Focus on Learning Free

I find myself a bit more introspective this time of year than usual, and I would like to share some of my thoughts with you.

I have just been inaugurated president of the United States Distance Learning Association. What an honor! This is the finest e-learning trade group in the nation, perhaps in the world. We provide networking opportunities for our members so that they may share best practices with one another; we honor excellence in distance learning within the public, private, and academic sectors; and we serve as Federal and state advocates for smarter e-learning public policy. I am humbled by my selection. If you have not yet joined the USDLA, I urge you to do so.

I am also humbled for other reasons. In my Jewish faith this period is the beginning of the New Year and these are the Days of Awe, the holiest days of the year. This is a time to reflect on all aspects of one’s life—professional as well as personal—in order to seek areas in need of improvement.

So as I take over the USDLA presidency, I find myself reflecting not only about the organization I have been chosen to lead but also, more generally, about the profession it represents. And I have an overriding concern which I wish to share with you.

Look how we define ourselves. We do not engage learners, we engage “e-learners.” We are not educators; we are “distance” educators. Nor are we content to focus on the eradication of distance barriers between those who teach and those who are taught: we eradicate time barriers as well when we seek to provide “anytime/anyplace” instruction.

And so we go about our business, multitasking merrily along, linked always to one another through our wireless e-mail, our ever-present cell phone, our ubiquitous handheld devices. When we gather informally, our discussions are just as likely to be about the latest, thinnest, lightest device we just purchased, and how it permits us never to be out of touch, as our discussions are likely to be about lives we have touched in the classroom. Strike that: my experience is that our discussions are more likely to be about our ever-improved technological abilities to surmount distance and time than they are to be about touching the lives of those we educate.

That is a shame. I am far from being a Luddite. After all, I am CEO of a well-known Web site, I wrote this article initially on a state-of-the-art laptop while traveling on the Washington, DC Metro, and I edited it subsequently on one of my three home computers; I often communicate with others via webcam; and my two cell phones and iPAQ are always nearby. Still, lately I have been thinking that I and others in my profession have been missing a fundamental truth: distance and time are not always the enemies of education; sometimes they are the prerequisite to our deeper understandings. And technologies which overcome distance and time, thereby keeping the purported learner always in touch—always bombarded with the actual or potential receipt of new information—may instead distract the learner rather than more fully engaging him or her.

I noticed something recently. Because during the normal workday I am always checking my email, always on my telephone or cell phone, or always on my webcam, I have unintentionally extended my workday to include times and places when and where I cannot be in touch with my staff or other company stakeholders. Do I have to write a monthly report to my funders, providing them insights into my recent management decisions? You can bet that will be written at 5 a.m (before I check a single work-related e-mail). Is there a seemingly insoluble budget problem I need to address right away? You can bet that the answer will come to me midway through my nightly 5K run (sans cell phone).

In other words, much of my best thinking about my daily distance learning work comes when I have created distance and time barriers between myself and others. And I think the same thing holds true in the world of education.

There is typically a gap in time between the receipt of information and the ability of a student to understand that information and to place it within a larger context. Sometimes, that gap is measured in seconds, or less. Other times, when there is greater complexity, that gap may last minutes, hours, days, or even longer.

True, for some people the more distractions during the gap, the better: we all know stories of the math student who solved a particularly difficult quadratic equation while studying a physics text.

But for many of us, the fewer distractions during that gap, the better. Meetings, telephone calls, e-mails, and the like only get in the way. To be sure, we cannot stop life while waiting to understand the latest academic insight regarding nineteenth century Eastern European history, nor is it realistic to expect all intrusions to cease while we master Spanish verb conjugations. But we can do a better job, I believe, in controlling when and where the intrusions take place. And technologies that keep us “plugged in” at all times and places are just as likely to cause learning problems as to solve them.

Technology’s ability to diminish the importance educationally of time and place is, simultaneously, sometimes a help and sometimes a hindrance to the nurturing of insight within those attempting to learn. Yet, how often do we in our distance learning profession define ourselves by our technologies, rather than by our pedagogies? All too often, in my experience.

Our task, it seems to me, is to provide balance: to know when to bring technology to a learning situation and when to remove it from a learning situation. For, ultimately, we are not “distance educators” attempting to engage “e-learners”; we are teachers engaging students as other teachers have attempted to engage other students for thousands of years previous to us. Our focus therefore should not be upon the science of new technologies; instead, it more properly should be upon the art of assuring that learning is actually taking place.

And, to do that, we must focus more on becoming better educators than becoming better “distance educators.”