J.C. Nyíri (Budapest):
 
 

§ 1 From Plato to Dewey
§ 2 Communication: Face-to-face versus Virtual
§ 3 Documents: Paper versus Screen
§ 4 Image and Text
§ 5 Learning Styles in a Virtual Environment
§ 6 Changing Patterns in Higher Education
§ 7 The New University
 
 

§ 1 From Plato to Dewey

The founding text of Western philosophy, Plato's Republic, is also the founding text of Western educational theory. The Republic treats, ostensibly, of the ideal composition of states; but actually it argues for a new type of education, one better suited to the needs of a literate society. Alphabetic writing did not become widespread before the 5^th century BC; by the last third of that century, however, Athenian society was practically literate. Plato lived in the midst of a communications revolution. Prior to the rise of literacy, Greeks became educated by listening to Homeric poems - listening to heroic stories recounted in the colourful medium of "metre and harmony and rhythm"⁽¹⁾. Plato ridicules the image of Homer as "the educator of Hellas", and excludes, from the ideal state, "the honeyed muse ..., either in epic or lyric verse".⁽²⁾ The education Plato advocates should lead, instead, into a realm of abstract ideas - concepts not accessible to the senses but only to thought. And it is important that - as Eric Havelock has shown in his monograph Preface to Plato⁽³⁾ - it is precisely the syntax of writing that creates abstract terms; for written language gives the impression that all words signify basically in the same manner, namely by designating something. That something, when it came to abstract terms, had to be an abstract object: thus were born Platonic ideas.

Now it is often pointed out that Plato had a low opinion of the educational value of written texts. As he puts it in Phaedrus, writing "will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories"; the learners "will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing". Written texts, Plato here goes on to say, pretend to have "intelligence", but "if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them", they always give one and the same answer. Written documents, Plato suggests, are not interactive; only in what is "communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness".⁽⁴⁾ But of course Plato himself committed his philosophy to writing - even if he did mimic, in his dialogues, the style of spoken exchange. Indeed writing was for Plato, argues Havelock, not just a new medium in which to express his philosophy - on the contrary, writing, the experience of literacy, formed the very source of Platonism. When Plato inquired about the nature of justice, or the beautiful, or goodness, he was not merely asking new questions; he was asking questions with regard to abstract terms that were simply not there in the Greek language prior to the rise of literacy.

It is striking that Plato should select the visually-based term "idea" - eidos, "form" - to apply to those ostensibly non-sensuous abstract concepts. Clearly, he could not quite suppress in himself the - correct - impression that human beings think first in images and only secondarily in verbal language. Pre-literal narrative language is inherently metaphoric, feeding on, and conjuring up, images; with the rise of alphabetic literacy not only spoken language, but also the language of images became relegated to an inferior position. Rudolf Arnheim interprets Plato as "a man impressed by a first glimpse of the power of logical manipulations and affected by the suspicion against the senses while at the same time close enough to the primary experience of knowing by seeing".⁽⁵⁾ And there is a brilliant argument by William Ivins to the effect that Platonism is actually a result of there not being available, until the advent of photography, a technology of exactly repeatable pictorial representations of particular objects. Since it was not possible "from an oral or visual description to identify any object as being a particular object and not merely a member of some class",⁽⁶⁾ writes Ivins, "it was only natural that the ancients came to think that ... [only words] were real and that the shifting changing phantasmagories of sensuous awareness they described were at best composed of imitations or faulty exemplifications of the reality that existed in the word".⁽⁷⁾ We will have occasion to return to the educational issue of images presently.

More than two thousand years after Plato, in another major philosophical work which is at the same time a major work in educational theory, in Dewey's Democracy and Education, the topic of communication once more comes to the fore. According to an oft-cited formulation in this book, "[s]ociety not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common."⁽⁸⁾ To this passage Dewey added that "[n]ot only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience."⁽⁹⁾ Dewey however stresses that while in primitive cultures it is the everyday communicational world which fulfils the functions of an educational environment - "[s]avage groups", as he puts it, "depend upon children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing"⁽¹⁰⁾ - this changes "as civilization advances". The gap between "the capacities of the young" and "the concerns of the adults" widens, "learning by direct sharing in the pursuits of grown-ups" becomes increasingly difficult".⁽¹¹⁾ In particular with the emergence of literacy there arises the need for separate institutions of formal education. Schools, Dewey points out, come into existence "when social traditions are so complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed to writing and transmitted through written symbols".⁽¹²⁾

In Democracy and Education Dewey certainly did not share Plato's misgivings as to written documents. As he put it: "Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity... A book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof."⁽¹³⁾ Some years later, however, he expressed reservations about the cohesive powers of the modern means of communication. In its "deepest and richest sense" a community, he wrote, must always remain "a matter of face-to-face intercourse"; the "winged words of conversation" - he meant verbal conversation - have a "vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech".⁽¹⁴⁾
 

§ 2 Communication: Face-to-face vs Virtual

Communicational environments have a direct bearing on education. It is inevitable that, with the triumphant advance of the Internet, teaching and learning, especially in the realm of post-secondary education, should have begun to move into the domain of computer-mediated communication. It is far from clear however what promises virtual education really holds. Conventional educational environments typically involve face-to-face communication in the classroom, and the reading of books and writing of papers at home. In virtual learning and teaching environments, in contrast, face-to-face communication becomes supplanted, partly or wholly, by virtual seminars; the reading of books and the committing to paper of notes and essays are supplanted by working with documents on screen.

