In my last post I some shot
my mouth off about the inexorable advent of online learning. When I think of the kinds of students who
will succeed at the school work of the future one word keeps surfacing in my
brain: otaku.
I first heard the term
about ten years ago, during a presentation by a Japanese media professional on hot
cultural trends in her home country. Otaku,
as she defined the term, is a slang expression for young people who spend most
of their time in their bedrooms, communicate mostly via the Internet, and are
devoted to what Matt Fraction calls “deep nerd” culture: comics, animation,
science fiction films, etc. Although
I’ve heard the term used in a derogatory way many times since then, in this
initial context it was presented as something popular, stylish, desirable. As the speaker put it, “In Japan right now if
you want to get a date and you don’t have thick glasses, you may as well forget
it.”
At the time, my response
was to think of otaku as both laughable and pitiable. Today, I’d like to offer a different
perspective.
Who does well with
online learning? I know some people who
do. A lot of them are private tutors, folks
used to living by their wits and finding their own way intellectually. These are people who finish their MOOCS, who
get paid to work with students over Skype, and write their own software for
their calculators. They approach
learning as an entrepreneurial act, where free actors come together to
negotiate a shifting terrain of opportunity and risk. And, at a time when the seminar based and experiential
models of learning I was trained in seem to be declining in their relevance, they
are successful. As a Turkish-born
colleague put it, “In Turkey there were just so few resources in
education. Here the opportunities to
learn are all around you for free - if you have the initiative to use them.”
Add to initiative the
capacity to work in physical isolation, on tasks that require tremendous
attention spans and the capacity to consult with others over technology. Add also strong, focused areas of interest,
however esoteric or impractical they might seem in the short run, and it seems
to me that the successful learner of the future will be a bit of an otaku.
This is not a utopian
vision; as somebody who has spent a lot of time talking to his action figures
himself, I can tell you that the life of the otaku is not always the most
conducive to good health and intimate relationships. More disturbing from a strictly educational
standpoint is the prospect of students wandering around over the intellectual map
unguided; there will be lots of time wasted and blind spots indulged, since, as
Robert Greenberg notes, “the problem with autodidacts is that they have such
terrible teachers." Still, perhaps the roles of role instructors can evolve
to address some of these concerns and turn some of these experiences to the
good. Models of blended learning and flipped
classrooms are intriguing, but we don’t have to get that fancy to make a difference. Hopefully when kids like my son- who at six
already is pretty good at channeling his inner otaku- has watched too many
videos about Lego Star Wars I can encourage him to return to the real world to
play, even if it is with Star Wars Legos. And I can’t help but be intrigued by
his ongoing negotiations with the other players of a game called Hay Day, where
he runs a small farm and market stand.
I hope that negotiating these
relationships will help him manage coworkers, that the time he fritters away
learning online about architecture only to move on to astrophysics shows him
that there is a diversity of knowledge out there, that the frustrations of
trying to get his Angry Birds video to stream correctly will show him that good
things come to those who wait. And if
not –well, maybe I’ll still save a few bucks by attending his online chess
tournaments instead of driving to all those soccer games.
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