Answering a Question

Here is a response to the instructors that I wrote yesterday. Back to the question of CMC and distance learning.

Do you see the asynchronous written nature of the class as benefits or drawbacks for your learning? Why?

After about a decade of using e-mail and two decades using computers I think I’m pretty well used to the idea of this form of communication and don’t really see it as being something all that new so I tend not to think about it as much as I should and I have to confess that this is a problem. When you think about it you have to adjust to some unpleasant truths.

The benefits, where they are practical, are pretty clear. I can still go to school, work, and be a father and husband. These benefits are clearly directly mirrored by the disadvantages. You think you can be attentive, think, research and write in a good manner, but what you really are doing is shoving more and more work into a very small amount of time that is left over from the rest of your life. It gives you a certain advantage but it doesn’t really improve your scholarship. It’s sort of like being on an IV drip and a respirator in the hospital. It keeps your scholarly dream alive, which is good, but it isn’t the same as being healthy. Roland Barthes once wrote about this:

There used to be a white streetcar that ran between Bayonne and Biarritz; in the summer, an open car was attached to it: the caboose. Everyone wanted to ride in that car: through a rather empty countryside, one enjoyed the view, the movement, the fresh air, all at the same time.

Today neither the streetcar nor the caboose exists, and the trip from Biarritz is anything but a pleasure. This is not to apply a mythic embellishment to the past, or to express regrets for a lost youth by pretending to regret a streetcar. This is to say that the art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.

So, if I could be on campus, in the library I’d be like in that streetcar. The nature of this class isn’t really about good or bad, it is about mutation. It doesn’t substitute for being able to work on campus and have the full experience. You might say that the nature of this class takes history out of the higher educational experience as well as all the ivy. It’s a mutation.