I would like to discuss four sets of problems arising through the transition from physical to virtual teaching and learning environments. I have been alerted to them, in no small measure, by the difficulties encountered in my own virtual teaching. The first set of problems turns on the fact that there are obvious cognitive losses which arise when virtual communication supplants the face-to-face kind. The second concerns the differing cognitive qualities of information conveyed by texts written or printed on paper on the one hand, and by texts appearing on the screen on the other. Thirdly, in the digital medium the question as to what extent information carried by texts can be supplemented by information carried by images becomes a pressing one. And fourthly there is the phenomenon, easy to recognize but hard to articulate, that different personality types vary in their capacity to cope with a virtual environment. After surveying these problems I will conclude by briefly reflecting on the ongoing discussions surrounding the issue of virtual higher education.

Some two years ago the president of Harvard University published a paper in which he suggested that the Internet enhances the "vital process" of what he called "conversational" learning. The daily exchange of ideas and opinions among students and between students and faculty members is, he wrote, "one of the oldest and most important forms of education"; and the Internet creates new electronic forums for precisely such exchanges. He stressed however that "[s]ustained, direct human contact is absolutely essential to serious education, and always will be. Ultimately, there is no effective substitute for 'live', face-to-face interchange." Although the Internet, he said, permits "a significant extension of scope, continuity, and even the quality of certain forms of interaction", still, "electronic communication will always lack critical elements of 'real' conversation".⁽¹⁵⁾

Face-to-face communication indeed has an incomparably wider bandwidth than any virtual channel. We should recall here Gérard Raulet's profound study "The New Utopia", written in 1986, pointing to the spurious idea of "supplanting places by spaces", and to the gap separating symbolic "interactivity" from actual social interaction.⁽¹⁶⁾ We should refer, also, to the important findings of an impressive array of empirical investigations showing that telecommunications, however dense and multidimensional the networks, do not have the effectiveness, let alone the emotional impact, of face-to-face encounters. Until the late seventies, such investigations focused on the effects of the telephone.⁽¹⁷⁾ What they found was that telephone contacts did of course make a difference when no other contacts were available.⁽¹⁸⁾ But such contacts, as contrasted with the face-to-face kind, had no great propensity to create new working relationships with people one did not meet before in person. Telephone contacts are effective if they can rely on background information from earlier personal meetings, and if they are regularly reinforced by such.⁽¹⁹⁾ The same pattern still holds when videoconferencing and e-mail enter the scene. The effectiveness of videoconferencing is low when not backed up by face-to-face conferences; e-mail correspondences peter out if they are not complemented by personal encounters, or at least enlivened by phone calls and/or video contacts.

The pathbreaking study on the topic of what we today refer to as mailing lists or their web-based variants was the book The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer by Hiltz and Turoff, published in 1978.⁽²⁰⁾ In face-to-face communication, the authors here point out, a person simultaneously receives information through many channels. Words are accompanied by sounds to indicate, for instance, "that the speaker is pausing to find the right words, or checking to see if the receiver understands"; the "speed, loudness, and tone or pitch of voice" give cues about emotion, age, and sex", while accents convey cues about the nationality, ethnic group, or social class of the speaker. Then there are visual cues like facial expressions, eye movements, gestures, etc.⁽²¹⁾ In fact, as the authors stress, referring to earlier research on nonverbal communication, this latter is inextricably bound up with the verbal aspects of the communication process. However, face-to-face discussions tend to have certain dysfunctional aspects, too: like the fact that "a large portion of the interaction that goes on in a face-to-face meeting is not related to the task at hand, but to the personal needs or motives of the participants and the social needs of the group itself"; or the inequality of participation, and the pressures to conform. In face-to-face discussions there is, almost invariably, a "top man", whereas in "computerized conferencing" (this is the term Hiltz and Turoff used) there tend to be multiple leaders - which is, incidentally, no unmixed blessing: "it may be", the authors remark, "that groups without a single leader who focuses discussion and dominates the others may more frequently fail to reach any decision at all within a specified time."⁽²²⁾ Indeed lack of strong or adequate leadership, the authors emphasize, is one of the main causes why computerized conferences might fail. Another such reason can be the sheer lack of numbers of participants within a conference or group.

Since the days of the Hiltz-Turoff book, computer-mediated communication has of course been enriched by various audio and visual possibilities. However, while such enhancements certainly matter, they do not alter the fundamental fact that face-to-face communication makes it far easier to maintain a coherent discussion. This holds even though written messages are generally better organized, and richer in content, than spoken comments. But here, again, we must distinguish between the cognitive import of conventional written or printed documents on the one hand, and, on the other, documents read or composed on the screen.
 

§ 3 Documents: Paper vs Screen

A comparison of the cognitive qualities of digital texts with those of hardcopy ones can conveniently begin by comparing certain qualities of written language to those of spoken language. We are back with Plato's problem. In analyzing that problem, Walter J. Ong, in his now classic Orality and Literacy, referred to profound changes "in thought processes and in personality and social structures" brought about by the invention of writing. "Thought and expression in oral cultures is often highly organized", Ong suggested, "but calls for organization of a sort unfamiliar to and often uncongenial to the literate mind". This organization is "aggregative rather than analytic", "situational rather than abstract". Written language fosters a linear logic alien to the preliterate mind. And of course literate people, too, tend to produce arguments more analytically structured, of a more transparent logic, when writing than when speaking.

