We can witness such phenomena of de-individualization e.g. in the field of the military - where the number of the unit etc. and then the "individual number" is printed in metal to easier identify a corpse after casualties. Such numbers we also know of big systems like social security systems, telephone or fax numbers and the like.
Remember the Mao clothing during Chinese cultural revolution - the western world was shocked about this form and process of de-individualization.
On the one hand we deplore the loss of individuality when we are forced to become uniform on the other hand we are delighted witnessing gymnastic sports events when choreography accomplishes that after hours and hours of training the movements of a group or big mass of people become synchronous.
There is a big difference in how societies deal with the individual - on the one hand we know the constitutional right of the individual to the persuit of happiness on the other hand the necessity of being subject to agreed norms, being standardized as a prognostic value for the sake of survival of that society.
In teaching/learning systems of societies we find the same dichotomy:
Since it is so difficult to describe a person we use names instead (baptism- remember the baptism formula from the bible ... "I called you by your name, you belong to me").
It is far easier to desribe functional properties or roles - by that to "de-fine" persons by approximation to their "value". But the concept of person is to transcend the number and description of roles/functions assigned to.
It was Carl Rogers, who in modern times fostered the concept of becoming a person also in the framework of higher education. He claimed the following goals for a program of reforming university education1
* curiosity instead of conformity
* own definition of goals
* open resources to nourish interests in natural context
* own responsibility for the special area of study
* partnership in decisions about the university programmes
* orientation in future problems of science rather than historical or facts knowledge
* concentrating on the solution of significant problems rather that methodological competencies
* enabling close human interaction
* focusing such interaction to real personal and not only intellectual or job-related problems
* creating a disciplined and critical learner who is able to judgeaccording to his own social and individual goals
* enabling the student to deal intelligently and creatively with the problems of humanity
to enable the student to become a member of the qualified group of experts who try to tackle the significant scientific and humane problems of our days.
the strive to fulfil a minimal norm on the one hand or to reach the best possible, to surmount the average on the other.
There is a basic conflict in every teacher, most of them would argue that after fulfilling a minimal norm then the goal to reach the best possible has to be followed.
Since fulfilling minimal standards is hard for many students because of societal constraints like todays abundance of stimuli, or whatever excuse might be thought of, the strive towards individualization seems to be still dysfunctional for many schools: individualization became connected with a notion of luxury.
The prince´s education might best describe this concept of individualization in education.
And indeed, in modern societies we find private additional instruction to be of such monetary impact on societies that people start to calculate whether private instruction alone might even be more cost-effective. It is not only that such private instruction is used as a remedy for tight secondary school situations but it is characteristic of modern societies in that many trained but unemployed teachers find employment in that field- the state system cannot afford to put more teachers into their schools. Also new developments in societies stronger rely on this facet than ever: try to find a normal school where you may learn computing or violin.
It was in the early seventies when Ivan Illich presented his thesis of deschooling society.
I remember a workshop in Cuernavaca where we dealt with the concept of lifelong learning, the OECD2 having presented this concept to the public in order to promote the idea that the learning process does not end with a first qualification but that it more and more will be necessary to re-qualify the workforce: We dealt with the pitfalls of deschoolong. 3
An Indian colleague presented a system of organization of learning opportunities where, like in a telephone book, one could look up items like "growing tomatoes in cans on the balcony". Strictly private, without any certification. Certification of tested qualifications and especially their questionable standards were the main issues at that time .The structural deficits of all teaching systems in a capitalistic society was the main concern.
Today recurrent education is said to be a permanent necessity simply because of the obsolence of former basic training .The tendency is that individuals make themselves responsible for such deficits, they have learnt to blame themselves for any incompetence.
I am not going to try to prove that the qualifications needed today are determined by the status and development of society rather than by the individuals wish for the persuit of happiness.
Is individualization as a concept steming from bourgeois social reform ideology or is it a category inherent in the concept of the learning process itself?
Theoretically the inclusion of discourse, of societal phenomena like interaction and communication or media into learning theory need not contradict the learning theory but supplement it5.
