Compare a few significant social interactions in your life–especially if some of them are mediated by writing…especially writing on a screen.

I’ve always preferred writing to talking as a method of communication. I find that when we write, we’re more likely to actually transmit information than when we speak to each other. And as much as I enjoy chatting with friends for hours, when it comes to the less inane, it seems to me like a waste of time and energy to fumble around a topic instead of getting to the point. I’m often annoyed when an old classmate will call me and try to make “small talk,” when all she really wants is my help, and we’ve rarely spoken beyond that. Why is there a need beyond the original greeting to act as if she’s interested in what I’m doing? I know that she wants something, she knows that I know, and once we’ve covered the fact that we’re both doing well, there’s no need to inquire further. Of course, this isn’t always so, but it’s usually clear when a person is genuinely interested. I might come off as a bit jaded, but I’ve honestly no patience for it.

On the other hand, there are real friends, people who want to speak to me and to whom I want to speak, and those people I make a point of calling from time to time, or (preferably) seeing them in person. In those cases, inane conversation is really an important aspect of the friendship, and really very enjoyable. We’ll email and text message, too, of course, but generally, these relationships are in person.

I bring the latter forward now because I’d like to compare it to my online interactions with absolute strangers I have never met, and probably will never meet. (And no, I’m not talking about following the Dalai Lama on Twitter.) I’ve met these people through my online interests, generally on a fandom-related site, and they know me only by my handle.

My online relationships are fairly one-dimensional. While my friends in the real world know about my family, other friends, interests, goals, and everything in between, my online friends know about one particular interest of mine. Granted, they know far more about it than my real world friends would ever even care to learn, but they don’t know me, just that one aspect of my identity.

But my online interactions aren’t about getting to know other people. They’re about learning and communicating and delving deeply into whichever shared interest we have. Sometimes, they do dip into the real world- for example, one of the contributors on one forum once asked for help on a newspaper article she was writing on a certain topic, one my sister knows much about firsthand. I was able to connect them via email, and two completely unrelated people on different continents shared information. However, as a rule, I don’t ask for information unless if it’s offered. We’re united only by our love for a fandom, and that’s more than enough for a relationship so limited.

This topic doesn’t mention learning, but I’d like to address it, too, since it’s applicable here. I feel that when I’m speaking to friends in the fandom, I’m much more likely to be open to new information than when it’s taught to me by a real world friend. I think that I associate the Internet and my online friends with fun and enjoyment, and one of my favorite things to do online is to read essays written by online friends. For example, I took a class on mythology last year in college, and found that a topic that had greatly interested me before the class became far duller when taught in a school setting. But a few weeks ago, one of my fellow posters on one site took The Odyssey and The Iliad and compared them to the storyline for several seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (here, if anyone’s interested). And that I was much more interested in reading; and, in fact, for the first time since taking the mythology class, I took out my copy of The Odyssey to reread it. There’s a certain, more casual attitude in writing when it’s over the Internet (case in point: this would be far more formal if I weren’t writing it for an online course), and because of that, there’s far more openness to learning and teaching. It doesn’t matter that I’m still in college and half of my friends of livejournal are forty-year-old professionals; they read what I write and treat it with respect, like they would any of their peers’ work. On the Internet, a screen conceals us all and forces us to treat others as equals unless our online behavior makes that impossible. Without race, gender, age, or other external factors influencing our opinions, we really can teach and learn from each other with no reservations.

I’ve never really liked the word “training” for what happens in school–particularly in higher education.  You train a dog.  Or a dancing bear.  The term seems limiting and constrained; it means that just one small task or skill is the goal.  If you’ve been trained for a job, you know how to do that job.  But you don’t really know anything beyond that.