Now just as speaking, as a rule, is less coherent than writing, a text composed on screen tends to be less coherent than a text composed on paper. The reason for this is clear. Maintaining coherence is a matter of comparing texts with each other, as well as of comparing one bit of a text with other bits of the same text. On screen such comparisons can be executed to a very limited extent only. Depending on the system used and the kind of display available, a number of documents can be viewed simultaneously; but of each document only a small segment will be exposed at a time. A synoptic view of all accessible and relevant documents, or even of a single extended document, is hard to attain. Contradictions become difficult to spot; the unity of the text difficult to sustain. A decrease in logical rigor is the inevitable consequence. It is a familiar observation that e-mail messages are frequently quite similar to exchanges in spoken language: rich in emotions, poor in grammar, and typically without the discipline of reflective writing.⁽²³⁾

In a recent empirical investigation into the reading, writing, and editing habits of the highly qualified staff of a major international organization, it was found that printouts, rather than documents on screen, played the essential role in their work.⁽²⁴⁾ As the research report puts it, a feature of paper that showed itself to be important was "the fixity of information" which it afforded. Subjects gained useful knowledge of the spatial location and ordering of information merely by reference to its physical place on the page. This did not happen when viewing the same document on screen - although it appears that pictures, if present at all, were used as anchor points. Subjects complained that, at readable resolution, they could "never see even one whole page at a time", and talked of "the need to lay pages out in order to form a mental picture or overview of the document". Thus whenever they needed to read and understand a document for the "subsequent structuring of ideas"- that is, practically, for the composition of another document - they tended to produce a printout. The research report concedes that documents which do "not rely heavily on their linear structure", and which mainly offer search and retrieval possibilities for "small sections of text and well-defined pieces of information" - e.g., dictionaries and technical manuals - are in many ways much better suited to be used in their digital versions. However, when it comes to the "reflective reading of long, linearly structured documents", they predict the inevitability of a combined employment of paper and electronic texts well into the future.

Difficulties in finding one's way about become of course aggravated when proceeding from offline digital documents to online ones. As Stuart Lee in the study "Online Teaching" reminds us: "When users move around a large information space as much as they do in hypertext, there is a real risk that they may become disorientated" - that they become "lost in hyperspace".⁽²⁵⁾ Lost in hyperspace: in the present circle I surely do not have to recall the messier sides of the Internet as a virtual library, or of the collections of links and digital documents we call digital libraries - virtual libraries in the narrower sense; nor would you expect me to talk about the relative merits and demerits of educational gateways as compared to the roaming of the Internet at large and the use of search engines. However, let me, still, make two points in connection with virtual libraries. First, and more momentous: since it is dysfunctional to read a longer text online, virtual libraries in the narrower sense are in danger of becoming digital museums rather than libraries students will routinely use. It is wonderful to have free access on the Internet, say, to the complete works of Shakespeare, or, for that matter, to the collected works of Plato in a number of English editions. What I find hard to believe, however, is that someone who is not thoroughly trained in the art of reading printed books - I will come back to this issue - or indeed has not studied a given text by Plato in a hardcopy edition, would be able to gain anything by looking at segments of that text online. The book is an inadequate format to be read on the screen; virtual libraries provide digital texts, really, which are of use only to the habitual book-reader.

The second point: Just as images in any digital document are helpful in finding one's way around when studying that document on screen, so, too, do images help when navigating virtual libraries, whether in the broader or in the narrower sense. And here it is important to realize that images can be more than just emblems or illustrations. As John Barnard has recently put it: "The primary purpose of graphics for a virtual library interface should be to guide the users to the information they seek, not simply to make the web page more attractive. The graphics need to serve a semiotic purpose of conveying meaning in order to help users find the information they seek."⁽²⁶⁾
 

§ 4 Image and Text

Due mainly to advances in cognitive science, philosophy has by now awoken from the nightmare of the notion of imageless thought. And due mainly to the increasing capabilities of digital image processing, the idea that verbal language can be supplemented, and sometimes even supplanted, by a language of pictures, is rapidly gaining currency.⁽²⁷⁾

In cognitive science, the breakthrough came with the discovery that there are many visual areas in the cortex which are retinotopically mapped. That is, the neurons in the cortical area are organized to preserve the structure (roughly) of the retina. These areas represent information depictively in the most literal sense. Imagery relies on topographically organized regions of the cortex which support depictive representations.⁽²⁸⁾ This explains how some pictures can be accurately perceived by apes - a gorilla can respond appropriately to certain quite subtle pictorial images. It appears, then, that a rudimentary capacity of thinking directly with images, without verbal mediation, belongs to our biological makeup. Now this capacity is vastly amplified by what Merlin Donald calls "visual symbolic invention". Donald speaks of a third evolutionary transition in the development of humankind, following upon the transitions from apes to Homo erectus and then on to Homo sapiens, a transition which was "recent and largely nonbiological, but in purely cognitive terms it nevertheless led to a third stage of cognitive evolution, marked by the emergence of visual symbolism and external memory as major factors in cognitive architecture. External symbolic storage", Donald stresses, "must be regarded as a hardware change in human cognitive structure, albeit a nonbiological hardware change." There are, Donald writes, "three broadly different modes of visual symbolic invention, which might be called pictorial, ideographic, and phonological". Of these, the pictorial mode emerged first; and the point Donald makes is that this signaled "the start of a new cognitive structure". Pictures, Donald is in effect saying, can express ideas without our needing to have direct recourse to the sounds of spoken language.⁽²⁹⁾

