The Future Classroom – Ten Years Later
Ten years ago I was the director of the new masters in education program at the University of New England. The program utilized an asynchronous distance learning process where the students, all K-12 teachers, completed course work that combined printed text, pre-recorded videotape and correspondence with “faculty mentors” via post and telephone. We would eventually add e-mail, but that was something still fairly new, even at the university, and not readily available.
That summer, ten years ago, the faculty and I were about to embark on a new residency activity called the Summer Integrating Seminar. In this activity the students were required to come to the Biddeford campus for one week (six days) and engage in a series of seminars, group sessions, and general “bonding” endeavors. The faculty believed this week would be the antidote to the otherwise “sterile” nature of taking a degree program at a distance.
One of the courses I mentored in the program was called Current Issues in Education. It involved video presentations from Alan November and David Thornburg and gave heavy emphasis to the new technological age we were entering and its potential effect on schools, teaching and learning.
Having mentored the class with one group already, I recognized that our students – these K-12 public school teachers – were having a very difficult time imagining what schools of the future might look like. The university had just finished and opened a new building for the medical school which contained, among other things, a “high tech classroom” complete with video and sound, special lighting, computer access (including the soon to become ubiquitous Internet). I decided that I would hold my summer seminar sessions in this room and play around with the technology to let the student see and feel what a classroom of the future might be like.
I must admit to having some theatrics in my background and I wasted no time creating a snazzy PowerPoint presentation (also a very new and cool thing in 1996) as well as to produce an opening multimedia display using sound clips from Star Trek.
After wowing the audience with all of the bells and whistles the room and its technology had to offer I shared with them a quotation that I had found while researching the presentation. I began, “I ask you to think about the following quotation and guess its origin:
“Today in our cities, most learning occurs outside the classroom. The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-magazines-films-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school instruction and texts. This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom so suddenly, we’re confused, baffled…”
I then asked the participants to share their guesses as to when this quotation was made and by whom, none were able to guess that the quote came from a Marshall McLuhan’s 1957 *essay entitled “Classroom Without Walls.” In this, McLuhan challenges the “Luddites” of the time who feared television was ruining education, to essentially lighten up. McLuhan makes the point that the same criticisms were said of the printing press and the mass production of books hundreds of years earlier noting that, “many teachers naturally view the offerings of the new media as entertainment, rather than education.”
McLuhan’s often quoted “The medium is the message” aphorism became a banner during the 1960s and early 1970s as the “new technologies” became omnipresent in the average American home. Although we can look back at this time somewhat nostalgically considering the rather tame effects of “I Dream of Jeannie” or “Gillian’s Island,” McLuhan was fairly accurate in his predictions.
For my 1996 class of K-12 public educators, the fear about the new information technology disrupting their classrooms was palpable and my use of the quotation from McLuhan created resonance, reflection, and ultimately acceptance. Indeed, like me, many if not all of these seasoned veteran grew up during this same dynamic period and also witnessed first hand the furor created when television first invaded our living rooms and then our classrooms.
I share these comments and reflections now because I see the same fears today – even among educators. Perhaps the anxiety is less so regarding the integration of computers in the classroom, but clearly when it comes to the new aspects of the form, be they blogs or wikis, or the social collaborations of MySpace or other on-line communities, the fears and suspicions are evident.
In reading the complete McLuhan essay, I can easily see how prophetic the message, and messenger were. If you substitute just about any reference in the essay with the words “blog” or “cell phone,” the quote fits perfectly with some of today’s concerns. Perhaps reading this blog entry – with the McLuhan quote - will create the same resonance, reflection and ultimate acceptance I was able to garner ten years ago.
According to my research, interest in Marshall McLuhan’s life and work faded in the 1970s and apart from some communications majors, I sadly suspect that many people have never heard of Marshall McLuhan. He died in 1980 and was in ill health for the last decade of his life. Had he lived to witness today’s highly technological world, I’m pretty sure he would have been impressed. And I know he would have loved the Internet!
~John Brandt
*The complete essay may be read on-line. Note that I have dated the quote coming from an essay published in 1957 and the web reference dates to 1960. When I first wrote these notes ten years ago, I had the original quote and I am presuming it was and is correct. While indeed the quote is found in 1960 publication Explorations in Communication, this work was a compilation of essays written over the previous seven years for a magazine published by McLuhan and anthropologist Edmund S. Carpenter called Explorations (published from 1953 to 1959) so I suspect that the original date was in fact 1957.
While a three-year difference is not usually significant, in this case I believe it is. The period from 1957 to 1960 witnessed a major increase in the use of television and therefore the quote made in 1957 would be much more powerful.
FMI:
Marshall McLuhan Global Research Center