But schools have often been seen in just that light.  The traditional (and still common) view of schooling is that it prepares students for a job.  Possibly a career (which is a more interesting, and higher-paid, job), but there is a specific goal or endpoint and every student is on a path to that goal or endpoint.  And if we look at some of the history of schools and how they have been conceived (as you’ll do in the chapters from Rethinking Education that you’re reading for this unit), we’ll see that training, or the endpoint of job-readiness or career-placement, has often been a very explicit goal of schools and schooling.  And beyond that, we’ll see that cultures are often very specific about who gets what kind of training, who gets what kind of endpoint.

Education as a cultural marker also means that education marks students and steers them into which cultures, which roles, they will be able to join.  Different students get very different paths–and traditionally, the best students (and I’ll ask you to think about how we define “best,” too) get the widest range of potential choices.  And therefore they get the training to be flexible and open and critical about choosing from among that range.

One of the things we’re seeing as we move to the future of education is that these distinctions are breaking down.  Students are deciding for themselves who is the “best” student, and who gets to take what direction with their learning.  Students who, in the traditional model, would have been given the full range of options, the full broad academic experience, are deciding for themselves that they want the direct goal and explicit end-point that used to be reserved only for “lower-level” students.  And those “lower-level” students are deciding for themselves that a broad liberal education, science and theory and philosophy and literature, are the direction they want to take–they don’t want to just be slotted into one specific job choice.  Or sometimes they’re already in that job, but still taking the opportunity, through TED or Academic Earth, or MIT’s OpenCourseWare, to get the broader education which might previously have been denied to them.

When people can break down the walls of institutions and degrees and departments, and decide for themselves what they want to learn and when they want to learn it, how will that change our schools, and how will it change our cultures? As college students, I’m sure you have had to take classes you would not have chosen if you could really direct your own education.  And maybe you’ve taken others (this one?) which you wanted to take because you wanted to learn something, not because they were required or directly related to a specific career path.

What about those “breadth” requirements? Do they have value?  If you’re a finance major, why should you have to take American Literature? If you’re an English major, why should you have to take Biology?  And if you got to choose all your own courses, exactly as you wanted, would that make for a more limited education? Or a broader one? When MIT puts all their courses online for free, what does that do to the value of an MIT degree?

You can take a Yale course on the American Novel, right now, for free.  You can even watch the lecture (there are actually three parts–this is just the first lecture–but you can get all of them) from that course on Nabokov’s Lolita right here in this course.  Or embed it in your own blog. (you don’t really need to watch this whole video–or the other parts–for this class.  But watch a few minutes and see what you think).

So do you need to go to Yale? Or why would you need to listen to a lecture on Lolita from anyone else? I’m not a Yale professor.  Would you want to hear my lecture on Lolita if you could hear one from Yale?

(And remember the question that came up in unit 1.  What good is a lecture, anyway? Is a series of lectures really a course? This new world of open education might make us question even more what good education or the best education really is.  What is a course, anyway?)

Warning: This is incredibly long. It was unintentional, I just kept typing! I’m really not as interesting as the giant mass of text would suggest.

I was also raised in an Orthodox Jewish background, so for the first paragraph of Sharon’s reflection, we’re very similar.

I was raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, in a big Jewish community. I went to a local yeshivah (Jewish Orthodox school) from kindergarten to 5^th grade, when I switched to a different school in Riverdale, New York. (S/A/R, for anyone who cares.)

I feel my school did a pretty good job balancing out my Judaic studes classes (Hebrew, Prophets, Bible, Talmud, etc.) with my classic secular subjects of History, English, Science, Math, and so on. I enjoyed it so much, that when they opened up a new high school, I signed up for the first graduating class of S/A/R High School.

Being in the first class was really interesting. We started with only 68 students and all of the teachers were new. Some teachers were good, some never lasted beyond that first year. We became very tight-knit, bonding over the experience of being the “guinea pigs” of our administration. My day was from 8 to 5:10 every day, but I stayed most days for some extracurricular activity, which was a big part of my high school experience. I stayed drama, choir, newspaper, literary journal and floor hockey (ice hockey rules, played on a gym floor), which was my favorite sport ever, but doesn’t exist outside of our tiny league. I still miss it all the time. It was the first time I was really personally invested in a sport.