The possibility of a pictorial dimension in linguistic representation was sensed by the early Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.⁽³⁰⁾ As he wrote: "The proposition is a picture of reality. ... In order to understand the essence of the proposition, consider hieroglyphic writing, which pictures the facts it describes. And from it came the alphabet without the essence of the representation being lost. This we see from the fact that we understand the sense of the propositional sign, without having had it explained to us." The later Wittgenstein took a different position - although it is still far from clear how different that position was. For instance in the so-called Part II of Philosophical Investigations there is a passage discussing the "double cross" - a white cross on a black ground or a black cross on a white ground - where Wittgenstein says: "Those two aspects of the double cross ... might be reported simply by pointing alternately to an isolated white and an isolated black cross. One could quite well imagine this", Wittgenstein adds on an uncharacteristic note, "as a primitive reaction in a child even before it could talk." Indeed the later Wittgenstein's method of explaining philosophical points with the help of diagrams would have made no sense if he had really adhered to the position almost universally attributed to him, namely that images do not have an unequivocal meaning unless interpreted verbally.⁽³¹⁾ It is against this position that Søren Kjørup was arguing when he wrote: "In most situations we understand perfectly well what the uses are to which words are put. - So why should it not be possible to imagine situations in which it is just as evident to which uses pictures are put?" To this he added: "More often than not there is no logical reason why we should not be able to perform a certain illocutionary act with pictures" - that is, do something with pictures so that they convey meaning - "but it just so happens that there are no rules for performing the act with pictures, although one might easily be devised. And this is not astonishing", Kjørup continues, "considering that whereas verbal language has been used and refined on the tongue of practically every human being as long as human beings have existed at all, pictures were so scarce before the invention of picture printing around 1400 A.D. (a much more revolutionary invention in the history of communication than the invention of typography half a century later)."⁽³²⁾

Images, then, are not only suited for alleviating the deficiencies of virtual communication. At a more fundamental level, they can make up for the deficiencies of verbal communication as such.⁽³³⁾ And we can assume, also, that images can essentially facilitate the teaching/learning process. However, if this assumption is correct, then an interactive multimedia environment is the optimal one for this very process.⁽³⁴⁾ The Internet promises to become precisely such an environment.
 

§ 5 Learning Styles in a Virtual Environment

Not every student is successful in a virtual classroom. The advantages of the virtual environment may be greater or lesser, or even non-existent, according to the different learning styles of the students involved.⁽³⁵⁾ The aim of learning style research, as one expert has put it, is to find "clusters of people who use similar patterns for perceiving and interpreting situations".⁽³⁶⁾ There are a variety of models used to characterize learning styles. Learning style has been described as the "manner in which various elements of four basic stimuli (environmental, emotional, sociological, and physical) affect a person's ability to absorb and to retain information, values, facts, or concepts".⁽³⁷⁾ Learning styles research looks at environmental preferences regarding sound, light, temperature, and class design; it looks at emotional preferences addressing motivation, persistence, responsibility and structure; sociological preferences for private, pair, peer, team, adult or varied learning relations; psychological preferences related to perception, intake, time taken over specific tasks, and mobility; and psychological preferences based on analytic mode, hemisphericity, and action.⁽³⁸⁾ Clearly, learning styles research is a very broad field, encompassing very different approaches;⁽³⁹⁾ I will here restrict myself to looking at just one domain, that of personality types.

Let me say at the outset that student achievement in the virtual classroom seems to depend much more on previous socialization, on the pre-school age and school-age learning environment of the individual, than on congenital predispositions or infantile experiences. Thus personality type might be an independent variable to a rather limited extent only. However, even if not of primary significance, underlying individual differences in personality do exist, and do matter. As Hiltz and Turoff for instance had already noted: "There are some persons who dislike face-to-face social interaction, or who are not skilled at interaction rituals, who can nevertheless seem particularly suited to communication in this new medium." In 1978, these authors had to admit "our extreme ignorance in this area. We know ", they wrote, "that there are personality factors that are very strongly related to the amount and style of use a person is likely to make of computerized conferencing. At present we have only the skimpiest of insights into what these factors are."⁽⁴⁰⁾ In this respect very little has changed in the course of the past twenty years.

Strange, since one would believe that here an appropriate research program can be easily formulated. All we need a suitable typology; and then we have to conduct experiments to link student achievement to personality type. Now what we do not have is, precisely, a suitable typology. Let us look at some candidates. One possibility is illustrated by Riesman's inner-directed / other-directed dichotomy, as formulated in his The Lonely Crowd published in 1950. "The other-directed person", Riesman wrote, "is cosmopolitan. For him the border between the familiar and the strange ... has broken down. ... While the inner-directed person could be 'at home abroad' by virtue of his relative insensitivity to others, the other-directed person is, in a sense, at home everywhere and nowhere, capable of superficial intimacy with and response to everyone. ... The other-directed person must be able to receive signals from far and near; the sources are many, the changes rapid." The other-directed person, we could hypothesize, will thrive in a network environment; while the inner-directed will be more at ease withdrawn among her books. Alas, the hypothesis is spurious: Riesman himself has made it clear that his types represent not so much original psychological endowments, as rather the outcomes of typographic culture on the one hand, and electronic mass-media on the other.
 
