fields or be very specific.

4. Complete Job Training

It takes most technicians about 3-4 years to become fully trained. Even after finishing a 2-year program, you will need to complete job training to learn the specific skills and procedures used at your job site. If you graduate from an ADA-accredited program, you can take a test to become a Recognized Graduate (RG) which will allow you to skip the written exam for certification.

5. Become Certified

Once you complete a training program, you can then pursue the voluntary certification needed to be recognized as a Certified Dental Technician (CDT). With this certification, you can choose one of five specialties including bridge and crown, complete and partial dentures, ceramics, or orthodontics. With this certification, you may also have a greater chance of achieving a supervising or management position in the lab. If you pass the RG exam, you can earn this exam without having to take the comprehensive exam for CDT status.

The way that the Brazilians view TV has certainly changed in three poor neighborhoods of Joao Pessoa, the capital city of Paraba in Northeastern Brazil. And it isn’t because a new soap opera or any additional TV series has started.

The secret is the new digital service that has been introduced, initially being made available to a few hundred indiviudals. The interactive system gives them access to a variety of public services – - information on health care, jobs, social programs, financial literacy and training opportunities – all at their fingertips and availble at the touch of a remote control.

“Back in the days folks here had to consider the travel options, it was at-least one bus to get to the National Employment System (Sine, its acronym in Portuguese) office.”

Online facilities

These new job opportunities for Edineide are supplied by EBC, Brazil’s public broadcasting service.  They can simply logon to the employment service and browse through jobs online, they’re all up to date and delivered using a satellite which transmits to the digital systems installed in each family’s home.

 

In addition to the receivers, they received a rc and training. “The technology enables them to engage with the content as if they were online, even if there is absolutely no broadband connectivity in the place,” says Andre Barbosa, Technical Development manager at EBC.

“Besides, the machine is simple to use, which is important for this part of-the public that relies on TV as their chief information source. The remote control is just like any other, with red, yellow, blue and green buttons,” he adds. Ninety-seven percent of Brazilian homes have at least one TELEVISION set.

It just shows that the internet is not the only communication media which is available in 21st Century Brazil.  In many ways delivering the service via digital TV has the potential of an even far reaching impact.  The platform has been pioneered by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the UK who have been at the forefront of such TV services.  They started with the award winning Ceefax service many years ago, most of the BBCs services are avalable in the UK only – but you can access most of the shows by using these services.

After the system is working properly and fully functional in Brazil, EBC seeks to export it to other Latin American countries, as well as to Africa. There is of course a lot of competition and there’s no doubt that being online offers you a host of options wherever you are. Slowly the digital boundaries being put up to protect profit margins and licensing revenues are being destroyed by innovative technology and shared techniques available to anyone.

Take this example for instance -

It’s a video hosted on Youtube, but the process effectively means anyone can watch the BBC in the USA and any other country. There is competition and whether you are a consumer in Brazil, Europe or Africa if the infrastructure is in place there will be little difference to the consumer – it is a global market.

Personally my memories of my degree course are not overly happy ones.  Sure the student bit was fine, the socialising, the beer and all the other stuff !  But if I think back to my actual lectures I have to say I can’t remember very much about them except they were incredibly boring. Ok the subject wasn’t the most exciting but Economics can actually be quite interesting if taught with some vigor and imagination.  Much of my course was lectured by accountants speaking in dull, monotones with minimal effort involved – it was quite mind numbingly tedious.

Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia thinks that the days are numbered for such dismal lessons. He expects the boring University lecture to be one of the very first casualties of the rise in online learning.  He expects MOOCs (massive open online courses) to transform the way we learn and indeed are taught.  There are already millions of students enroled in all sorts of courses all across the planet.

He speaks of a similar experience as myself – taking a calculus course delivered by a boring and dull teacher who barely spoke English.  With online learning there’s little reason to only use the entertaining and interesting teachers – after all you are delivering to thousands more students why not use the best available?

There’s a long way to go with online learning which is still very much in it’s infancy.  The opportunities are immense though – interactive information is ideal to be delivered online and it can be integrated with video, music and all sorts of multimedia content.  Many instructors are already earning a masters in education online so that they can learn how to best utilize technology in their classrooms.  When you look at some of the pioneers of online education like the BBC you can see what might be possible.  Some of the online education resources there are second to none. Imagine students learning English being able to integrate BBC documentaries into their study schedule.  At the moment it could be difficult – but there is hope check out this site which explains – how to watch UK TV abroad for example.

In reality the courses of tomorrow will be developed from all over the world.  There are so many initiatives going on, we should see over the next few years what looks like working best.  Only last month for example a huge investment was made by Hong Kong establishments in the area of computer based online learning.  It’s exciting times as Jimmy Wales suggested.

