Sounds like you need video to catch the dynamic performance. There are wooden lecturers, and even well-spoken lecturers who nevertheless never budge from the lectern; those are the taking heads who may as well use only audio. You’d be moving around the stage and not be anchored at the whiteboard or lectern. You’ll need a cameraman to make a good video of it, somebody who’ll draw back for a long shot when you’re moving, zoom in over your shoulder tight on the whiteboard sometimes, medium shot when you stand and talk.

It’s been my experience that the whiteboard is hard to capture clearly on the video, and even worse after the video’s been shrunk and compressed for streaming. There’s usually a bright light on the board so the audience can see, but that tends to swamp the camera’s sensor, and the whiteboard tends to whiteout.

If your presentation were formal, there’d be fixed PowerPoint slides that could be reproduced alongside the video for clarity. But for a spontaneous whiteboard session…well, there are electronic whiteboards that can digitally record whatever you write, but they’re fairly expensive and not widespread. What you might want to do is have a second, high-resolution camera locked on the whiteboard. If you use a still camera, the videographer can periodically click its shutter while you write. Or if it’s video, let it run, then in postproduction extract still frames. You can display those images alongside the video.

I know it sounds like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. But I’ve seen so many promising lecture videos that made me squint at a whiteboard or overhead projector, and often led me give up in frustration when I just couldn’t read what’s being written. I don’t want that to happen to you.

Please keep on keeping me posted, bowser.

In one I was talking about losses. “What do we lose in life?”

I had my back to the group, maybe 50 people, and was writing as they talked out. Friends, money, family, jobs, health.

And then a voice I recognized as Chuck, a guy in my group. “Virginity!” A mix of guffaws, chuckles, nervous laughter came out.

Without turning around I said, “That was quite a loss for you, wasn’t it Chuck? It took you a while to get over that, we worked on it. However, as I said, since you were alone it didn’t really count.”

That broke ‘em up, all of ‘em.

It sounds like your presentation might be one that would benefit from video. It’s hard to imagine just talking about intervention; I’d expect you try to show, to act it out, maybe even use actors? Some of our courses for psychologists are like that, with videos of group and single therapy techniques to show how it’s done. One course teaches interview techniques for HR people (psych is a broad field when you think about it), and students have to create and upload their own video for review.

Best of luck, bowser.

Frankly, my main interest is passing on the experience of 35 years. I have developed a means of explaining Chemical Dependency, denial and doing interventions which comes from experience, motivation, and almost obsessive thought. I have been told many, many times that a book should be written, that I have broken new ground. And I have.

At one time I was offered the lead interventionist job at Betty Ford. I turned it down because they want every intervention to be referred back to their facility. It is only rarely the most appropriate.

I was sought out to do an intervention on a top Hollywood producer. (After the intervention one of his daughters asked where he got his Valium. He mentioned a physician, the daughter said that’s were Elizabeth Taylor got hers.

“Who do you think gave me his name?”

The one lecture, explaining how to make denial work for the clinician, is worth a lot of money, really. And there’s a demand for it.

I have to admit I’m most interested in sharing this information before I crap out. It would be a shame for some of this stuff to be lost when I go.

And if someone makes money on it, I agree I should share in it. I don’t think I’ll have to worry about that with my friends. It will depend upon the deal they make with the production and distribution people. However, if I don’t like it, I don’t have to do it and will not be in any worse position than I am now.

Thanks again. I appreciate it.

The word “Oxbridge” tickled a memory, and when I looked it up, I was reminded that it’s a contraction/mashup of “Oxford” and “Cambridge”, and has been used for a while to describe the two universities collectively as a community, interchangably used for the institutions as well as the students. I don’t think you’re wrong, really, only that there was already an “Oxbridge”, yet your use of it as a generic term works well.

You’re also not wrong to be concerned about the direction higher ed will take when it finally begins to respond to the present crisis. The oligarchy has a stake not only in creating narrowly-skilled interchangeable workers, it has a stake in conditioning a certain pliant mindset too. A mindset the opposite of the Western liberal tradition taught by the liberal arts.

Just this week I was forwarded a press release about a joint venture between MIT and Fujitsu. They announced software that will assemble courses to order based on assessing the student’s needs and matching it to modules in a library. It sounds pretty good in theory, but the poison apple is that Fujitsu is a significant maker of supercomputers. Projects like these always benefit the patron, so you know damn well that what this one produces will be a huge AI package that will only run on a Fujitsu supercomputer. An expensive platform like that will benefit only existing large institutions and corporate training programs.