Another kind of candidate might be Freud's oral-anal distinction. The anal type is orderly, prefers well-structured tasks, and likes to leave clear imprints - clearly a hardcopy person. For the oral type anything goes, he freely gives and takes, he does not mind overflows - he, we might suppose, will be happy to dive into cyberspace. But here again it seems that we are mixing up cause and consequence. The oral character might be just the outcome of preliteral cultural patterns, the anal a product of literacy.⁽⁴¹⁾ Then there is the introvert-extravert dichotomy of Freud's antagonist Jung, easy to adopt - one thinks of the introvert as a reader of books, the extravert as a node in the web - but fruitless, because psychologically hazy, when it would come to real-world applications. Jung's typology has been brought down to earth, and extended into a system of sixteen types, by Isabel Myers-Briggs. This system is widely used, but I doubt if it is a promising one when entering the virtual environment, since it is so clearly informed by the imagery, the implicit assumptions, of the Gutenberg era. The same seems to hold with respect to the well-publicized researches on hemispheric specialization in the brain to the effect that visual and spatial functions are primarily localized in the right hemisphere, whereas linguistic functions are primarily localized in the left hemisphere. Experiments with computer-using children have not yielded coherent results in terms of the verbal-visual distinction. Computer images, and especially computer texts, or indeed interactive media, might well call on different brain resources than do real-life or hardcopy images, or hardcopy texts.⁽⁴²⁾ By contrast, an approach which I do find promising is Eysenck's introversion-extraversion paradigm, especially as summarized in the book Personality and Individual Differences: A Natural Science Approach.⁽⁴³⁾ "Introverts", we read here, "learned better when they followed a carefully sequenced, highly prompted learning structure, whereas extraverts were more successful when presented with a random arrangement." To this the authors add: "At least until quite recently, educational provision has tended to approximate more closely to a structured than an unstructured system. As a consequence, the academic superiority of introverts may be due in large measure to the fact that the educational system is more closely geared to their needs than to those of extraverts."⁽⁴⁴⁾ It is to the discussions surrounding the changing educational system I now briefly turn.
 
 
§ 6 Changing Patterns in Higher Education
 
Let me here begin with a reference to Cardinal Newman's book The Idea of a University, published in 1852.⁽⁴⁵⁾ The book takes its point of departure from the statement that the university is "a place of teaching universal knowledge". Now we should recall that at first "university" had little to do with universality; it certainly did not mean an universitas facultatum. The Latin term universitas, both in Roman and medieval times, designated simply an aggregate of persons. Medieval universities were corporations - either of masters or of students. Only gradually, with the modern notion of a unity of knowledge,⁽⁴⁶⁾ did the university become associated with the notion of a type of comprehensive, all-embracing, knowledge, i.e. with the requirement of teaching a complete array of subjects.⁽⁴⁷⁾ This is Newman's point. According to him the mere fact that the university offers a wide range of studies is beneficial to the students, since "though they cannot pursue every subject which is open to them, they will be gainers by living among those and under those who represent the whole circle. This", he says, "I conceive to be the advantage of a seat of universal learning, considered as a place of education."⁽⁴⁸⁾ The idea that a university should be a place of encounters and exchanges is centrally important to Newman.
 
A similar view was formulated by Hastings Rashdall, in his classic work The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, published in 1895.⁽⁴⁹⁾ "Names are sometimes of more importance than is commonly supposed", Rashdall wrote in the epilogue of his work. "Whether a particular institution should or should not be called a university may seem by itself to be a very small thing. But the name has got to be associated with education of the highest type: to degrade the name of a university is therefore to degrade our highest educational ideal."⁽⁵⁰⁾ For Rashdall,

[t]he two most essential functions which a true university has to perform are to make possible the life of study, whether for a few years or during a whole career, and to bring together during that period, face to face in living intercourse, teacher and teacher, teacher and student, student and student. It would be a fatal error to imagine that either the multiplication of books or the increased facilities of communication can ever remove the need of institutions which permit of such personal intercourse. A university, therefore, must have a local habitation.⁽⁵¹⁾

although we like to think - imagine or fantasize would be a more accurate term - that our educational institutions are characterized by Oxbridge tutorials, small seminars, and lots of contact between student and faculty, the great majority of American and European students (many of whom, incidentally, are nonresident or attend institutions without campuses or adequate student facilities) have for half a century or more received their education in lectures with hundreds of others.

collegiality is dissolving throughout both our colleges and universities, ... because faculty, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, spend less time on campus, preferring to work at home on personal computers, which give them access to libraries, databases, and other colleagues all over the world. In that sense the university as a place is disappearing because the people who really constitute the place interact less and less in the traditional university space.

As learning styles research expert Terry O'Connor wrote:

It is a truism in media that people first tend to use new technology the same way they used older technology. In [the educational] context, the tendency is to use computing technology to deliver the same kinds of instruction & testing that are currently offered in the traditional college classroom. We [falsely think] that the same time patterns, the same content-centeredness, the same student-relations, and the same tasks ... should be electronically replicated. Eventually, applications of computing technology will challenge these assumptions and free us from the need to stay trapped in older college paradigms.

