The Web We Weave: Online Education and Democratic Prospects

Abstract

Near the end of The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey writes that the consummation of democracy will involve the art of full communication. The internet might appear to fulfill Dewey's vision, increasing opportunities for inquiry, interaction, and renewal through the social construction of meaning. Yet certain forms of technologically mediated communication threaten the development of much needed skills for democracy. While citizenship education may be facilitated by digital technology, it also demands pedagogy of a more traditional sort, one characterized by embodied, experiential interactions between teachers and students. We employ pedagogical theory, democratic theory, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience to underline the crucial importance of these embodied, experiential interactions and their relationship to the challenge of sustaining democracy in our times.

Notes

¹ Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Partial Portraits (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1970), pp. 388–389.

² University of Phoenix, “Just the Facts,”  < http://www.phoenix.edu/about_us/media-center/just-the-facts.html>.

³ Rich Duprey, “Apollo Education Group in the Regulators Crosshairs,”  < http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/07/16/apollo-education-group-in-the-regulators-crosshair.aspx>.

⁴ Ibid. For-profit online education is not limited to degree-granting institutions. Coursera, the company that made its reputation by offering free online courses, has begun to bring in revenue with its “Signature Track” program. The company advertises the signature track certificates as a form of “professional development.” These courses are offered through partnership with brick and mortar universities (Ry Rivard, “Free to Profit,” Inside Higher Ed, April 8, 2013,  < http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/08/coursera-begins-make-money>).

⁵US News and World Report, “Best Online Bachelor's Programs,”  < http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int = a29209>.

⁶ Elain Allen and Jeff Seaman, Grade Change: Tracking Online Education in the United States (Babson Park, Massachusettes: The Bason Survey Group, 2013). ^*Originally known as the Sloan Online Survey: Jeff Seaman, Online Learning as a Strategic Asset: The Paradox of Faculty Voices: Views and Experiences with Online Learning (Washington, DC: Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, 2009). Approximately 70% of “academic leaders” approve of the claim; 70% of educators disagree.

⁷ James Farr, John S. Dryzek, and Stephen T. Leonard (eds), Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

⁸ John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916); Émile Durkheim, Education and Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1956); Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Knopf, 1961); Thomas Ehrlich, Civic Responsibility and Higher Education (Westport, CT: Oryx Press, 2000).

⁹ William Talcott, Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, September 2005).

¹⁰ Anne Colby, Elizabeth Beaumont, Thomas Ehrlich, and Josh Corngold, Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement (Stanford, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2007); Peter Levine, The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens (Boston, MA: Tufts, 2007); Global University Network for Innovation. Higher Education in the World 4: Higher Education's Commitment to Sustainability: From Understanding to Action (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Martha Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Andrew Delbanco, College What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

¹¹ Ehrlich, Civic Responsibility and Higher Education; Lonnie Sherrod, Constance Flanagan, and James Youniss, “Dimensions of Citizenship and Opportunities for Youth Development: The What, Why, When, Where, and Who of Citizenship Development,” Applied Developmental Science 6:4 (2002), pp. 264–272.

¹² Arguably, the least critically examined concept in common pedagogical parlance is the collection of skills or behaviors called critical thinking. Its development is universally endorsed but rarely systematically pursued Arum, Richard and Josipa Roska. Academically Adrift. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Critical thinking is a cognitive process of analysis, reflection, and evaluation “that is focused on deciding what to believe or do” (Robert Ennis, “Critical Thinking,” Teaching Philosophy 14:1 (1991) pp. 5–24). Rather than adopting opinions, convictions, values, or goals owing to their popularity or their customary or authoritative origins, critical thinkers rigorously interrogate their foundations and assess their weaknesses, merits and implications (Alan Diduck, “Critical Education in Resource and Environmental Management: Learning and Empowerment for a Sustainable Future,” Journal of Environmental Management 57:2 (1999), pp. 85–97; John Huckle, “Sustainable Development,” in Handbook of Education for Citizenship (London: Sage, 2008)). Critical thinkers embody a disposition of habitual inquisitiveness and focused inquiry (Peter A. Facione, Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction. Research Findings and Recommendations (Newark, DE: American Philosophical Association, 1990)). Such deliberate and focused inquiry creates, and is a product of, our ongoing social development, what Paulo Freire called “the unfinishedness of the human condition” (Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation, trans. Donaldo Macedo, 1st ed. (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1985)). Critical thinking cuts down false assumptions, and carves away at biases, including the biases of the critical thinker.

