Shadows of the future or lessons of the past: the impact of virtual learning environments

Citation

Abeles, T.P. (2004), "Shadows of the future or lessons of the past: the impact of virtual learning environments", On the Horizon, Vol. 12 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/oth.2004.27412aaa.001

Shadows of the future or lessons of the past: the impact of virtual learning environments

The early automobiles were not only called “horseless carriages” but they also looked like their namesake in form. As they became more ubiquitous, they evolved and simultaneously started to produce changes both in the physical infrastructure and in cultural patterns. E-learning appears to be following the same path. Early adopters saw the opportunity, particularly with the rise of the Internet, to extend distance education, using the system as a more efficient way to deliver what had been carried out via the print media and postal service. Others, used, and still are using, software such as Blackboard and WebCT to map brick space into click space by creating virtual discussion sessions complete with access to didactic materials as well as creating administrative systems for registration and student tracking.

In the automobile’s beginning, there were requirements that the “horseless carriage” be preceded by a person with a flag or other signal device to warn the populous and to avoid frightening the ubiquitous equines. By the end of the First World War, not only had the USA’s transportation system evolved, but also the agricultural economy had been disrupted as horsepower was fueled by petroleum products rather than hay and oats, major cash crops for Midwestern US farmers. Today, with the rise of e-learning individuals warn of quality dilution and digital diploma mills while decrying the rise of “for-profit” universities which supposedly compete by eliminating the essence, the brick space experience, and commodifying the post secondary experience, creating the equivalent of an intellectual production line.

On most university campuses, concerns still are raised as e-learning becomes part of the movement which sees students as “customers” and which defaults to a business model, the university as a private rather than a public good. Just as the advent of the automobile caused changes, it also amplified, or made visible, larger social changes. Similarly, e-learning makes visible the fact that post secondary education has changed. Where once a primary school diploma was sufficient for employment, today the bar has been raised to the point where education, K-to-14 and K-to-16, is seen as the barrier to be crossed, changing, and, in essence, commodifying what was once a selective and élite institution, the university.

The use of asynchronous conferencing software, derived from the early community bulletin board systems, eases cyber immigrants, faculty and administrators, into the virtual world by maintaining the parallels between brick and mortar and cyber spaces. The ubiquity of the Internet and high-speed broad band connectivity adds the parallel richness of audiovisuals once laboriously carried into the classroom with projectors. While the faculty are becoming familiar with such opportunities, in the classroom as well as online, the incoming students, the cyber natives, are already downloading music and movies on their computers and text messaging on their cell phones, even during lectures, and, where possible, during tests.

Education, by its very nature, is historic. It is hard to certify for the future. Thus, the university has been seen as the repository and curator of knowledge centering on its library and the scholarly interpreters of the texts contained therein. E-learning has made visible that knowledge, particularly historic, even a few minutes past the moment; and it essentially becomes available, anytime and anywhere. Knowledge can be “just in time” and not “just in case”. Students enrolled in “laptop universities” and virtual institutions, with the advent of the semantic Web, will have the intellectual riches of the world at the click of a mouse. What is even more important is that this same information is now freed from the core of the Ivory Tower, the library, and is available (ignoring the “digital divide”) to persons K-to-gray on an as needed basis. Even familiar “courses” when taken in click space may not originate with the institution where the student has matriculated. Adding e-portfolios as a means of evaluation of a student’s competency again changes the roll of faculty and the function of The Academy, all made visible and simultaneously stimulated by the current equivalents of the horseless carriages of e-learning technology.

As suggested above, K-14/16 becomes the benchmarks for entrance into the larger society and the economy as adult/participants. Corporations, many of which know no geographic boundaries, must manage scattered, multicultural, operations. Third generation knowledge management systems promote the creation of communities of practice, or knowledge ecologies where the Internet enhances the ability for employees as well as the corporation’s clients and suppliers to collaborate to provide the best services and products. Similarly public sector organizations form networks of collaboration in their efforts to carry out their functions be they local or global. In many ways these collaborative communities resemble more the old one-room schoolhouse than the structured boxes called classes today, in both brick and click space. Again, knowledge management not only informs us as to why these become natural communities, but also points to how e-learning with its just-in-time effectiveness challenges the just-in-case of traditional education systems, in both form and content.

Interestingly, similar communities form on the Internet when individuals engage in massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Communication with administrators in both the traditional academic community and the corporate education sectors indicates that there is a sense that variances of these gaming and simulation platforms will move e-learning from the horseless carriage to, at least, the level of Henry Ford’s Model T and give one a glimpse of what lies ahead as the field of artificial intelligence, reborn, offers new insights and tools.

