Living in a Parallel Universe

Andrew was in his seat. His lesson was scheduled to start but as usual he was alone. The icon popping up on his screen showed him that most of the students had already joined the class on line. He pressed the button so that the entire session would be recorded.

He exchanged the usual pleasantries with the group. Mohamed said that he was in Germany as his mother was receiving medical treatment. Omar was at work but his supervisor had allowed him 1 hour to take this class. Most of the other students were at home although 3 or 4 of them were meeting at Starbucks in Mirdif

“OK, at the end of last week’s class I asked you to think about an issue. Click on the link I sent last week to see the discussion task.” The link contained an attachment which read as follows

“Imagine a world which is exactly like ours apart from some significant differences. This world has very limited technology. The internet does not exist. Mobile phones only appear in science fiction movies. Personal Computers and Smart Phones have not been dreamt of. The only way of finding out information is to read a hard copy or by spending time face to face with someone who already has the information you need.

Your group has been asked to develop a plan for the best way to teach young people the skills they need to lead successful lives. In developing this plan, three key issues need to be considered

How is useful information stored so it can be retrieved quickly when needed?

How will people who have information and those who want to learn end up in the same place at the same time?

How will people be able to communicate with others when they have questions or ideas they need to discuss or problems they are having?”

Andrew checked that everyone could see the text. Some of the students admitted they had a problem understanding all of the language in the reading materials. They asked Andrew to confirm that students could use the voice and text translate software that was available. He did.

“OK, who would like to start the discussion?”

There followed an explanation of the work the students had done. Over the course of the week they had shared articles, videos and held discussions with each other to agree on a common framework that nearly the entire group supported. Their findings can be summarized as follows:

1: Information needs to be stored in one place where people can go when needed. The information would need to be catalogued and ordered in such a way that information about the same subject was in the same place so that students could find it easily. It would have to be somebody's job to decide which information was stored

2: To enable them to communicate with each other, teachers and students would need to be physically present in the same place

3: To enable informal discussion between students they would all need to live and work in the same area.

Andrew asked the group what they would call these 3 places. The group said that they had come up with some new words seeing as these things did not exist. The words they had decided on were library, classroom and university.

Andrew questioned the group members on their plan. “So what you are saying is that these 3 places, the library, classroom and university, are solutions to the problems faced by a world which has extremely limited methods of communication?” The students agreed that this was true.

Andrew continued “How about if that method of learning was transported to our world? How would that work?”

At this point Ahmed spoke up for the first time. “I’m sorry but I am really frustrated here. I have a question which I really need to bring up. I am taking a course in lifelong learning skills. Why think about what we would do in a world that doesn’t exist? Why not focus on the world we have in front of us now?”

Andrew responded by saying that Ahmed’s point was a good one. However, the world he was asking them to live in was very similar to our own world in the past. That gave him the opportunity to rehash one of his favourite quotations.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

That started a discussion among the students about what it meant. Mohamed said that he had googled the quotation. He sent the link to everybody and said it had originally come from “George Santayana (philosopher, poet and essayist. (born 16 December 1863 in Madrid, died 26 September 1952 in Rome, Italy). Mohamed seemed quite proud of that.

Later during the discussion Rashed said he had an important point to make. He had been doing further research on the Santayana quotation. Apparently, its real meaning is often misunderstood. He argued that “progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains nothing to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.”

Abdulla then asked this question

“Mr Andrew, when the internet and all the communication tools were first being introduced, all of the information from a million libraries suddenly could be accessed from home. And people could make videos and upload it and do all of the things we can do now for the first time. Loads of social media sites started up and suddenly everybody was online. But that just increased the amount of information. How did people know which information was useful and valid? And how did people decide which was the best way to communicate in different situations? How did they avoid they avoid the perpetual infancy that Santayana talked about?”

Andrew replied “Abdulla, that is a brilliant question. What you are saying is that libraries, classrooms and universities are great solutions for a world with those problems. One of the biggest problems to enable learning to take place would be how to store information. If we cannot store information to enable it to be passed on to others, we would always be in a state of perpetual infancy. This would mean we would not be able to learn from others who lived before us. As Isaac Newton said, he was only "standing on the shoulders of giants." Your idea of a library would solve that problem. Your idea of a university where students and teachers can discuss and work on problems formally and informally is also a great solution. But your solutions also raise some issues which cannot be solved. What if some information you need is in a place you don’t know about? What if a student is somewhere else so cannot contribute? Luckily we do not live in that world. Modern tools solve many problems not solved by the solutions of a former age. But (and here is the thing) the modern world brings with it a whole new set of problems that need to be solved for the first time. And you always need to remember what it is you are trying to do in the first place. Because to be honest, all of our lives, from the day we are born until the day we die is spent trying to make sense of the world and to solve the problems we face. And that has been true as long as there have been humans on earth. And it always will be true

After the session ended, for the next discussion topic Andrew posted the following link:

What is the purpose of higher education? What is it students need to learn in today's world? And how should they learn it? As a starting point compare and contrast the following 2 texts.

TEXT 1

One of Einstein's colleagues asked him for his telephone number one day. Einstein reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. "You don't remember your own number?" the man asked, startled.

"No" Einstein answered. "Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from somewhere else?

TEXT 2

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!” (Thomas Gradgrind, a character in the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens)

As Andrew drove home he thought to himself "That will get them thinking"