The whole concept of curriculum, accreditation, and segregation by ages is entirely a product of outmoded ways of disseminating knowledge. ... The entire school is determined by primitive technologies of the past... The artificial kind of learning we call a school was simply proposed to get children to know things they didn't acquire naturally from the learning environment. As this need disappears, the institution of school will disappear.⁽⁵⁶⁾

1. Plato, The Republic 601b, Jowett transl.

2. Ibid., 606e and 607a.

3. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.

4. Phaedrus 275a-b, 275d, and 278a, Jowett transl.

5. Arnheim, Rudolf, Visual Thinking, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969, p.8.

6. William Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953, p.159.

7. Ibid., , p.63.

8. Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, New York: MacMillan, 1916, p.4.

9. Ibid., p.6.

10. Ibid., p.9. "To savages", Dewey continues, "it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn."

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p.22.

13. Ibid., p.5.

14. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927), repr. in Dewey, The Later Works, vol.2, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1984, pp.367 and 371. On p.371 Dewey goes on to say: "The connections of the ear with vital and out-going thought and emotion are immensely closer and more varied than those of the eye. Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator."

15. Neil L. Rudenstine, "The Internet and Education: a Close Fit", The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 21, 1997.

16. Raulet, "La nouvelle utopie: Signification sociologique et philosophique des nouvelles technologies de communication", in: Eddy Cherki - Marc Gauillaume - Gérard Raulet, Les télétechnologies, 1987. My references here are based on the German edition: G. Raulet, "Die neue Utopie. Die soziologische und philosophische Bedeutung der neuen Kommunikationstechnologien", in: M. Frank, G. Raulet and W. van Reijen, eds., Die Frage nach dem Subjekt, Frankfurt/M.: 1988. Compare especially p.285 ("die hier gemeinte 'neue Utopie' [bedeutet] das Verschwinden des Örtlichen zugunsten des Räumlichen... die Kategorie der Delokalisierung") and p.287 ("eine leichtfertig mit der sozialen Interaktion verwechselte 'Interaktivität'").

17. A pioneering work was Richard L. Meier's A Communications Theory of Urban Growth, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962. "Face-to-face interaction", Meier here wrote, "which is most efficient by far in creating and maintaining groups, requires proximity" (loc. cit., p.42).

18. See e.g. Suzanne Keller, "The Telephone in New (and Old) Communities", in: Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977.

19. See esp. Bertil Thorngren, "Silent Actors: Communication Networks for Development", in: Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone. Analyzing the impact of telecommunications on urban and regional development, Lionel Nicol wrote in 1985: "telecommunications - and, for that matter, the telephone - have traditionally been presented as having a decentralizing influence. The basic argument is that a fundamental effect of better communications is to reduce spatial impedance; that is, the frictional forces that geographical space imposes on the transfer of persons, commodities, and information. ... Yet, despite its impressive advantages, there are no tangible signs that telecommunications may be displacing transportation... Claims to the contrary simply ignore the synergic effects of improved communications on the need for face-to-face contacts that, for institutional or cultural reasons, cannot be handled on-line." (Lionel Nicol, "Communications Technology: Economic and Spatial Impacts", in: Manuel Castells, ed., High Technology, Space, and Society, Beverly Hills, Ca.: Sage: 1985, p.195.) As Mitchell L. Moss has put it: "Although many so-called futurists argue that the electronic cottage will replace the office building and that teleconferencing will replace the in-person meeting, such speculation merely demonstrates a poor understanding of urban functions... ... telecommunications has not reduced the value of the face to face transactions that occur in large urban centres." (Mitchell L. Moss, "Telecommunications and the Future of Cities", Land Development Studies, 3 [1986], pp.38f.)

20. Hiltz, Starr Roxanne - Murray Turoff, The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978.

21. Ibid., pp.78f.

22. Ibid., pp.104ff.

23. I have argued to this effect in greater detail in my paper "Electronic Networking and the Unity of Knowledge", in: Stephanie Kenna and Seamus Ross, eds., Networking in the Humanities, London: Bowker-Saur, 1995.

24. Kenton O'Hara - Abigail Sellen, "A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents" (http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi97/proceedings/paper/koh.htm), and Abigail Sellen - Richard Harper, "Paper as an Analytic Resource for the Design of New Technologies" (http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi97/proceedings/paper/ajs.htm).

25. Lee is here quoting Jakob Nielsen. See Stuart D. Lee, Susan Armitage, Paul Groves, and Chris Stephens, "Online Teaching: Tools & Projects", Report commissioned by the JISC Technology Applications Programme, 1999, <http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/reports/teaching/ >.

26. J. Barnard, "Web Accessible Library Resources for Emerging Virtual Universities", The Journal of Library Services for Distance Education (http://www.westga.edu/library/jlsde). Vol. II, No. 1 - July 1999.

27. I am here attempting to broaden an argument I have begun in my "Electronic Networking and the Unity of Knowledge", cf. note 23 above.

28. I am here following Stephen M. Kosslyn, Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995, pp.12ff.

29. M. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1991.

30. A subtle and imaginative analysis of Wittgenstein's idea of a directly depicting language is given in Barry Smith, "Characteristica Universalis", in: K. Mulligan, ed., Language, Truth and Ontology, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992.

31. I owe this point to Andreas Roser, see his "Gibt es autonome Bilder? Bemerkungen zum grafischen Werk Otto Neuraths und Ludwig Wittgensteins", Grazer Philosophische Studien 1996/97.