At the present time numerous corporate and university groups are developing and using such virtual learning environments (VLEs). And, as usual, the technology leads the applications, in this case, in both content and process. In the game/simulation environment communities of practice/participation function similar to, yet differently from VLEs. What this implies for education can only be seen through a glass darkly. We already know that the “business” of a university, grades 13-16 is changing and thus the form and function of the academic is on the edge of significant change. This has less to do with the fact that most academics are cyber immigrants and more to do with the fact that the academic has probably spent more than 25 years going through the education system which has remained essential unchanged since the1600s, the institution of von Humboldt and Newman. Old habits, expectations, and experiences are hard to change. VLE’s, while offering new opportunities, can act as a solvent to loosen the gears between the ears and offer alternatives to the classroom and research laboratory. No one has yet to address the possibility that many in the educational community, even at the university level, will find that the skill sets that have been imbedded may need to be readdressed.

Today there are laboratory computers that can not only run experiments, but analyze the data, make decisions about what follow-on experiments need to be conducted, and proceed to execute the next set of experiments. Today, delicate surgery can be conducted more accurately via computers across the world than by a skilled surgeon in the operating room. And, today the artificial intelligence in a simulation environment is able to adjust its response to each player so that the outcomes are different over time and across communities of participants. Stephanson’s (1998) novel, The Diamond Age, describes a future world where a child has an “intelligent book” and a human mentor that, together, are able to provide just-in-time knowledge and guidance as the individual encounters life experiences. With the merging of smart cell phones that can access the broad band Internet, the distant future is, essentially here, today. What has been “taught” in the K-16, how it is provided and when, needs reassessment. Just-in-case learning must be revisited in a world that is becoming just-in-time. Variables in the knowledge acquisition equation, which had been considered so small as to be negligible, or so stable that they were constant, now loom large.

Education has fallen victim to the understanding provided by the insights of the emerging field of complex dynamics. Historically, scientific experiments were conducted by holding all variables in a system constant and studying changes as one variable is altered. While many realized that the interactions could not be completely separated, it was assumed that the changes were large compared to the couplings. Today, complex dynamic models not only have shown that such assumptions can lead to totally orthogonal conclusions, but also that, over time, the relationships change; some variables, once considered too small to be important, over time, might also become significant while variables once significant would fade to obscurity. Peter Allen, once a member of Prigogene’s complex dynamics research group in Belgium, has taken these ideas to new levels by, for example, building models of ocean fisheries which demonstrate the interconnectedness of social, economic, and biophysical systems. These open systems do not yield to the standard scientific models which, in addition to being “closed” as a simplifying assumption, are often constructed within disciplinary domains.

Second generation e-learning, emerging in the form of VLEs (occasionally termed “serious games”), clearly points out that the function of education institutions can not be decoupled from the larger socio/economic community, even though, because it was housed in separate facilities, it was assumed analyzable independently. Today, education is K-to-gray. What is “needed”, is needed in context, when it is needed. Today’s students sense this when they acquire units of knowledge for credits, only to discard much of it once the credit is obtained. MMOG players obtain knowledge as they move through the simulations, and like experiences are encountered in VLEs which anticipate similar engagements within the larger context outside of the virtual reality.

The distinction becomes blurred when we see that the certification, once awarded through the academics becomes integrated through “credit for experience”; and university credit can be awarded for equivalencies in other institutions, including secondary schools. Exogenous variables, which were once thought to be able to be ignored, become important in open systems. This makes it extremely difficult to try to understand present and future systems through traditional qualitative forecasting methods such as scenario building and techniques such as Delphi analysis without the support, or partnering with artificial intelligence as manifest in the VLEs, themselves. As with AI systems that carry out laboratory experiments or which either mentor or participate directly in the MMOG environments, we may be seeing the emergence of computerized personal learning environments that also become participatory in the life of the learner. The very primitive “spreadsheet” which changed accounting and economic analysis practices becomes more closely coupled and a true decision support system. Learning is no longer an external activity that is carried out in brick or click space, separated in space and time from other daily functions. Knowledge, historic and current, which was once anticipated to be needed or even demanding to be needed at the moment, is not acquired independently from the moment. This does not preclude the demise of brick and click space learning environments, but it demands the deconstruction of the model that has formed the foundation of education since the first scholars gathered pupils at their feet. Perhaps Socrates’ practice of holding forth in the Agora was more prescient than we have ever believed.

We may have come full circle. But now the editorial “we” may not just be the individual, but it may depend on an external hard drive for the human biocomputer. Stephenson’s prescient creation of a learning “bot” may have become a more accurate foreshadowing of the future of e-learning than the extrapolists models based on the first generation learning and content management systems being used today. Due to the fact that humans have been dependent on intellectual shamans since the dawn of time and the guilds of these high priests have maintained control for almost half a millennium, even a disruptive technology, such as manifest in the bits and bytes of computers, can be expected to be slow to be accepted. The adoption curve at a paradigmatic bifurcation may have a small slope, small but powerful. Perhaps it is not idle speculation to wonder whether androids really do dream of electric sheep. Thoughts?

Tom P. Abeles