Course management systems like WebCT and Vista start with the idea that the point of teaching is to deliver content, evaluate performance, and facilitate communication. Once those goals are set, the system can become unbelievably complicated -- delivering more and more content, different kinds of content, to variously situated recipients; evaluating more kinds of performance and amalgamating evaluations into meta-evaluations; facilitating communication between folks who could never ordinarily meet, allowing them to draw pictures, etc. And all of these systems develop bugs, that need to be debugged with -- more complexity. Or they succeed so well that they overload computer capacity. It is easy to forget that all of this complex evolution arose out of a quite simple and very controversial and likely just plain wrong view about what teaching is about. But by now, things have gotten so advanced that nobody has time to worry about those initial premises that started the whole juggernaut rolling.
Peter Geach tells about a math prof who began a lecture, "Let x be the number of trains that leave the station each day." One student frantically waved his hand, "But professor, what if x isn't the number of trains that leave the station each day?" We need more of that sort of spirit, in all enterprises into which money is to be poured.
Posted by shea0017 at December 21, 2004 4:07 PM