Pedagogical Change and Its Evaluation

Myth has it that, once upon a time, lecturers in universities read their lectures from handwritten manuscripts which were dusty with age. Students scribbled these lectures down in the lecture halls as best they might in a bizarre mimicking of the medieval scriptorium. They could then pass these notes on to their siblings and children and expect the process to have gone on unchanged in the interim. Later the blackboard was available for the lecturer to jot down enigmatic words like Goethe, empiricism, the enlightenment, mass with the double ss underlined as a spelling guide. Some courses used the new technology of textbooks. Then came the overhead transparency with its wonder of coloured pens. It is notable that some of these myths are still believed along with the inference that university teachers are technophobes, cannot construct a curriculum for love nor money and are on holiday half the year.

There is another myth: that new technology will make the face-to-face teacher obsolete, that you will get a better education watching a professor at Harvard, who is a leading luminary, give great lectures while you attend the lecture live in real time on the web than you would get from someone giving a lecture in the same room as yourself. When radio arrived, when television arrived and when computer-aided instruction became possible, similar claims were made. The global village will make the local village obsolete. Media moguls will buy up pedagogical resources (human and non-human) and international capitalism will have its way with us.