If you ever wondered why we get so much enjoyment from playing even the simplest of games, you have to look back into our distant ancestry for some interesting and surprising answers.

Anthropologists have long known that part of the growing up process of most of the animal kingdom, humans included, involves playing games. They also know that not only do many of these seemingly innocent games serve to entertain, but they have a more serious application in teaching us how to survive.

Survival is, of course the prime directive embedded into the instinctive patterns of the brains of all living things. In order to survive we need to know how to obtain food and water as well as find shelter from adverse weather. We also need to know how to avoid predators that might be inclined to make a tasty snack of us, or if it is not possible to avoid them, then to defend ourselves to the best of our abilities in order to stay alive.

We can observe this behaviour first hand by watching our own children as they play fight with their siblings as a way of attempting to obtain authority in the pack or family ranking structure and to hone defensive as well as offensive skills that would be needed in a natural environment to get food. This behaviour is echoed in our pets, where we are probably more familiar with watching puppies fight for the role of head honcho in the family pack.

While entertaining and education to observe, watching youngsters play certain competitive games to assert their strength and skills gives us a clue to why we as adults still enjoy playing all manner of games. It is no mistake that we generally prefer to play competitive games that enable skill, guile and determination to win and demonstrate our superiority over our competitors.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether the games themselves are physical such as competitive sports or mental such as board games and mental agility games that require skill and good judgement over sheer physical superiority to win. We enjoy playing them because they provide us with a chance to show how good we are at them!

You can learn more about the fascinating subject of competitive games here: http://www.thomasoil.com, while gaining a better insight into why we love them so much and what drives us to compete and go all out to be the best we can be.

While it may seem like a strange concept, the body’s metabolism is a natural function that operates adequately without a person really needing to interfere in any conscious way. While this is perfectly workable for most people, there are some who through certain circumstances have allowed their metabolism to become sluggish and inefficient. The net result is that person joining the ever lengthening statistic that is society’s overweight sector of the population.

The good news is that the metabolism can be educated to work more efficiently through a series of activities, diet and lifestyle changes. Like many of the body’s unconsciously run processes, the metabolism is governed by the subconscious part of the mind and that can be influenced by conscious decisions and actions.

For instance, the initiation of a daily exercise program and the gradual increase of the amount of exertion undertaken will have a knock on effect on the metabolism. It will do this by forcing the metabolism to increase its pace to match the increased workload experienced by the physical body.

Likewise, a change of diet to a more healthy or low calorie option such as the kind provided by diet programs like Nutrisystem or a healthier alternative as obtained from a professional nutritionist or diet expert will similarly cause the metabolism to increase efficiency. This happens through being forced to deal with a different set of foods to digest and process.

By removing high glycemic carbohydrates that were causing the sluggishness and lethargy and replacing them with more proteins and fiber, the metabolic process is given a jump start. It also helps to normalize blood sugar levels, reducing the work load on the liver and stabilizing the production of insulin.

Limiting sugar intake is a key to improving the body’s ability to metabolize food more efficiently. When that diet is combined with drinking more plain water and the omission of unhealthy soda drinks, the combination can make a marked improvement in the way the body burns energy and its reduction in stored fat.

The physical changes that a person makes to their lifestyle, diet and activity levels teach the metabolism through repetition to increase its work rate and efficiency. This is the real way to improve health and reduce excess fat storage in the body by teaching the body’s natural power plant to do its job more efficiently for the benefit of the person and a greater level of overall well being.

Online learning and training has the potential to completely change the way both businesses and colleges educate.  The overall benefit that most people see is the simple fact that it is so cost effective.  It opens up the possibilities of training in very advanced or specific areas to a mass market of students.

Of course it’s not for everyone, many people simply don’t have the motivation or time management skills to utilise this form of learning effectively.  The flexibility is perfect for some but many need the discipline and mentoring that you’ll still only get with traditional classroom based learning. For those who are able to self manage their learning the potential is huge.  Problems with finance, travelling and logistics are gone.  You don’t need to bother with the complicated problems of getting your students and teachers in the same room at the same time.

The teacher can be anywhere, the lecture recorded once and streamed across the planet.  The unit costs plummet dramatically meaning that world class education can be delivered to anyone with an internet connection and basic computer skills.  Interaction can still be achieved through forums and chat rooms, mentoring can be tailored through a host of technological devices and programs.

There are of course still many challenges to creating a valuable online training course in whatever subject.  The style needs to be carefully tailored for your target audience, a one size fits all is difficult to achieve in any subject.   Differences in learning styles, schedules and both geographical and time differences can make a big impact.  A lot of the time courses can be perfected through feedback from students – ensuring that some sort of communication method is available is essential for this obviously.

