The Internet and the Classroom
It’s up to educators to make sure instant access to knowledge complements teaching.
By Debbie Chachra
The organization of universities, courses, and learning experiences has largely been shaped by a world in which access to information is difficult. I’m writing this in Cambridge, England, where the university traces its founding to a group of students who migrated from Oxford in 1209. Since then, it’s been a community of scholars and documents—concentrating knowledge through the spoken word and on paper. For most of this time, in order to access this fount of information effectively, you had to be at the university itself.
The college where I teach, near Cambridge, Massachusetts, is newer than wine served at some University of Cambridge college dinners. Founded in 1997, it is part of a global network of scholars that was facilitated first by the printing press, then by worldwide postal services, and now by the next great revolution in access to information.
Five hundred years ago, access to knowledge meant joining one of a very few communities of scholars. Fifty years ago, it meant physically going to a local library. But as of about five years ago, it has meant pulling knowledge out of the air, wherever you might be–not everywhere, not universally, but it’s hard to imagine that access to information will ever become more difficult than it is right now.
The physical layout of the traditional lecture hall, in which all the chairs face a single individual at the front of the room, encodes a pedagogy that is predicated on that faculty member being the sole source of expertise accessible from within the classroom. But the Internet and wireless technology give us the option of dismantling educational structures—physical and otherwise—that were necessary when access to information was difficult.
The shared physical setting of a college continues to be valuable for today’s students and scholars. For them, as it was for those 13th-century youths who gathered in Cambridge, it’s also about being part of a community of learners. But educators need to ask what it means to be inside a classroom where the walls are no longer a barrier to the flow of information.
Some electronic education technology amounts to “using bright new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in thinly disguised versions of the same old way,” in Seymour Papert’s prophetic words from 1971. So what are new ways of learning that better use the resources that electronic technology make available to us?
In his October 2015 Learning Devices column in Prism, Chris Rogers provided some excellent practical tips on using a smartphone in the classroom, ranging from its simple use as a calculator to sophisticated sensing, image processing, and control. As he put it, “My goal is always to turn the classroom into a space where students find different solutions to the same problems, and thereby teach each other–and me.” But we can extend out from this. In general, I don’t want my students to find different solutions to the same problems. I want them all to work on different problems—project-based learning is entirely facilitated by students being able to research their topic, on their own, from within the classroom or the lab, since I no longer need to carefully confine what they learn to the limits of my knowledge. I teach introductory materials science, which is an enormously broad field, and my students have taken on projects on everything from Widmanstätten patterns in meteorites to quantum dots. But as Rogers suggests, this also means that the students become sources of knowledge for each other and for me.
More broadly, we can stop thinking of ourselves as just the locally resident source of knowledge, and help our students learn how to find, synthesize, evaluate, and use information online. My engineering exams often had one-page “cheat sheets” to free students from having to memorize equations. Now that everyone has access to a universal cheat sheet, how does it change what and how we teach?
I was the kind of kid who read encyclopedias and who lived in the library, and I’m delighted that a generation of students is growing up in a world where there are no longer walls around knowledge. It’s up to us, as educators, to help them make the most of it.
Debbie Chachra is an associate professor of materials science at Olin College.