I completely disagree with distance learning. I agree that a student could get a basic knowledge of the material with the information being presented to them, but there is more to the equation than that. The student also will have to have discipline and lets face it there are a lot of people out there who don't have the discipline to properly analyze the material on their own. From experience I feel it is necessary to have a professor present to actually drag the student into the material. Last year while taking my tax class I got involved with the volunteer program VITA. If I was taking that class over the internet there is no way I would have participated after receiving an email from some guy I didn't know asking me to participate. I did participate, because of Professor Gilday. He caught my attention and got me interested. In turn I was able to apply what I learned in class to a real life setting and gained a much better understanding of the material.
There is a human need to be with others face-to-face. Sites like myspace and facebook cannot fulfill that need. We have plenty of myspace friends and some make new friends on the sites and there is always a need/want to take the frienship from an internet friendship to actually hanging out in real life.
I believe it was during this week that Professor Langguth said something along the lines of he would hate the day he couldn't pull his calculator out to do a math problem. When he said that it got me thinking about what we learned in our psychology class that the human brain can only do so much. In that case I think it is a good thing and it isn't hurting us to be lazy in a sense. It means instead of wasting brain power on simple calculations we can get those calculations and use our minds on developing and analyzing the calculations so that we can make some true meaning of them and their use.
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