32. Søren Kjørup, "George Inness and the Battle at Hastings, or Doing Things With Pictures", The Monist, vol.58, no.2, April 1974, pp.221-224. Kjørup here concludes by referring, in a footnote, to the book by William Ivins we have cited above.

33. On this point compare also Michael A. R. Biggs in "The Concept of Knowledge in the Context of Electronic Networking", edited by J.C. Nyíri, The Monist 80 (3), July 1997.

34. I find very pertinent here some formulations by Lester Faigley, in his "Literacy After the Revolution": "This semester for the first time I am devoting a significant part of a writing course to graphic design, and I am discovering, after years of attempting to teach students to analyze images, that they learn much more quickly when they create images on their own. Active learners can think reflectively about any human symbolic activity, whatever the medium. - ... a decade from now ... I expect that we will be teaching an increasingly fluid, multimedia literacy... - I direct a large college writing program that aims to give every student opportunities to practice the new electronic literacies unless they prefer to be in a traditional classroom." (Todd Taylor - Irene Ward, eds., Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.)

35. I am indebted to Deborah Walters (SUNY at Buffalo) and László Turi (Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest) for valuable suggestions concerning Learning Styles reseach.

36. Terry O'Connor, "Using Learning Styles to Adapt Technology for Higher Education" (http://web.indstate.edu/ctl/styles/learning.html). "Based on this information", O'Connor continues, "we should be able to adjust educational environments to make them more efficient and successful places. ... Some people may tend to respond to auditory information more sensitively than to other kinds (say, iconic). ... Auditory learners will learn well in lecture settings; private learners will gain knowledge from quiet reading. However, these are only two out of a broad array of preferences found among intellectually capable people. When learning experiences are limited to these modes, students who rely on other styles are bound to be less successful. Limited classrooms are likely to inhibit one or more clusters of students whose preferred styles are not given the opportunity to be used (a problem that may be wrongly attributed to lower ability or motivation)."

37. Roland L. Danielson, "Work in Progress: Learning Styles, Media Preferences, and Adaptive Education" (1997 - http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~plb/UM97workshop/Danielson.html). Danielson is here referring to R. Dunn, J. Beaudry, and A. Klavas, "Survey of Research on Learning Styles". Educational Leadership, 1989, 46/6.

38. I am here following O'Connor, op. cit.

39. I should point out that the claim that learning styles research has insights to offer to the practice of virtual education is not uncontested. This is how Ching-Chun Shih and Julia Gamon have summed up the results of their recent research: "Student learning styles and student characteristics (gender, Web-based courses they were taking, whether or not they were university students, types of students as off-campus, on-campus, or adult students, limited or unlimited access to a computer, number of courses previously taken in the same subject area, study and work hours/week) did not have an effect on their Web -Based learning achievement. ... The conclusion was that students with different learning styles and backgrounds learned equally well in Web-based courses. And learning styles did not affect student motivation and use of learning strategies. ... Motivation and learning strategies seemed to be the most important factors in Web-based learning and accounted for more than one-third of student achievement." ("Student Learning Styles, Motivation, Learning Strategies, and Achievement in Web-Based Courses", http://iccel.wfu.edu/publications/journals/jcel/jcel990305/ccshih.htm).

40. Hiltz-Turoff, op. cit., pp.101f.

41. This is McLuhan's explanation. As he put it: "In a culture which for centuries has been as lineally arranged as our own, it is obvious that the habits called 'anal' or 'oral' by psychologists receive a collective educational stress far in excess of any fashionable biological or psychological emphasis that could occur in individual training. It is equally obvious that our 3,000-year-old lineal stress did not originate nor terminate in biological bias or in toilet habits. ... The psychodynamics of sight, sound and language take easy precedence over social biology as concepts and instruments of explanation of these phenomena."

42. Donald has some important observations here. "Some key linguistic functions seem to be left-lateralized", he writes, "but it would be a gross exaggeration to claim that verbal thought is an exclusively left-hemisphere mode of consciousness. 'Visual thought' is also an imprecise term in this context. Some forms of visual thinking are episodic: for instance, mental rotation, simple visual problem solving, and probably simple image generation. Other kinds of visual thinking are representational, either on the mimetic or the ideographic-analog level. There is no evidence that all forms of visual thought are restricted to a single hemisphere. - Therefore the commonly taught left-right division of function between visual thought in the right cerebrum and verbal thought in the left paints an oversimplified, misleading, and confused picture. We have no reason to believe that episodic uses of vision are lateralized at all."

43. Hans J. Eysenck and Michael W. Eysenck, Personality and Individual Differences: A Natural Science Approach, New York: Plenum Press, 1985.

44. Eysenck and Eysenck, p.322. On pp.324f. this is the summary they give: "two main research strategies ... have been used in this area. One approach is simply to correlate personality research scores with measures of academic attainment. This can provide an overview of what is happening, but it is usually extremely difficult to decide exactly how personality is having its effect. The alternative approach is more experimental in nature and involvescomparing the effects of different teaching strategies on learners varying in personality. This approach has not been used extensively but appears to offer much greater promise of discovering the teaching methods that are optimal for each individual.

