LiberalArtsOnline Vol. 1, No. 1
Imagine an ideal seminar. Perhaps it is made up of ten students, all familiar to you from previous classes or campus activities. The participants know each other well and the comfortable environment stimulates lively and thoughtful discussions. Students engage each other directly rather than through you. What a wonderful image of a liberal arts education in progress!
Now, imagine that same seminar a few years in the future. Will there be a handful of students gathered around a conference table and an equal number joining the conversation from remote locations with the aid of virtual reality masks? It's not hard to imagine a time when technology will render remote participants indistinguishable from those on site. How will we justify asking students to join us for four years as part of a residential college community when they can more conveniently and economically join the same seminar from miles away?
Although it has been available for years, distance education has been of little consequence to most residential liberal arts colleges. Paper-based correspondence courses lack the face-to-face interaction that brings a subject, a student, and a discussion to life. Video and televised courses don't promote the give and take that encourages students to test ideas and receive immediate feedback. Interactive technologies are becoming common but conversations still tend to be awkward. However, at this moment in our lives rapid advances make it easy to imagine a not-too-distant future in which we will be challenged to justify a student's physical presence on our campus and in our classrooms.
As our students become increasingly comfortable with virtual reality, we will need to move beyond familiar traditions in defending residential education. Are we prepared to justify life in our communities as integral to a liberal arts education?
We might begin by emphasizing serendipitous learning that results from informal or even accidental interactions on our campuses. It is hard to imagine a virtual faculty:
--Walking through the library the night before an exam in search of frenetic students who need to be shown how to refocus and identify central ideas;
--Referring to a student's participation in a play from the previous semester to draw him or her into a class discussion;
--Engaging a group of students in discussion after a public lecture, an art opening, or a poetry reading;
--Drawing on traditions, institutional ethos, and esprit de corps to persuade students to move to the next level of effort;
--Working in concert with students, faculty, and coaches to encourage an individual who has lost focus;
--Using the informal environment of a studio or laboratory to guide and prod a student who clearly needs a confidence boost; or
--Drawing on a wide range of observations to determine whether a student needs to be comforted or scolded over a failed assignment.
Although these events are the stuff from which we build memories, we tend to think of them as an added, unplanned bonus to the fundamental work we do with our students.
It is a bit sobering, though, to imagine that these events --- events that seem almost accidental --- may become the justification for residential education. One wonders, how will this revelation change the way we prepare for a semester or for our daily tasks? How will we know when we have done enough to go home? How will we select, evaluate, promote, and reward colleagues? And how will our self-perception change when we focus on making intentional that which has been accidental?
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.