I was reading a blog by a fellow named Harold Jarche today, and in his December 8th entry called, “Short, medium and long-term views about the Internet”, he quoted from a list of fundamental changes taking place in business and education that have been spurred on by the rise of the internet:

People work from home.
Intranets replace offices.
Networks replace pyramids
Trains replace cars
Dense neighborhoods replace suburbs
New social infrastructures evolve.
Cheating becomes collaboration.
Half of all learning is online.
Education becomes web-based.

The list is originally from a book called Nine Shift, by Draves and Coates. I have been thinking a lot about it, because so many of these assertions ring true in my own experience of my life, work, city, and business. Since education is my business, that is the one that I have been thinking most about.

First and foremost, I am a teacher, and many of the classes that I teach are one-on-one classes taught online, with the aid of Skype, and a screen sharing program called Beam Your Screen. I like this format. It allows me to give all of my attention to one student, without having to leave my desk. I always have all of my teaching materials ready-to-hand. I can schedule the class at a time that works for both of us, and neither of us have to waste any time in transit. However, there are moments with some of the students, when I can sense them drifting away, drifting into the pleasures of the cloud: Facebook, MSN, WoW, who knows what else. I try to make the classes as interesting as I can, but when are talking about grammar, or essay structure it is hard to compete with all of the interesting diversions that are just a click away. When I see a pupil drifting away, I sometimes wish that I was in a classroom with that student, and I could have a monopoly on being interesting. I am still grateful that I don’t have to waste transit time, but the internet gives me no tools to capture my physicality, or gesture. I am just a talking head and a digital blackboard.

There are some concrete things that the internet’s flatness doesn’t diminish. Marking work and the criticism it produces, for example! It is pretty boring no matter how you slice it and moving it online doesn’t make it more so. Instead, moving that work online gives us tools that make it easier, both for students, and for teachers. Acovan’s COMARKER program makes comments legibly – no more red scrawl, it stores and recalls any comment that is entered – no more having to type “verb tense” twelve times while marking a paper, and, most importantly, it provides a platform for its users to share comments with all of the other markers using the system – if someone makes a comment that you like better than your own, you can find it and use it.  I hope that COMARKER™’s attributes will make my teaching expericence richer, just as some technologies strip it of its vibrancy.  Now if we can only segue it wth Moodle…

But if I hear about the Boy Scouts offering badges for blogging, or making it to level 15 in Call of duty, then I quit.