I actually found my administration very open about questions concerning our Judaism and identity, and the school tried very hard to balance both curriculums. I loved English especially, and was thinking about being an English major in college. While math was never my strongest subject, I had one teacher who was just so passionate about it that to this day I can never really hate math. I just feel incredibly frustrated when I don’t understand it.

Besides the double-curriculum, there was a twice-weekly class that was mandatory, but ungraded. We would divide into small groups (3-8 people) and learn some Judaic text that wasn’t in our regular curriculum. The point of this class was to learn Torah L’Shamawhich we roughly translated as “learning for the sake of learning,” not learning for a grade or a requirement. It’s an idea I’ve taken with me into my college years, and I audited a class last semester for fun, and I try to keep learning things (such as Japanese) on my own time, outside of the traditional classroom setting. I also try to take at least one class every semester for fun, as a rule.

I applied to the Honors College at Queens without really investigating what an opportunity it was, assuming that I wouldn’t get in. I actually applied to nine different colleges, and for a while Barnard College was my top choice. But I was wait-listed, and I found out that quite a few people from my grade were going to Barnard, and I wanted to go to college with a fresh slate and break out of my shell a little bit. So when the Honors College got back to me, I went to all of the events and chose to come here.

Then I decided, like many of my classmates, to take a year off and go to Israel to study in a religious school for a year. I chose a school in Jerusalem that was known for serious students and a lot of freedom, because I wanted a serious classroom environment but a fun atmosphere. That year was an amazing experience. Virtually all of the classes were “learning for the sake of learning,” in that none of these classes were really graded. We woke up and went to classes because we wanted to. The schedule was from 8:30 in the morning until 10 at night, with some breaks in the day for lunch and dinner and hanging out. I took classes in Talmud, Prophets, Bible, Halakhah (rules for things like Kosher) and other stuff like that. Being entirely self-motivated was incredibly hard, and there were days I wasn’t anywhere near 100%. We had trips to go hiking around the country with our teachers, and we went to teacher’s houses for Sabbath and other holidays. It was amazing to bond with teachers and other students on so many levels outside of the classroom.

It was my first time living away from home, which meant there was no one to tell me to get out of my bed unless I did it. I learned a lot about myself that year.

My best learning though, would have to be on the public transportation. Israel is a teeny little country, about the size of New Jersey, but it has a fantastic bus system. Unfortunately, my Hebrew wasn’t really up to par, especially at the beginning of the year. Learning how to use Hebrew to get around was a learning experience unto itself. People were incredibly helpful, and I learned all the ways to check with a bus driver to make sure he didn’t forget to remind me for my stop. (“Where is _____ stop?” “How many more minutes?” “How many more stops?” “Are we close?” “Is it next?”) My best experience was visiting my cousins in a little farming community a few miles from Sderot. The bus dropped me off by the side of the road and there was NOTHING in sight as far as the eye could see but my little bus stop. It was the perfect beginning to a horror movie. But I made it through that time, and all the other times I had to take buses to get places. I also figured out how to handle cabs when I needed them. During that year I went to a friends wedding, a cousin’s shiva house, up and down Israel for weekend visits to family and strangers, a week in Poland to learn about the Holocaust, 12 days in Europe over Spring break, you name it. I learned how to plan ahead, and how to handle myself in all sorts of crazy situations.

I found that living at school also taught me a lot about how to handle people and conflicts. My roommate was amazing from day one, but I had two suite-mates that I didn’t get along with at all. It took four months before I was able to switch rooms, but I learned a lot of skills I use with difficult people.

After that, my first year at Queens College was a big adjustment for me. I don’t know about Hunter, but at Queens, it feels like 99% of the students are in pure commuter-mode: show up to class, take class, leave campus. There was very little interaction between students before and after class, and the dorms weren’t built yet. I got an apartment with a friend and a girl I met through a posting on a mailing list. I had to handle food planning for the first time, and Macaulay was actually a lot less supportive then I was expecting. However the required Macaulay classes were one of the best things about my first semester. Not, mind you, because of the content, although seeing a bunch of plays in the city was amazing. But it was the only time I was in a class where I saw the same people multiple times a day. And we hung out in the lounge together, and spoke to each other, and now I know everyone’s name, and we hang out at seminars together. But those first few weeks were incredibly lonely.

But I got used to being in an apartment instead of a dorm, so when the dorm opened I chose to stay off-campus. I enjoy hosting meals and small movie-watching parties. I am the one who tries to arrange meals for the whole apartment on a nightly basis, and I try to keep up a cleaning schedule, although that’s my major weakness. I’ve learned that I tend to work better at the library than hanging out with my roommates at home, so I just stay on campus for some of my work.

I’ve also found at college that they are finally doing what my high school was always trying to do – most classes seem to overlap each other, the same information applying to different subjects. I’m always delighted when I sit in on a class and learn something that I’ve learned already in another field or subject. Sometimes I finally feel like college is getting me out into the world to learn what real life is really like. Sometimes I feel like I’m still in high school, though, where grades feel frustratingly useless and nothing I learn seems at all useful. I suppose only time will tell at this point.

My first post here in the reflections.  Hope it goes well.

Where have I been?

My formal education may be considered rather boring.

Raised Catholic.  Catholic elementary school, starting in Pre-K all the way through the 8th grade.  What did I learn in those ten years?  No running or ball playing in the playground, and a wide array of filthy jokes.  Sad, isn’t it?

I may be making too light of it, I had my coursework.  Times tables, some algebra, some sciences.  Sadly nothing challenging.  Certainly not what one would expect from a Catholic school that prides itself as one of the best in the city.  I digress, it was a delightful experience socially.  That must count for something.  And to the school’s credit, it sends many students to decent high schools with good scholarships.  After the eighth grade, I may have needed a change of pace.

Welcome to Holy Cross High School, where I would continue my Catholic education.  Fortunately, thanks to my successes in elementary school, these four years would be free (a luxury I liked very much, considering I chose it again on my next stop).  Before I get ahead of myself, we stick with the high school years.  To be honest, academically it Holy Cross was not the greatest choice.  I was rarely challenged, save for a College English course I took for credit in my senior year.  It did wonders for my appreciation of literature and poetry, rekindled a love for reading I had lost due to becoming complacent with pedestrian coursework, and challenged me to develop a sense of myself in my own writing.  My so called ‘academic’ writing was not as much polished as it was salvaged, but I developed a stream of consciousness style I enjoy very much, and often have to hold back in academic writing.

However, in my high school years, there was another type of learning that occurred.  Professor Ugoretz encouraged us to show more than just traditional learning.  Most of my learning took place out of the classroom, and out on the football field.  Too cliche`?  I agree.  Let me explain.  I would argue endlessly about how football, or sports in general, translate to life, but that would validate the cliche`-ness I am trying to avoid.  I mean I learned from my coaches.  Not all of them, but some of them.  They instilled qualities I needed that I was not getting in the classroom.  Commitment, work ethic, challenging myself.  Things most of me teachers did not provide as I coasted along with my A’s and no school bag.  I might have been lost without them.  They taught me more than all the schooling combined.  They prepared me for college better than anything I learned in 12th grade psychology (oddly enough was taught by my football coach.  Ok bad example.  Let us restart.) They prepared me for college better than anything I learned in 12th grade physiology.  That works better.

And obviously now I am here at Macaulay, pushing along, like I learned to do, from all my schooling and all my experiences.  Furthering my education, through new courses, new relationships, and new experiences.