The good news is that lots of people recognize the danger. The open source movement has provided a philosophical compass: Good educational systems must be open and accessible to all. (That doesn’t necessarily mean free, because eventually the bills come due; but open source has a way of minimizing costs and gravitating toward inexpensive solutions). Software is open source, and so is a lot of the content (course materials) itself. You can assemble your own course out of modules freely-available online.

As for learning a new interface, of course that’s always a negative. Some of the online software tries hard to create its own unique UI, but most of it, especially the open-source stuff, just relies on whatever the Web browser makes available. So if you can drive a browser, you can drive an online course. That’s my hope, anyway.

You don’t need to stand corrected, just stand.

When everything is funneled through software and the net, every single experience and interaction must first be preceded by learning a different GUI and mastering the appropriate data structures. You can’t just write an essay, you have to learn the appropriate editor so you’ll be compatible with your prof’s document management system. And everything has a password that must be memorized. I remember one of our young correspondents here, VRB, complaining about it when he started college recently. He lost his laptop and could no longer function. He no longer posts…. One of my frustrations at work and even in routine civilian transactions, has been the ever-increasing requirement to debug the tools before you can even start thinking about working on a problem.

By the way, I thought I was coining a phrase, combining Oxford and Cambridge into a generic term signifying ancient medieval university towns, Gothic towers, ivy covered walls, punting in the canals, and all the rest of that Inspector Morse/Brideshead Revisited stuff. I stand corrected on both counts..

My basic mission is to replace the feedlot model with as much human interaction, between students as well as with the teacher, as is technologically feasible. Physical presence is, of course, the “highest bandwidth” channel for human interaction, but the problem is that it’s the least cost-effective form of interaction, and in practical terms, it’s getting priced out of reach of the average student.

My philosophy is based in part on what I’ve learned about research into early child development. One striking point is that a human’s initial learning is entirely driven by emotion, starting with mommy’s smile, and progressing through, for example a lesson on intention and will with “and I can make mommy smile by smiling myself!”. We’re social primates, later in life we organize ourselves in groups to learn…human learning is a strongly social endeavor.

Of course, the optimum degree of sociability depends on the material. Hard factual and conceptual topics in engineering and math and the hard sciences can be studied effectively by individuals in isolation. Although eventually even in the hard sciences you have to emerge into the light and try things out in exercises and labs.

Remember that I’m involved in training psychologists, and it’s hard to imagine a more polar opposite kind of education. Psychology in the classroom is an ongoing series of group or pair exercises as psych students spar with each other to learn about interacting with their clients. Lots of writing is involved, too; and writing is one of those things that can be learned very effectively online in a group setting where people are constantly critiquing each others’ work. In courses and, ya know, places like this.

To describe it more concretely, the traditional form of online education is a “learning management system” that imposes a rigid path and sequence to, almost literally, make the student jump through a designated series of hoops. If you’ve ever opted to take driver’s ed online after getting a ticket, you’ve experienced exactly that kind of hell. Professionally an LMS called “moodle” was my first exposure to the genre, and I instantly responded by trying to hack to make it more humane. But, perhaps karmically, it was internally too rigid and inflexible to be fixed, so I dropped it and turned to “social media” software like WordPress, which underpins the present software here. Nothing’s rigid, there are few barriers to just browsing around the course in random order if that floats your boat. Forums scattered everywhere to capture conversation. The most formality comes when you have to demonstrate that you’ve grazed sufficiently to pass a quiz and earn academic credit and a pretty PDF certificate.

Another angle on it is that it’s a matter of trust. The feedlot model, whether online or in the dirt world, starts with the premise that students don’t really want to learn, they were coerced to be there, and if you don’t rigidly control their behavior, they’ll cheat and goof off.

A very industrial model. Type A business managers understand this very well.

I tend to be more trusting, but with a practical twist: Yeah, some percentage of students will always cheat and goof off no matter what you do, so eff ‘em, it’s their loss. They’ll drop by the wayside anyway if you give them enough rope, and it’s fine with me if we free up resources for the serious students.

In a similar vein, a lot of our courses are free. The open course is one of the major threads of change in education. My school’s philosophy is to charge real money for courses that lead to a real financial payoff for the student–professional development, certifications, better job, etc.–but to give away as much of everything we can afford. In many cases, you can read the course material for free, but have to pay a fee only to take the final exam and earn academic credit.

