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Paper-Based Materials Distorted Ways of Learning
5/21/2008
Why did we develop a default learning model and beliefs so contrary to current reality? We had adapted to what we could do over the whole time that we had only analog materials to work with. A student writing a paper on paper had a hard time showing that paper to the rest of the class, so, over time the natural collaborative learning style popularly known as Socratic became distorted by the limitations of analog materials. Collaboration was no longer the norm. Humans had lost something.
Plagiarism
These analog limitations led to the idea that real academic work is individual and not collaborative. And this faith led directly to the quaking fear -- think Joe McCarthy and the Communist witch hunts -- of plagiarism. Sounds so much like "the plague," doesn't it? Oh, the horror if students should somehow share their ideas among themselves!
But the plagiarism problem is not at all with collaboration -- which is the culture of the Web and of today's world -- but with us educators having so little experience designing work assignments that eliminate any possibility of plagiarism.
Just think of this one subtle shift in the following paper-writing assignment:
1. The analog world test question: Why was the polar bear put on the endangered species list?
2. The digital world question: What did Fatimah (a class member) mean by her Wiki comment about polar bears?
The first question lays down the plagiarism challenge, the second eliminates that possibility.
Join the Devolution
Individual work as the default norm makes no sense in this time when both learning research and our materials lead us back to traditional human social learning norms. Our materials are by nature social and not individual. And, digital materials fit better with the natural social learning patterns of humans, which existed for thousands of years before the "Gutenberg Parenthesis" and are now re-emerging.
Yet, to look at the curricular design still prevalent in higher education, to see that same curricular design reinforced in course management systems, and in the quizzing and testing tools, you'd have to conclude that in the midst of this Web 2.0 world we still believe the only way to learn is individual and the greatest crime one can commit is plagiarism. We're living a paper fantasy in an electronic world.
Our beliefs about learning have been based on analog limitations, not digital possibilities. The cat's out of the bag: Digital tools and spaces don't augment learning design of the past few centuries, they augment pre-Gutenberg human social learning patterns. We are not in a revolution, but a devolution. It's nice to be home again.
Trent Batson, Ph.D. has served as an English professor, director of academic computing, and has been an IT leader since the mid-1980s. He is currently a Communication Strategist in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at MIT. batsontr@mit.edu
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