So much is discussed about distance learning and how it will affect The University and all our attitudes to learning and teaching. Everything is in a constant flux. When you are in the middle of a revolution, it can be hard to see where you are going. Sometimes it can help to examine what happened during previous periods of technical change. The trajectory of development is so much easier to perceive with hindsight. Such an analysis can help us consider how the new technologies themselves lead to new ways of working, often far more profound in effect than merely improving on the old ways of working. Partly the cause of this is that the technology disrupts the existing cost-benefit trade-off decisions that people make, leading potentially to dramatic shifts in resources. Often a technology that was perceived as threatening can be absorbed by the participants with little deep effect. Sometimes however the technology can support an underlying change of power. It can be the case that while destroying one pattern of working, the technology leads to a far greater growth of work and jobs in the new. Such retrospectives probably can't help us predict the future, but they may help us ask different and more interesting questions about where we are going, and what we need to build to get us there.

I wonder what it would have been like for an academic to live through the adoption of printing in Western Europe. Here is one speculation:
 
 

With the development of movable type printing and the rapid growth of printed books we now have a means to support a radically new form of learning. Students can learn by reading! This has obviously rather worrying implications for teaching:

• In the lectio the lecturer does not have to read out important passages at dictation speed so that the students can copy it.
• The students can read texts in their own time, anywhere.
• As books become cheaper we might even allow students to enter our libraries and read their contents without the fear that so much extra usage will cause damage to irreplaceable resources.
• This means that Universities will have to radically reconsider their teaching practices.
• We predict that the lecture will be an obsolete form of teaching by 1510.

However there are legitimate fears about this new mode of teaching. We asked some scholars for their opinions:

• But I don't know which is the right way to use books in teaching - there seem so many different ways. Which is best?
• Maybe I'll wait until someone comes up with a proper theory of the educational use of books.
• Is there any evidence that this 'book education' form of teaching is any good?
• Isn't it just more work for teachers to incorporate yet another technology into their teaching?
• 'Book education' sounds profoundly anti-social - all those students reading away on their own can't be as good as all being together in a classroom
• People will adopt Book education and no one will bother to measure whether it is any good. There will be no studies to show that using books s better than not. In a few years people will just assume it's 'obvious'
• Students will lose their memorization skills, and it will kill the art of story-telling.
• Books are too dangerous to be in the hands of undergraduates
• It will only be a niche market for the poor, isolated and desperate. Who would ever choose to read a book for pleasure rather than going to a talk? Who would want to learn from a book? The idea is laughable
• With books we could have just-in-time, ubiquitous, flexible learning. Students could learn from home, even on horseback! They could start reading the book at any time, on any day of the year. We would have to ask ourselves why on earth we have semesters and fixed timeslots for teaching, let alone buildings or universities. This is very worrying!
• How will users be able to cope with the huge amount of information in the rapidly growing number of books?
• It is predicted that by 1520 it will be impossible for any scholar to have read all the books there are, even over a life of continuous study.
• How can we help students navigate this immense information space?
• There are also books published containing unsuitable materials for young minds. How do we handle this issue?
• There is a worrying growth in pornography: both scandalous woodcuts of erotic images and texts and verse of a lewd nature. Advocating the use of books in education in a general sense may be taken as implicit support for the publication and dissemination of such instruments of corruption and perdition.
• Parents may not know what their children are reading in their bedrooms between the leaves of an innocuous leather bound volume of sermons.
• Some sort of filtering mechanism must be devised to prevent the wrong kind of books getting into young hands.
• Isn't buying cheap books unethical? How will illuminated manuscript writers make a living if kids can go and download the latest madrigal from some hawker on the street for a penny? Universities should not be encouraging this kind of antisocial anti-monastery-business behavior.

• The reading of books may prove addictive. There are already signs of certain academics showing antisocial tendencies and preferring life as reported on paper to life interacting with real people. Some sad individuals spend over 40 hours a week staring at pieces of paper.
• Attendance at bear baitings and witch burnings are already in decline. We are in danger of losing our traditional values.
• Is this book technology just a fad, like 'accusations of heresy as a means of academic career enhancement', or is it the way of the future?
• Doesn't the shift to using books in education mean that we need more resources?
• Is it just a trick to enable the University to get by with fewer lecturers?
• Is it a sneaky way to teach more people than can physically fit in one classroom?
• This technology will allow book publishers to infiltrate the educational market, potentially totally bypassing universities and drastically undercutting their fees. After all why travel to Paris to study when you can read the book at home? Instead of dozens of lecturers all teaching the same class across Christendom, why not commission the best teacher to write a book that teaches the concepts, print it cheaply and distribute it to all the students. It could be that universities will be forced to close with just two or three elite universities remaining in Europe.

• If we let students read just any old stuff, how do we know what they will read?
• What if the content is of dubious quality or just plain wrong?
• What if they read something we haven't read?
• With the collapse of centralized control over idea production and dissemination already in parts of Northern Europe, anyone can publish their ideas in a book. Anyone can set themselves up as a teacher - that way lies anarchy.
• We can't guarantee the quality of the material to which our students may gain access.

Michael Twidale Actually copyright 1999