A possible response to Wiley/Hilton

I here present the following scenario as a partial counterpoint to Wiley and Hilton’s article Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education (2009).

After applying for admission to community college (which is open to all with a high school diploma and many without) and paying fees (a nominal $26/unit as subsidized by the state), Jay makes his way to a classroom of no more than 45 students. The professor sometimes lectures, and sometimes has students work in groups. Materials used inside class are often analog (textbooks and notetaking) but outside class digital resources (available via extensive library databases) are encouraged. Small class size ensures that Jay has opportunities to meet fellow students, some of whom he connects with outside class on Facebook and through text messaging.

When Jay is not in class, he tends to lose focus on school. Instead, when he gets on the computer to do today’s research for a paper on Rousseau’s “Social Contract”, Jay finds himself surfing the net, watching YouTube videos of skateboarders (he’s even posted a few himself, being a very good skateboarder — one of his friends has a digital videocam) and reading manga e-books from Japan. At the same time, he stays continually connected to his friends through a Gmail chat window, Facebook, and text messaging on his cell phone. He finds it hard to focus on research or textbook reading (also required for the Rousseau paper, to provide context), instead seeking out information that is personal to interests he already has.

Jay thinks of himself as a creative person, but spends most of his spare cash on consumer goods, such as ringtones for his phone. He thinks of education as something to get through so he can get a job that makes enough money to buy more stuff. He’s digital and connected. The only time he isn’t is at his job as a barista, where he’s too busy to text, or in the classroom, where the tethered environment encourages him to focus on a particular subject. Surprisingly, it is here, in the more closed environment, where Jay has the best chance to learn about a world more open than on the one in which he has isolated himslef.

If he set himself to the task, Jay could learn habits of mind that would enable him to think critically about the world around him, analyze sources of information for veracity and usefulness, and develop a moral and ethical system. The opportunities are there in the paper where he may select his own topic in philosophy class, the essay where he is asked to analyze a set of historical resources, and the group project he was put in charge of in science lab. He is not aware of these opportunities because it is easier to see school, which he thinks of as artificial compared to his own reality, as a hoop to jump through rather than an opportunity for internal growth. Such growth could disconnect him from his preferred set of friends, and who cares about Rousseau, who lived so long ago, anyway?

Jay copies and pastes a line from Wikipedia’s page on Rousseau into his report (“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”), unaware of any irony.