You mentioned Oxbridge (actually an imaginary place at the intersection of Oxford and Cambridge), but a more recent example from England is The Open University. It was founded in 1969, long before the Net, to promote free distance learning. The word “open” means not just free monetarily, but free of admission requirements, i.e. past academic prerequisites. If you want to learn something, it’s yours. They started out using educational TV and radio, then glommed on to the Internet early, in the low 90s. They’re an interesting case study because they approach the social aspect through a network of physical locations where students can watch the educational materials with others, get tutoring, form study groups, and so on. They deal with the trust issue at exam time by having students take their tests in a physical room with a proctor keeping an eye on things. This dual physical and virtual approach is sometimes called “blended learning”.

All that long information dump is by way of reassuring you that lots of people are trying very hard to preserve education and make it better; we “[w]on’t let the university experience become a boot camp for the commercial industrial complex.” You may have reflexively looked for disagreement in a disputatious venue, but in fact the world of education is full of people who agree with you.

Take heart, ER. We’re workin’ on it.

The University concept goes back pretty much in its present form to Medieval times. It is one of the crowning cultural achievements of Western Man. Once you’ve been through it it will always be a part of you, and it will make you a part of that community and that tradition.

The feedlot model you refer to may be a part of the American educational experience, and although it can be
criticized, it did democratize higher education and allowed it to be brought to the masses. But it is not the way it has to be all the time. The organization and culture of the OxBridge tradition still retain their individuality in curriculum and classroom. The student has control of his education and the professors compete for them. You “read” under whoever you want.

I took my basic college classes in Math, Physics, and Astronomy in great lecture halls, probably not too spiritually different from staring at a computer screen. But my other courses and my liberal arts were in small classrooms with personal contact and debate with my teachers and fellow students. This is where I got my real education. Outside the classroom, there was constant face-to-face personal contact with a real community of scholars, discussion and argument of what we learned in class continued. Independent thought, critical thinking, all this came from the community, as well as what was going on in society, and in other disciplines. The bachelor’s degree gives you a glimpse into just how complex your own field of specialization is, but your fellow students show you that other fields and disciplines are just as rich and complex. You get a feel for the entire scope and landscape of human knowledge.

You can learn differential equations and Fortran programming in the lecture hall (or a computer screen), but you get an education on campus. That is where you learn how to think, where you are educated. I was a working class kid from an immigrant community when I went to college in the 60s and 70s. When I came out I was a sophisticated, cosmopolitan man, aware of my place in society and history, and with a fundamental understanding of how both worked. Maybe I wasn’t a particularly talented astronomer, but that’s really not what an education is about, is it?

I never used any of the technical skills I learned at University on the job (except for the Fortran), but my grasp on society, culture and human psychology was formed during those years. The university experience was my single most important experience, more significant in determining the man I became than my intimacy with a foreign culture and language, or my time in the military, or my travel overseas, or four decades in my profession. I would not trade it for anything. If I had just wanted a good job, I would have become a dentist.

Don’t let the university experience become a boot camp for the commercial industrial complex. Your comments on the state of education and the nature of current paradigms in current learning technologies are quite insightful.

When the old Florida University Board of Regents was reformed, and the educators and scholars were replaced with “business and community leaders”, the new President spoke about how the New University was now going to return to its true and legitimate mission, “to teach students what they need to know, not how to think”.

I submit those who presume to decide “what you need to know” would prefer you never really learn “how to think”.

It’s good that the business of education will be reformed, kicking and screaming. But the flensing can cut too close to the bone, favoring academic pursuits with short-term payoffs over longer term and less obviously practical pursuits. The ratio of trade schools to liberal arts colleges is what distinguishes a merely businesslike society from a great society, and the transition of education to a new technological paradigm has to be handled carefully.

Or to a very old paradigm. My take on how to educate online is heavily biased by my experience with online forums, and you won’t be surprised that I think that learning has a heavily social component. The traditional approach to online learning has been very highly structured, stepping each individual student through a series of chutes and pens, much like cattle in a feedlot. I find that very sterile, and the systems I’m building are based on this software right here, and try constantly to get the students interacting with each other through forums and commenting.

I’m also challenging the concept of a “course”, arguing that with an online platform like this, you need never leave the course. You might take the final exam and earn your academic credits, but forevermore, you’re free to return and share your experiences out in the real world, correct the professor and try to get the last word, and to consult with other colleagues. I’m trying to blend the concept of a course with that of a community. Just for fun, I also like to throw in a reference to the Talmud, and the idea of a community of scholars toiling down through the ages endlessly refining and perfecting a single work–i.e., a wiki.

What’s new is often so old.