互联网对教育的贡献
2008/04/01……
What about the second big goal (learning)? Heavy technological artillery has been applied to education starting in the 1960s. The basic idea has always been to amplify the efforts of our greatest current teachers, usually by canning and shipping them to new students. The canning mechanism is almost always a video camera. In the 1960s we shipped the resulting cans via closed-circuit television. In the 1970s the Chinese planned to ship their best educational cans all over their nine-million-square-kilometer land via satellite television. In the 1980s we shipped the cans on VHS video tapes. In the 1990s we shipped the cans via streaming Internet media. We’ve been pursuing essentially the same approach for forty years. If it worked you’d expect to have seen dramatic results.What if, instead of increasing the number of learners per teacher, we increased the number of teachers? There are already plenty of opportunities to learn at your convenience. If it is 3:00 am and you want to learn about quantum mechanics, you need only pull a book from your shelf and turn on the reading light. But what if you want to teach at 3:00 am? Your friends may not appreciate being called up at 0300 and told “Hey, I just learned that the Franck-Hertz Experiment in 1914 confirmed the theory that electrons occupy only discrete, quantized energy states.” What if you could go to a server-based information system and say “show me a listing of all the unanswered questions posted by other users”? You might be willing to answer a few, simply for the satisfaction of helping another person and feeling like an expert. When you got tired, you’d go to bed. Teaching is fun if you don’t have to do it forty hours per week for thirty years.
……(greenspun.com)
该段引用文字取自”Software Engineering for Internet Applications“一书的Introduction章节。作者用通俗的语言解释了互联网应用存在的意义,而我引用的文字恰恰在解释互联网如何造福教育领域,值得花些时间读一读。
大意是这样的:大约在半个世纪之前,为了解决教育资源不足(缺乏教师)的问题,随着技术的不断进步,各个国家通过不同手段大批量地分发教育资源(比如录像带、电视信号等),直至20世纪90年代,我们终于可以利用互联网来传播教育资源了。这一看似微小的变化带来了引人注目的影响,利用互联网,每个人都有机会发挥自己的一技之长,我们可以在成为一名学习者的同时贡献自己的专业领域知识,成为教育、帮助别人的老师。这一角色的随意转换使得教育资源缺乏问题迎刃而解。作者最后一句说的好:如果不必(像一名教师那样)每周工作40多个小时并如此持续30几年的话,教育别人就会成为每一位学习者的乐事。