¹³ Grainne Conole, Rebecca Galley, and Juliette Culver, “Frameworks for Understanding the Nature of Interactions, Networking, and Community in a Social Networking Site for Academic Practice,” The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 12:3 (2011), pp.1–11.

¹⁴ Rachel Brooks, Alison Fuller, and Johanna L Waters, Changing Spaces of Education: New Perspectives on the Nature of Learning (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 221.

¹⁵ Suffice to say the findings from research in this area are not all of one thread, and much remains to be seen regarding the educational potential of these activities. For instance, one study on the relationship between user-generated content and democratic engagement finds that contrasted with informational media use, user-generated content involvement is negatively related to political knowledge, even though it is positively correlated with real-world political participation (Johan Östman, “Information, Expression, Participation: How Involvement in User-Generated Content Relates to Democratic Engagement Among Young People,” New Media & Society 14:6 (2012), pp. 1004–1021).

¹⁶ Barbara Means, Yukie Toyoma, Robert Murphy, Marianne Bakia, and Karla Jones, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies (US Department of Education Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development Policy and Program Studies Service, 2009).

¹⁷ Top 500 Supercomputer Sites, “Operating System Family/Linux,”  < http://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/1>; a previous version of this statistic is cited at  < en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#cite_note-top500-osfam-21>.

¹⁸ UF's completely online university went live in 2014. Behind the initiative is a plan to increase the affordability of a university education and to produce a talented pool of future employees for the twenty-first-century workforce. The state granted UF ten million dollars in startup funds, and promised an additional five million dollars each year thereafter. UF Online's business plan outlines student savings of thirty-seven dollars per credit hour, and the development of thirty wholly online degree programs within ten years (UF Online Comprehensive Business Plan 2013–2019, in State University System of Florida Board of Governors Agenda and Meeting Materials (2013), p. 12).

¹⁹ Tom Auxter, “A Corporate Take Over of the Curriculum?” in Higher Education (Fall 2013), < http://www.uff-uf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Tom-Auxter-A-Corporate-Takeover-of-the-Curriculum.pdf>.

²⁰ John Fallon, “The Great Education and Technology Race,” Pearson, January 31, 2013, < http://blog.pearson.com/the-great-education-and-technology-race/>.

²¹ Margaret Hilton, Research on Future Skill Demands (Washington, DC: 2008).

²² See James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, 1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

²³ John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (1939), in John Dewey (ed.), The Later Works, 1925–1953 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), p. 177.

²⁴ Ibid. See also Dilafruz R. Williams, “Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement,” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 14:2 (2008), p. 92.

²⁵ John Dewey, Evolution and Ethics (1898), in John Dewey (ed.), The Early Works, 1882–1898: 1895–1898. Early Essays (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), p. 48.

²⁶ John Dewey, Logic—The Theory of Inquiry (1938), in John Dewey (ed.), The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953: 1938 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), p. 71.

²⁷ John Dewey, The Inclusive Philosophical Idea (1928), in John Dewey (ed.), The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 3, 1925–1953: 1927–1928, Essays, Reviews, Miscellany, and Impressions of Soviet Russia (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), p. 42.

²⁸ Dewey, Logic—The Theory of Inquiry, p. 32.

²⁹ John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916), in John Dewey (ed.), The Middle Works, 1899–1924: 1916 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), p. 128.

³⁰ John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1929), in John Dewey (ed.), The Later Works, 1925–1953 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), p. 134.

³¹ Ibid., 141.

³² Ibid., 131.

³³ Cass R. Sunstein, “Freedom of Expression in the United States: The Future,” in Thomas Hensley (ed.), Boundaries of Freedom of Expression and Order in American Democracy (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), pp. 319–347.

³⁴ Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 359.

³⁵ Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), pp. 176–178.

³⁶ John Dewey, Experience and Education (1938), in John Dewey (ed.), The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 13, 1925–1953: 1938–1939 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), p. 12.