45. The book was based on lectures delivered in Dublin, where Newman presided over the establishment of a Roman Catholic University that came into being in 1854. The collection first bore the title Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education: Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin, becoming popularly known as The Idea of a University after several revisions and enlargements. I am here quoting from the edition by F.M. Turner, with contributions by Martha McMackin Garland, Sara Castro-Klarén, George P. Landow, George M. Marsden, Frank M. Turner, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

46. See my paper "Electronic Networking and the Unity of Knowledge".

47. I owe this point to Tamás Tóth's paper "A napoleoni egyetemtõl a humboldti egyetemig" [From the Napoleonic to the Humboldtian University]. Concerning Newman I am indebted to Zoltán Endreffy's "A katolikus egyetemrõl" [On the Catholic University]. Both papers were written as part of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences research project "The Changing Function of the European University", directed by Professor Tóth, and have appeared in the Aug.-Sept. 1999 issue of Világosság.

48. Newman, op. cit., pp.76f.

49. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895, in 2 volumes. New edition in three volumes, ed. by F.M. Powicke and A.B. Emden, London: Oxford University Press, 1936, reprinted in1969. It is the latter edition I will be quoting from.

50. "That universities should be multiplied", the passage continues, "is, within certain limits, natural and desirable; and it is by no means essential that all should conform exactly to the same pattern. It is natural and desirable again that efforts should be made to diffuse knowledge and intellectual interests among all classes by means of evening lectures. ... But it would be a delusion, and a mischievous delusion, to suppose thet evening lectures, however excellent and however much supplemented by self-education, can be the same thing as the student-leisure of many years, duly prepared for by a still longer period of regular school training" (Rashdall, op. cit., vol.3, p.462).

51. "It may in a sense be maintained", the passage continues, "that the bewildering accumulation of literature and the rapidity with which it is diffused have only emphasized the necessity for personal guidance and interpretation - for association in teaching, in study, and in research. Personal contact adds something even to the highest spiritual and intellectual influences... There is a kind of knowledge, too, which can only be secured by personal intercommunication, a kind of intellectual cultivation which is only made possible by constant interchange of ideas with other minds, a kind of enthusiasm which is impossible in isolation. To a certain extent of course these functions are performed by every sort of educational institution and every scientific or literary society. But it behoves us not to lose or lower the ideal of the university as the place par excellence for professed and properly trained students, not for amateurs or dilettantes or even for the most serious of leisure-hour students; for the highest intellectual cultivation, and not merely for elementary instruction or useful knowledge; for the advancement of science, and not merely for its conservation or diffusion; as the place moreover where different branches of knowledge are brought into contact and harmonious combination with one another, and where education and research advance side by side" (Rashdall, op.cit., vol.3, pp. 463f.).

52. Sheldon Rothblatt - Björn Wittrock, eds., The European and American University since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp.341f.

53. Parker Rossman, The Emerging Worldwide Electronic University: Information Age Global Higher Education, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992, pp.7f.

54. George P. Landow,"Newman and the Idea of an Electronic University", in: Turner, F.M. (ed.), J.H. Newman: The Idea of a University, pp.359ff. It was in a similar spirit Neil Rudenstine addressed the issue in a talk given on May 29, 1996: "Many inventions (such as radio, film, and television) have of course had a massive effect on society - on how people spend their time, entertain themselves, and even gain information. But, in spite of many predictions, these particular inventions have had little effect on formal, serious, advanced education. Why should the Internet be any different? ... Let me suggest some of the main reasons why I believe that the Internet is fundamentally different from those earlier electronic inventions, and why I believe it is already having - and will continue to have - such a major effect on higher education. - To begin with, there is the steadily mounting evidence of dramatic change and intensity of use... More fundamentally, there is in fact a very close fit - a critical interlock - between the structures and processes of the Internet, and the main structures and processes of university teaching and learning. That same fit simply did not (and does not) exist with radio, film, or television. ... - If I say there is a critical interlock or fit here, I mean nothing more complicated than the plain fact that students can carry forward their work on the Internet in ways that are similar to - and tightly intertwined with - the traditional ways that they study and learn in libraries, classrooms, lecture halls, seminars, informal discussion groups, laboratories, and in the writing and editing of papers or reports." ( Neil Rudenstine, "The Internet is Changing Higher Education", American Studies Journal, no.39, November 1996, p.50.)

55. Anne B. Keating - Joseph Hargitai, The Wired Professor: A Guide to Incorporating the World Wide Web in College Instruction, New York University Press, 1999, see <http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/professor.html/webinteaching>, ch.3.

56. Educom Review, vol.29, no.6, November/December 1994)

57. Recent (1995/96) figures are reported by Richard L. Hannah in his brilliant essay "Merging the Intellectual and Technical Infrastructures of Higher Education: The Internet Example" (The Internet and Higher Education, vol.1, no.1., 1998, p.10): "The age, experience, and work history of students impact online acceptance, often define access points (e.g., campus, work, home) and indicate career relevance of leaning about and through the Internet in addition to the context of the specific academic course content. The traditional "four year degree" is not realistic for most students. In fact, the majority (58.3%) of undergraduate college students are now beyond the benchmark (if not mythical) 21-year-old graduate... Statistical profiles of freshmen surveys consistently show a high proportion of students expect to work to help pay for college expenses, 39.5%, with 5.5% expecting to work full time... Anecdotal testaments indicate this is a significant underestimate of work hours, and some research is indicating that the work-school blending is also emerging as a significant factor in high schools."