The future is now.
Ages ago, I had a cheesy poster with a fancy drawing of a robot on it (which looked really cool 25 years ago, trust me) with the ominous caption 'the future is now'. A discussion today reminded me of this. Today, right now, a strange new future is upon us - everything is instantaneous from entertainment to online education to Kindles, etc. I blogged a while back about how surreal it is that one can download original scientific texts in seconds to an e-reader. But the college paradigm is relatively the same. OK, every college must now have (sigh) a climbing wall; and today I was really discouraged to hear that some schools have full time dorm concierges in an effort to attract students to theirs halls of higher learning.
But the bottom line is that students physically attend classes on a schedule, not in random moments on Hulu or Tivo or Roku. They trudge with their Orange Mocha Frappuccinos into lecture halls large and small and most actually take notes by hand (on the powerpoint handouts provided the day before of course). They follow syllabi, churn through homework, attend office hours at the set time every week. There's no app for that.
So why has the college norm persisted, and especially the residential college? I really, really, really want to get all preachy and serious about this, but I don't think that's the way to go here. True, I want to rant on about the epic intellectual and emotional maturation that takes place when kids go off on their own for four years and immerse in (to carry on the metaphor) an intellectual sink or swim odyssey. I want to talk about obvious points like hands-on learning and peer-learning and daily access to renowned scholars. But that's maybe for another day.
I feel like going the Sci-Fi route here. Maybe Bill Gates imagines that a Matrix-like computer loaded learning technology will one day exist that will be far superior to attending lectures and seminars ("Woah - I know quantum mechanics!"). Or maybe one day we will embrace a Geiger like melding of humanity and machine that will make concepts of place and geography irrelevant. But my attempt at something profound here is that I think our humanity drives us to learn together and that we don't want technology to isolate us and to hand virtual degrees out to us in our little suburban boxes.