Afew years ago, someone wrote a tongue-in-cheek academic paper with the thesis that if people kept storing old issues of National Geographic magazine in their garages, the weight of all those issues will eventually sink North America into the ocean.
The paper was funny because it was true (even though it wasn’t). If you just extend the line representing the growth of magazine storage on the graph—if we can assume the future will be just like the past— then the graph and the conclusion are valid.
This mock study is based on what’s actually a common fallacy— assuming the future will be just like the past, only more so. Think of how wrong Malthus was when he predicted in 1798 that population growth would soon outstrip food production. It’s the same fallacy as the gag paper on National Geographies.
Change, for good and ill, is not a smooth process but a disruptive one. Suddenly, an old and reliable product, idea, or trend is gone, replaced by something totally and radically new. Very often, we desperately search for that new thing, but still somehow expect it to be cloaked in the rags of the old idea.
That’s what I call the Tyranny of Metaphor.
Take, for example, the very concept of distance learning. As satellite delivery of video extended to the classroom, the tyranny of the metaphor of the classroom took hold, and educators simply recapitulated the organization of a physical classroom in cyberspace—an awkward use of the affordances of the new medium (if 500 students are in the virtual classroom, what percent of them can actually interact live with a teacher?).
This pattern was repeated when video conferencing came to schools—classrooms were still run in largely the same way as they were in a traditional classroom, rather than completely rethinking the educational experience to fully take advantage of the new technology.
A more encompassing example is the historic search for “The Textbook of the Future.” Many fine educators have spent most of their careers in pursuit of this Holy Grail, moving from the format of a book to a CD-ROM, from a CD-ROM to a DVD, and so on. This search has gone on for decades, yet most students still use a traditional textbook as the organizing principle of their coursework.
To my mind, what has diverted the search and frustrated this particular attempt at innovation has been the tyranny of the metaphor of the textbook—an enclosed, total system that has been produced and distributed by one company and authored by a relative handful of people. All three points of that triangle are under attack now by the organization of the Internet and the tyranny of the metaphor of the networked society.
It makes perfect sense that people want the new thing to be just like the old: humans are all about minimizing cognitive load (you can insert any reference you want about the past election here). But as educators, we are stuck needing to think beyond our silent, self-imposed limitations.
Damn!
Call for Papers
Publish in Distance Learning
The editors of Distance Learning would like to publish your paper. We are interested in papers dealing with practical applications of distance education in a variety of settings. contact michael slmonson, editor, if you have questions about your idea (954-262-8563; simsmich@nova.edu). guidelines for submitting your paper can be found on page ii of this issue.
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