Online learning: A line of one’s own
found in Sumerian civilization dating back to 2,600 B.C. The mindset that goes with libraries are not old, but ancient. Compare that to online data and you find a wealth of information vastly different and easily within the reach of anyone who has an Internet connection.
There is a stronger and more direct human engagement with online data. One can tweak—and twist— the data. The student can print anything online so long as the site allows such process. The teacher can organize with amazing speed blocks of information and create a full essay by the act of cutting and pasting. The sites from which one can collate data are malleable and open. If one is lucky, one can communicate with the writer/author who may be residing on the other side of the globe. The wide horizon of the Internet allows us to inspect papers and writers.
For anyone who has regularly used the Internet and collated data from the same, he must be aware by now that papers, which are part of university or institutional journals do not come free anymore. One must be ready to pay for them. Schools and libraries must set aside a fund so that students and teachers can search through those sites. The rest of the Internet remains gratis, gracefully.
The Internet-savvy individual knows the wealth of materials available online. The word “massive” covers just a wee part of the collections online. The available documents that can make any lesson plan and lecture look monumental and scholarly outside our human imagination.
The Powerpoint presentations of yore pale beside galleries and museums where the “visitor” can have a close-up view of artefacts or a closer, more intimate appreciation of paintings and other visual arts. There are lectures from experts on any kind of art—from Byzantine to Bagobo art, from Impressionism to Expressionism.
There are interviews of artists. Where the artists have long passed on, documentaries about these dead geniuses are there for Humanities teachers to learn from and assign to their students.
The proverbial yellowing lecture notes of an old professor shall remain proverbial. There is dynamism in the online transaction: the lecturer has to keep in pace with new developments. This online universe is a world transacted deftly by younger users.
Online, there are no dead authors or distant wise men and women. The Internet has made available living voices of thinkers and pundits. Derrida is alive in the Net. He does not lecture always; he also rambles on and on, with his thoughts gathered like magical bloom by a student or an individual asking the question. He talks in French but that is alright: the generations of today are to subtitles born.
Derrida talks about love by not talking about it. Noah Chomsky speaks how life is empty without love.
Gayatri Spivak, difficult and complicated when read, is mighty lucid in lectures punctuated by amusing denials and confident claims: I am not an anthropologist. I am a Europeanist.the videos produced out of Spivak’s lectures are lengthy in the most useful and beautiful way. She cracks jokes, which lighten the mood of the talk; she dismisses other thinkers even as she seems to complement them.
She talks about the subaltern and then proceeds to explain her latest version of subalternism. This is a luxury that no generation in school until the 90s had—to “face” authors and thinkers and grasp their thoughts as primary data.
I am afraid, authors and those magisterial thinkers will doubly be more interesting than any good teacher behind a lesson. Where does this leave the esteemed professor or lecturer? He is now the facilitator actualizing what has been talked about but never accomplished—a studentcentered learning.
For all the ease in this talk about online learning, we still have to contend similarly with what the woman in Virginia Woolf’s essay has to contend—that we can only, paraphrased, learn and really learn if we have money, a room and a line of our own.
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