³⁷ Katy J. Harriger and Jill J. McMillan, Speaking of Politics: Preparing College Students for Democratic Citizenship through Deliberative Dialogue (2007), cited in Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Task Force, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2012), p. 143.

³⁸ David. W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, and Karl A. Smith, Active Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom (Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company, 1998).

³⁹ Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), pp. 27–28.

⁴⁰ See Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002), pp. 40–41.

⁴¹ See Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals about How We Became Who We Are (New York: William Morrow, 2002), p. 183.

⁴² Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Harper, 2005).

⁴³ Jesse Daniels, Interview, “The Internet Can't Teach What the Social World Can,” Contexts 8:14 (2009), < http://contexts.org/articles/fall-2009/the-internet-cant-teach-what-the-social-world-can/>.

⁴⁴ Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), p. 24; Manfred Zimmerman, “The Nervous System in the Context of Information Theory,” in R.F. Schmidt and G. Thews (eds), Human Physiology, 2nd ed. (Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag, 1989), pp. 166–173; Ap Dijksterhuis, Henk Aarts, and Pamela Smith, “The Power of the Subliminal: On Subliminal Persuasion and Other Potential Applications, in Ran Hassin, James Uleman, and John Bargh (eds), The New Unconscious (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 82.

⁴⁵ Jeffrey P. Toth, “Nonconscious Forms of Human Memory,” in Endel Tulving and Fergus Craik (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Memory (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 245–261, p. 252. See also K. Koh and D.E. Meyer, “Function Learning: Induction of Continuous Stimulus-Response Relations,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 17:5 (1991), pp. 811–836. P. Lewicki, M. Czyzewska, and H. Hoffman, “Unconscious Acquisition of Complex Procedural Knowledge,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 13:4 (1987), pp. 523–530.

⁴⁶ See Arthur Reber, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Guy Claxton, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1997); George E. Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael MacKuen, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 30.

⁴⁷ Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, ed. Majorie Greene (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 183.

⁴⁸ La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, trans. Leonard Tanock (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1959), pp. 45, 67.

⁴⁹ Quoted in John Coates, The Claims of Common Sense: Moore, Wittgenstein, Keynes and the Social Sciences (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 47.

⁵⁰ Reber, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge. See also LeDoux, The Synaptic Self, p. 85.

⁵¹ Polanyi, Knowing and Being, pp. 141–142.

⁵² Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), pp. 49–51.

⁵³ Anit Somech and Ronit Bogler, “Tacit Knowledge in Academia: Its Effects on Student Learning and Achievement,” The Journal of Psychology 133:6 (1999), pp. 605–616.

⁵⁴ Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning, p. 58.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 60.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 59.

⁵⁷ Claxton, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind, p. 192.

⁵⁸ Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning, pp. 53–54.

⁵⁹ Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” American Political Science Review 63:4 (1969), p. 1077.

⁶⁰ See for example, Erin Sparks and Mary Jo Waits, Degrees for What Jobs? Raising Expectations for Universities and Colleges in a Global Economy (Washington, DC: National Governors Association, Center for Best Practices), < http://www.nga.org/files/live/sites/NGA/files/pdf/1103DEGREESJOBS.PDF>, cited in Ashley Finley, “Civic Learning and Democratic Engagements,” Paper prepared for the United States Department of Education as part of Contract: ED-OPE-10-C-0078 (2011).

⁶¹ Jeanne Meister, “Job Hopping Is the ‘New Normal’ for Millennials: Three Ways to Prevent a Human Resource Nightmare,” ForbesMagazine, August 14, 2012, < http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2012/08/14/job-hopping-is-the-new-normal-for-millennials-three-ways-to-prevent-a-human-resource-nightmare>.

⁶² Education Votes, “Florida Universities Suffer Funding Crisis as Gov. Scott Ramps Up Political Games,” < http://educationvotes.nea.org/2014/07/22/florida-universities-suffer-funding-crisis-as-gov-scott-ramps-up-political-games/>.

⁶³ Mark Edmundson, “The Trouble With Online Education,” The New York Times, July 19, 2012, < http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-education.html>.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seaton Patrick Tarrant

Seaton Patrick Tarrant is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida. His dissertation addresses the relationship of sustainability education to emergent theories of citizenship and democracy.

Leslie Paul Thiele

Dr. Leslie Paul Thiele is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director of Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida.