Lesson 3 - Implementing Online Learning

One of the earliest means of formal teaching was oral – through human speech – although, over time, technology has been increasingly used to facilitate or ‘back-up’ oral communication. In ancient times, stories, folklore, histories, and news were transmitted and maintained through oral communication, making accurate memorization a critical skill, and the oral tradition is still the case in many aboriginal cultures. For the ancient Greeks, oratory and speech were the means by which people learned and passed on learning. Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey were recitative poems, intended for public performance. To be learned, they had to be memorized by listening, not by reading and transmitted by recitation, not by writing. Lectures go back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Demosthenes (384-322 BC) was an outstanding orator whose speeches influenced the politics of Athens.  

Nevertheless, by the fifth century B.C, written documents existed in considerable numbers in ancient Greece. If we believe Plato, education has been on a downward spiral ever since. According to Plato, Socrates caught one of his students (Phaedrus) pretending to recite a speech from memory that in fact, he had learned from a written version. Socrates then told Phaedrus the story of how the god Theuth offered the King of Egypt the gift of writing, which would be a ‘recipe for both memory and wisdom’. The king was not impressed. According to the king:

It [writing] will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on what is written, creating memory not from within themselves, but by means of external symbols. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part, they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow men.

Phaedrus, 274c-275, translation adapted from Manguel, 1996

I can just hear some of my former colleagues saying the same thing about social media.

Slate boards were in use in India in the 12^th century AD, and blackboards/chalkboards became used in schools around the turn of the 18^th century. At the end of World War Two the U.S. Army started using overhead projectors for training, and their use became common for lecturing, until being largely replaced by electronic projectors and presentational software such as Powerpoint around 1990. This may be the place to point out that most technologies used in education were not developed specifically for education but for other purposes (mainly for the military or business.)

Although the telephone dates from the late 1870s, the standard telephone system never became a major educational tool, not even in distance education, because of the high cost of analogue telephone calls for multiple users, although audio-conferencing has been used to supplement other media since the 1970s.  Video conferencing using dedicated cable systems and dedicated conferencing rooms has been in use since the 1980s. The development of video compression technology and relatively low-cost video servers in the early 2000s led to the introduction of lecture capture systems for recording and streaming classroom lectures in 2008. Webinars now are used largely for delivering lectures over the Internet.

None of these technologies though changes the oral basis of communication for teaching.