Don’t be afraid to change and update material even when it’s completed, sticking a course in some sort of online archive for years is not going to keep your course fresh.  Make sure that it is revisited and updated regularly, these don’t need to be big changes but keeping the content up to date will also keep it relevant.  A useful resource to encourage this is to reference international news sources like Reuters and the BBC.  To access these resources some people may need to use proxies and VPNs in order to obtain the correct IP address – information like this site - http://thenewproxies.com/british-ip-address/ can illustrate how to access sites in the UK like the BBC for example.

Additional Information Here - http://www.iplayerabroad.com/

The growth of online education is much talked about and many think that 2013 could well be the defining year.  But in the context of the world, how important is it likely to be?  Well many estimates have suggested that the global economy needs to create over 500 million jobs in the next ten years.  This has been estimated by the World Economic forum and the figure is the best guess we have at the requirement needed to ensure sustainable growth and minimise social disruption.

It is of course a huge figure even on a global scales and without doubt one of the keys to delivering this sort of growth.  Education is essential to growth in all sorts of markets. From the developed countries like Europe where growth often creates employment opportunities that require skilled workers with a high level of education.  Without sufficient skilled employees growth can easily stall in these countries.

In other less developed areas like Africa and some parts of the Middle East, growth is created by developing human resources.  Education is the enabler to grow their economies, through attracting new industries and encouraging business and entrpreneurs from with their own society.  None of this happens if education is neglected – stagnation and falls in GDP usually follow.

So we can see that the demand for education must be fulfilled, there have been studies that show that 80 million more people will be seeking access to education in a decade or so.  Normal expansion by building more colleges and universities will never meet this requirement.  It would require that three huge colleges holding over 39,000 students each needs to be built somewhere each week for the next dozen years !!  This is simply not possible with even the biggest resources and much of the developing countries couldn’t even begin to cater to these sorts of demands.

This is where digital technology offers a potential solution, you do not need to build thousands more Universities or train tens of thousands of academics to teach them if you can expand the reach of the existing infrastructure.  If a single professor can lecture to a twenty thousand over the internet instead of 40 in a class room then there is a glimmer of hope.  IT’s important we start looking at the internet on a global level again and start bringing down the artificial barriers that are being created.  For example I am unable to access some US academic sites when I’m travelling outside the country – I have to use an American proxy – see here - to get access by masking my real IP address.  This sort of digital discrimination is only going to restrict world development much like the trade protectionism has done for years in the global economy.

In the UK we have had a online university for many years, it is called the Open University and has been extremely successful.  I myself have taken several courses and my wife has actually completed a masters degree by distance learning.  But it’s never been seen as a direct threat to the mainstream Universities and colleges.  In the UK the OU is more a complementary learning establishment, making education accessible for those who can’t drop everything and take on the role of full time student.  In fact most traditional universities in Britain work alongside the OU in developing new courses and delivering them.

But in the last couple of years there is a revolution staring in online education particularly in the US.  Ever since a professor from Stanford University called Sebationa Thrun released a complete online Artificial Intelligence course for free and weeks later 160,000 students had signed up.  Academics all across the globe started looking out at their lecture halls with a handful of students in front of them, and started to consider their options seriously.  From the academic point of view, the rewards are obvious – delivering knowledge to tens of thousands of students across the globe from all sorts of backgrounds.

The advantages are obvious and teh bigger Universities in the US are already advancing through partnerships in distance learning provision.  Edx and Udacity are just two of these organisations which include real courses delivered on line from world renowned Universities like Harvard, Stanford and MIT to name but a few.  The reality is that these courses are being released and the take up has been phenomenal in some cases.

But many are wary of this stampede to provide online education.  After all the attractions to the student of completing their studies whilst in their pyjamas, living from home and virtually debt free are hard to avoid.  But the traditional fee paying normal student are  essential to the existence of our Universities.  There are also arguments that learning through a computer misses out much of the other personal development activities – socialising, making friends and face to face contact with your tutors and fellow students.  However the argument that these are worth the incredible investment most students have to make now to complete a traditional degree is difficult to believe.

Even though the revolution of providing these course free is relatively recent there are already thousands of courses available.  For instance just check out somewhere like Udacity and see how many courses they have available. At the moment most are open to anyone regardless of their location however I am certain this will not last.  In the end these will have to be self financing at a minimum, so expect to see payments or restrictions on access eventually.  Maybe these can be bypassed in the way thousands of us watch the BBC Iplayer overseas using proxy servers and VPNs like this site explains – who knows.

Take a look at this video if you are interested.

One thing is for certain that online education will be vitally important over the coming decades.