Impressions

Chris Beneke

My understanding of art history is tenuous. At best. But one thing I’ve learned from the popular science writer Jonah Lehrer is that a revolution in 19th-century painting coincided with the advent of a disruptive new technology.* That technology was the camera, and the artistic innovation that it encouraged was Impressionism. With the emergence of the camera, Lehrer writes, “painting lost its monopoly on representation.” Once the static could be captured by a mechanical device, the painter’s comparative advantage resided in his or her ability to convey the fleeting, sensory-laden character of everyday experience. Representation gave way to impression, symbol, and expression.

There may be a lesson here for academia, and historians in particular. Educationally related technological breakthroughs of recent decades—yellow lined paper, VHS players, Laserdiscs, PowerPoint, the insulated thermos mug—could be harnessed by the lecturing professor in the traditional classroom. DVDs and YouTube allowed the professor to illustrate her points with a vivid film clip, or to catch a rejuvenating 45-minute nap. However, the larger cyber universe won’t be so easily tamed. The internet, as we have been told, is a genuinely disruptive technology. There will be no napping.

None of this is news. Dan Allosso has been writing about the radical and generally positive impact online learning is likely to have. I wrote something myself a couple of years ago. And nearly every day, someone pronounces the end of the university as we know it. Usually, that person is Kevin Carey, but not always. Online learning clearly presents a challenge to the way things have been done. (If you doubt it, ask yourself whether you are capable of giving a better lecture on a particular topic than anyone in the world—or check out Jonathan Rees’ blog.) It’s concurrence with an increasingly untenable college cost structure should be worrisome to all of us.

Setting aside the daunting tuition and student debt issues, the parallel rise of the camera and Impressionist painting offers us an example of how a disruptive technological change can result in the sort of transformative change that Allosso, Carey, Rees and others been talking about. Like the Impressionists, we need to capitalize on the ephemerality and distinctiveness of each classroom situation, every day. We also need to presume that the seats bolted to the floors in our lecture halls and classrooms will not be occupied because a professor happens to be standing in front of them delivering the same lecture—one now easily recorded and distributed—he has been giving for the past 15 years. Because of the web’s capacity for delivering knowledge to us in the comfort of our homes or our carefully guarded Starbucks tables, the live lecture’s marginal utility as a means of conveying static truths to a passive audience has diminished, maybe forever.

History teachers need not wholly despair. For years, pedagogical experts (don’t smirk, there is some truth to the designation) have been telling us that students need to be actively engaged in order to learn better anyway. Until now, many of us have been able to evade the implications of that insight because our anecdote-riddled sixty-minute accounts of past events have been so, well, engaging. But like the 19th-century artists who found that their value as purveyors of verisimilitude had faded, we too need to develop creative ways to use history to expand our audience’s understanding of the world. That’s a cliché I know—like telling a baseball team that it needs to win one game at a time. And this process will prove challenging for people like me who have always seen ourselves as doing our job best when we represent the past most faithfully. But it may already be past time for us to think seriously about painting water lilies.

________

* It’s conceivable that my art history problem is related to the fact that I derive my conclusions about the subject from popular science writing, but I digress.

Notes From Grad School: Career

Dan Allosso

Okay, yes, I recently renamed my website history-punk.com; so this is an opinion from outside the mainstream. But I’ve been wondering about the “online education” debate. Part of the problem with some of the discussions I’ve been seeing lately is that they no longer seem to be focused on the students at all, or on learning at all. They lose sight of the fact that the students are the market, and what’s best for the students should drive the discussion. It’s easy enough to acknowledge that this isn’t always the case when administrators choose online as a way of simply cutting costs. But it seems from the complaints of some “technoskeptics,” that the goal is protecting a pedagogical system and an institutional structure that conserves their “right” to full employment at a high wage with good benefits. While we’d all like that, the rest of the economy is already struggling with the hard task of assessing the effects of new technology on the changing roles of workers. Especially in the value-added service sector.

I’d like to refocus the conversation on what works. What helps students learn? What are students’ goals? I think students generally have two sets of goals. One is clustered around learning skills and knowledge that will help them live their lives. The other focuses on career credentials. One of the things that’s becoming more clear to me as I’ve been working on and talking about my writing handbook (which the world can now see parts of on You Tube for free) is that—especially in Gen. Ed. courses—we’re more often teaching life skills like reading, critical thinking, and spoken/written communication than we’re teaching data they’ll need to carry with them always.

An area I haven’t seen addressed by the online-education debaters yet is the ability the web gives students, to see and hear the very best teachers talking about material they have intimate knowledge of iTunes U and TED are a couple of examples of media that push videos of very high-octane lectures out to a mass audience. I’m very excited about the opportunity to watch Richard Feynman’s physics lectures, or to see James McPherson talk about the Civil War, and I think the fact that everybody suddenly has access to incredible quantities of very high quality teaching material, for free, changes the game. These people were once only available to rich kids at elite schools. Now they’re out there for everybody.

I’ve gotta believe 100-level, Gen. Ed. courses are by far the most prevalent in terms of both student participation and instructor employment (all the more-so if we count adjuncts and grad students). So if these are really the majority of the courses, the question is: how does the presence of an instructor in the classroom play against the opportunity for a student to see the person who defined the field talking about their original research and insights they’ve gained over a lifetime of devoted study?

Yes, of course instructors in the classroom do other things that a video lecture from Stanford is not going to be able to do. But now we’re talking about tasks. The iconic role of the professor has been deconstructed. Of course, professors at universities that employ TAs to run discussions and grade papers had already begun this deconstruction themselves. What does a guy like me offer to students that they couldn’t get from iTunes U? That’s the question that should be shaping our career development. And I don’t think the answer is “accreditation.”