Taking the classification models of
Bloom (understanding, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation),
Gagné (concept-learning, principle learning and problem-solving) and
Merril (classification behaviour, analysis behaviour and problem-solving)
we find with all three authors classifications which are- especially in the context of self-instructional material -dependent on social interaction already when application into teaching practice is necessary. All these learning theories seem to neglect the everyday practice of teachers. Whether learning is taking place inside the individuals central nervous system is not the important issue: whether it happened or not, this is the main question- a question which cannot be answered outside a societal context. It also is important whether there is feedback to such an event.
Probably the inclusion of interaction is not so important for the process of understanding but the motivation, the applicability and especially the relevance for the individual (Ausubel's "meaningful learning") are most important issues for the learning process itself.
But to theoretically extract the social element from theory of learning would mean to alienate the learning process from the individual.
Teaching material thus offered as material for easy consumption has an alienating character. Its main characteristic is gearing the learners motifs, (which might even work,) but when there is little choice of type of teaching-learning situations the learner will become addict to this mode and continue to ask for more and more canned knowledge instead of getting in touch with his individual needs and creatively trying to meet these.
Such "self-instructional" material seems to have reached a new quality in education.
The didactical problem: being confronted with perfectly structured and evaluated material is still the same one as in medieval times: It still is a social situation to teach and the basic conflict can best be described with the paradox intervention ( Be spontaneous!) Learn!
We know from early learning behaviour studies like from Pavlov, that extinction takes much more effort to be achieved, than conditioning. So it is a merely economic issue to achieve correct behaviour at the earliest stage possible.
This means that errors made should be taken care of at the earliest possible instance.
In my life as a father of children I witness that schools tend to commit many a crime in this respect by not correcting errors when teachers administer tests but just indicating that at a certain place in a test an error ocurred.
Is it lazyness of teachers? I think most of the teachers would reject this and argue that it is merely impossible to make a "positive correction", indicating not only the error but presenting the correct answer and trying to begin a process of additional input for remedy because of the number of tests to be corrected.
This is a severe argument and I dont have the solution for direct schooling at hand:
but in distance education I think it would be waste of time and energy to go along that line of correction like just indicating: "You are wrong".
Since years I propose error oriented tutoring as a chance for additional teaching effort -
at an early stage of the learning process.
Tests will give at least some indication of quality, and although I dont want to step into the discussion of efficiency of grades for motivation and for real comparability of learning efforts, I think tests are good for training. It is just one known form of presentation of content. And we know of cultural differences in this field: In Germany a test in a classroom which has been failed by more than one third of the learning group either has to be repeated or to be approved by the administration. The idea is, that always the results of a test in a learning group will turn out to have the typical form of a Gauss-curve;whereas in the anglo-saxon culture a notion of achievement up to 100% of the tasks is more prominent- at least it can be discussed.
I want to mention a computer program which presents technical special vocabulary6 which simply "has to be learned" such programs enable the student to go for a 100% while working with the system ,(this program developed at the FernUniversität is called COACH7)
One of the inbuilt elements in Coach is a small stochastic program that ensures that a student will be presented items not perfectly known before again and again - until the student has given the correct answer for the third time - .This is one of the necessary aspects of individualization: To be patient with the learner until the correct answers are presented and secured for the future.
So the learner can be sure to really have mastered all items when the program finishes.
There are two strings I want to follow:
1. The presentation of a new item in a meaningful context must not be too easy:
The more self-explanatory an item is, the less is the learning output due to the system. I could present an example of that software, where you, assuming that you are not able to read a Greek input-line (the reason for that will be clear now!), but still will be able to correctly fill in the blanks, just from your previous knowledge and from a self-explanatory meaningful context. My impression is that we should have less than 50% of items that easily can be filled in because of general previous knowledge.
For testing reasons this instrument proves to be highly effective, also in terms of using tests for additional learning. But the question remains how efficient it might be for the first presentation of new content. To test this, you really need persons not able to infer a meaning from context only. This is one field of study still to be explored. For general practice in vocabulary learning the COACH is a good instrument to fill in the blanks - you always have the possiblity to call for help or to break up your search for the correct answer by filling in a question mark and receiving the correct answer.
