One More Year To Remember
Dan Lukiv

july 1

dandelions,
bald, taller than the grass--
antennae

july 2 

outside the glass door,
a cat drenched with rain sits
and meows

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Shopping for Answers: Reflections on a Trial of Online Content Delivery
Elizabeth Bullen, PhD
Elizabeth Parsons, PhD.

            In MT Anderson’s young adult novel, Feed (2003), students attend corporate-run School™.  Education has little to do with the transfer of disciplinary knowledge. Indeed, conventional learning is arguably as redundant as “alive teachers,” since in this dystopic future world “you can be supersmart without ever working” (p. 59). This is because most people are blue-toothed to the World Wide Web by a technology known as the “feed” and can instantly access any information they need. According to the novel’s lone dissenting voice, however, “When you have the feed all your life, you’re brought up to not think about things’ (p. 127). Albert Borgmann (1999) makes a similar point “in the context of computer-assisted education” when he “draws a parallel between the mind of the learner and the personal computer: both are able to retrieve and process information, but both know nothing” (Roberts, 2001, p. 108). In other words, “the complement to “having the world database at your fingertips” is to have nothing in your head” (Borgmann, 1999, p. 206).

            Both Anderson and Borgmann raise questions about differences between knowledge and information and the changing social context – including the disembodiment – of teaching and learning. These are also some of the preoccupations of this paper, which reflects on a trial of online delivery of lecture content to a cohort of on-campus first year students enrolled in a Children’s Literature unit at a multi-campus Australian university. The specific circumstances out of which the trial arose reflect broader trends in higher education, both nationally and internationally, that have more to do with policy than pedagogy. Australian universities are increasingly moving towards online learning for on-campus entry level students, both entirely online units and hybrid combinations of electronic and live teaching. This creates new challenges for teachers and learners and, as we will explain, particular anxieties for teachers of literature. As such, it was with misgivings that we suspended a conventional lecture and tutorial program and substituted online lecture content delivery annexed to complementary classroom seminars. This paper considers some of the concerns online delivery raised for us as teachers and discusses our students’ responses to the alternative format. What we found were not entirely holograms and empty heads but was that students take a consumerist approach to material made available online, selecting only what they assume they need to achieve the assessment tasks. As Borgmann puts it, in the online environment, students “are like the consumers of a well-stocked twenty-four-hour supermarket who have made their lists, come in when convenient, move along the shelves, and assemble whatever they need and want” (1999, p. 205).

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Policy Education for a Cross-National Student Population: A Case Study of a Doctoral Program in Health Policy
Sherry Fontaine, PhD

Introduction

            United States colleges and universities located near or adjacent to international borders often attract a large number of students from “across the border.” This is certainly the case for U.S. colleges and universities located in northern border cities, where Canadian student enrollment is relatively high. In areas such as Western New York, which is facing declining populations and declining regional economies, Canadian students offer smaller regional colleges and universities welcome tuition revenue? The Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities stated that in 2002 Western New York’s nine private colleges reported that there were 695 undergraduate and 1,257 graduate students from Canada (Schumer, 2002). An important issue for institutions that want to continue to attract Canadian as well as U.S. students is how to offer educational programs that meet the academic and career objectives of all students. For public policy programs, this issue becomes more salient as differing political and social welfare systems, as well as related career paths, translate into challenges for public policy educators.

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