I at first thought this was a joke, but it’s not:
The Chicago Sun-Times this week laid off all 28 of its staff photographers, and has reportedly begun training its remaining reporters on “iPhone photography basics.” Media journalist Robert Feder first reported the news in a post to his Facebook page Friday, citing an internal memo from Sun-Times managing editor Craig Newman.
According to to the Wall Street Journal, computers and MOOCs have put flesh and blood teachers on notice, too.
This is a joke:
Why not forget the teachers and issue all 404,151 students [of the Chicago Public School System] an iPad or Android tablet? At a cost of $161 million, that’s less than 10% of the expense of paying teachers’ salaries. Add online software, tutors and a $2,000 graduation bonus, and you still don’t come close to the cost of teachers. You can’t possibly do worse than a 7.9% college readiness level.
Fortunately, the tech press is defending the value of a classroom with live people in it. Maria Bustillos writes here on The Verge about taking “The Ancient Greeks” on Coursera and loving it.
The quality of the lectures is far in advance of all but the very best documentary television (such as Robert Hughes’s Shock of the New). Add to this the value of the reading list and bibliographic information given in the lectures, and you have a whole new form, and a quite exciting and pleasurable one: a template for study that is intellectually rich and stimulating, first-rate, providing up-to-date scholarship for those with the time and inclination to work carefully through the reading list.
BUT, she adds:
It’s not even remotely like a real class. In no way did the rudimentary quizzes and forum discussions substitute for having to write papers, participate in class discussions or sections, swap information and notes with fellow students, talk with profs and / or TAs — all of the things that amount to supplying concrete proof, to teachers and to yourself, that you’ve learned something specific from your studies. Furthermore, humanities classes wherein we’re made to write essays have the more advanced goal (again, for those who can and wish to flex a bit more muscle) of getting students to generate their own new ideas from what they’ve learned — say by relating the lessons of history or literature to other books or ideas or periods of history, or to their own lives, societies, or circumstances.
Conversation about great books and ideas. Revolutionary.