Good morning, S1 and S2 (is that anything like Thing 1 and Thing 2?) and Tom--

SDAI, what makes you think that intensive Internet courses would be less vulnerable to favoritism and rot? Would they not be run by institutions with human beings in charge? If I wrote an essay or a paper whose position disagreed with that of a professor who allowed personal bias to influence grading, how would the Internet mediate that any differently?

Online, the student has the benefit of not being physically present in the room with the teacher and the other students. But as a drawback, the student is not physically present in the room with the teacher and the other students.

Beneficial because there is no chance for personal comparison based on looks and personal habits. The short man and the beautiful woman would not be handicapped by social preconceptions of lack of authority and stupidity, respectively. A stutterer need know no fear. Racial and ethnic stereotypes would be rendered null. A charismatic student, unless that allure became somewhat translated into print, would have no chance to charm the professor into giving an A for C work. It wouldn't matter if you had a personal relationship with your tailor or your local next-to-new store clerk. On the other hand, a student could be slovenly and piggish but brilliant and no one would know. Hence there would be no hint to the student that a daily change of underwear can enhance desirability in the job market.

That's where the drawbacks begin. The most valuable learning experiences I have had have come not from the assigned reading or the research, but from the class discussions with other students, in which we all bring our lives and insights as well as the assigned readings and research to the table. Online courses attempt to reproduce that by using scheduled online realtime chats, BBSs or list-servs (the best using some combination of all of these), but it's not the same, as anyone knows who's ever been in a chat room with more than 20 people. It's like trying to reproduce lightning in a laboratory. Sure, you can get a spark, but the fullblown organic effect of a thunderstorm can't be captured in a virtual environment.

Now, in some technical fields, in which yes-or-no answers are the rule, it's probably possible to reproduce the materials and score the tests without bias on the part of the professor (or more likely, the TA), but that reduces the entire process to a multiple choice/fill in the blank format. Any subject requiring critical thinking skills, and that would include theoretical hard sciences of any discipline, requires other people to bounce ideas off of. Correspondence can work, but judging someone by their ability to make subjects agree with predicates is another kind of mental filter, one that only sees the verbally adept as worthy, penalizes the inelegant of phrase and the dyslexic, and fails to recognize musical, kinetic and visual expressions of intelligence.

My "Survey of the Middle Ages" project on the development of alphabetic forms and the illuminated manuscript would be lost in an environment like, say, this one. The course in storytelling was 1/4 research and 3/4 rehearsal, performance and critique, which just doesn't happen well online -- a teller must learn to read the audience on the fly. The practicum on book binding and repair would have needed everyone to find their own very expensive (though very simple) machines to do the lab work. Even online courses whose content was entirely print benefitted greatly from prior personal meetings of students, who then had a greater understanding of the chatroom denizens' personalities. And don't let's even think about Conversational French. But I could take the SATs online and shine.

Do we really want to be reduced to virtual displays and multiple choice/true-false test formats? Will online collegial affiliations be as strong as those made in person? Is virtual social contact going to help us to learn interpersonal skills in the long run? Aren't those skills precisely what keep people from killing each other?

Just thinking--
Mary Anne

PS-- I hope you're feeling better, Tom. It must require all your self-control to stay still. I picture you as a fidget -- but that's only an online impression. ;)