2.. The core of the program is the handling of possible wrong answers. We have a log-file system from which we extract (by a special software) the 5 most prominent errors8 in order to present a helpful comment when one of the "expected" wrong answers shows up. Good students call upon possible alternatives too: The more a learner tests out the list of possibly correct answers (synonyms), the better! The didactical problem that remains is, that with a good student, always typing in correct answers, our effort with having collected all the wrong answers and developed the sensitive comments that may induce future learning, all the presentation of new cognitive structures, will not be called upon. But this is one of the problems having shown up with computers: what about all the entries in all the databases which never will be called up?
Such teaching systems are able to react on individual performances , they are mass products but their goal is to supplement the individualization of the learning process.
Also in higher education student-student interaction has gained a respectable position in the discussion of possible settings.
Now in virtual classes or virtual seminars this notion stays alive and we should expect that the proportion of student-student interaction is still gaining in importance.
This situation represents the idea that learning can be organized to happen not only by direct interaction (dyads) of teacher and learner (even if a fellow-student is pushed into the role of a teacher) but also by indirect learning possibilities of the witness - lets call it "witness learning"- the witness being mute but awake and "intellectually" following the other interactions in the setting.
The question is now whether this setting can be transported also into the framework of distance education. There are many forms of distance education throughout the world, very few indeed will be of a kind where dyads of learning interaction will be excluded: on the contrary, almost all distance education institutions will have provisions for such dyads - mostly student-tutor interaction of some kind, sometimes for classical seminars or summer schools in order to make up for something that is thought of being missing: autonomous learning, in remote, asynchronous interaction.
Theorists of Distance Education like Börje Holmberg, in claiming that the "proprium" of DE be the unique one to one relationship9 seem to insist on the incomparability of distance education with organized learning of any other kind.
The big disadvantage of Holmbergs notion is that we still must calculate: DE is attractive to tax payers only if it promises the same results at less cost than the normal system.
Lets calculate then:
In a normal daily class - lets say 30 learners and a teacher - there will be a net-contact-time of interaction among teacher and individual student of less than 10 minutes a week.
There is a ratio of 1:30 in direct one-to-one interaction, if it were not for the trust in witness-learning possibilities shools would have to close down.
The one-to one interaction Holmberg promotes for DE implies that, out of organizational reasons, this ratio will normally not be possible: Holmberg speaks of a 1:1 ratio! This means while the tutor interacts with one student no other student is learning from this interaction.
In correspondence education there normally was nothing like "witness-learning".
And, let me blunty state this, if every DE student was to build up a relationship with a paid tutor on this 1:1 basis, DE never would have worked: Successful tutorial contact, by telephone, writing, e-mail etc. only functioned because the 1:1 relationsship will be asked for only by a very small proportion of students, the others either dropping out or learning successfully without a prescheduled one-to-one interaction.10
There are many successful DE students never having asked for individual support and still keeping the pace and sitting the exam and passing it. This must have been even the bigger proportion and it seems to represent the didactic quality of the material presented. It is this group of successful students working with elaborated didactic material which makes me think that the proprium of distance education cannot be the one-to-one relationship Holmberg talks about.
One-to-one relationship in DE is something we have to work for as a built-in-possibility, yet hoping that it never will become necessary for every student! This argument is in line with the one just mentioned about a successful student, making no errors in a vocabulary training and leaving the producers of teaching material with the notion of being superfluous.
When electronic discussions are offered, we find a new dimension in distance education: fellow-students might profit a lot again from witness learning just like in any traditional educational setting.
So one of the evaluative questions for a professional development seminar on the WWW11 was, what participants think they have most learned from. We should expect that the learning meterial, in the case of the seminar the readings, would be the most important part and that own activities, such as communicative interaction either in messaging or in project work would be second: The results though coincide with the theoretical aspects just mentioned: Participants think that seminar readings on the web contributed most to their learning, but the second position is held by witnessing the message interactions - even more than actively participating in such interactions.
Message-interactions like in the Hyper-News system of this seminar are as a technical possibility not new to distance education12: Theoretically this is a new dimension to traditional concepts of distance education: extensive use of mail, computers and even groupwise access to similar systems although known for years seem not to have been included properly into theory.There is this negative association connected with the word "lurking". We do have to re-think now about open asynchronous interaction systems on the internet as one of the more prominent structural elements of distance education: a lot of didactical work has to be done!