One of the biggest issues facing brick and mortar higher education is remaining relevant in an age of excess communication. The problem is exacerbated by the tendency to treat college as High School 2.0. Students don’t go to college because they want to; they go because they are expected to, and besides, what else would they do?

This combination explains the popularity of tools such as the clicker. They remove the expectation of public participation. Especially, these tools mean that students aren’t expected to engage the instructor and other students in discussions regarding the topic that they took just to fill up a slot in their schedule until they graduate.

The instructor talks. The students click. What could be better? There is the feeling of participation without any face-to-face interaction.

The problem is, once they start using the clicker, why do they need to be in the classroom? Why not click from home? The end result will be something like the scene in Real Genius where more and more students just bring tape recorders to class, and eventually the instructor brings a tape player to deliver the lecture to a bunch of tape recorders. Did scribes after Gutenberg think that they could adapt just by writing faster and in a more uniform manner? Reducing face-to-face communication won’t save the university.

Gaze into the Brazil-green future of the university.

This is not so much a problem with clickers as what they represent. I would have responded more to questions in college if we’d had clickers, too. But I would have responded even more if we’d had clickers from my apartment. If we use computers to monitor students who are right in front of us, why should students come onto campus to do any of this? What value does a “come to the hill” university environment add to the learning process if it moves to only replicating something that could just as well be done on-line?

If universities become nothing more than the Internet with a commute, what’s the point?

Which brings me to locked down browsers. The first time I saw an ad asking “are you testing student knowledge or their Internet searching skills?” I thought the students were taking tests at home. But the ad photo shows a classroom full of computers. Ignore for the moment the pre-iPhone assumption that the school will have control over the browser that students use to cheat. They are using computers to facilitate instruction… and then castrating the computers so that students can’t take advantage of them.

It’s like embracing open book tests by saying you can bring in all the books you want—but you can only use them as a writing surface. Because testing should assess rote knowledge of students, not their ability to reason out answers with real-world information.

Because the future’s too important to work a part-time job.

The concept of “open book” testing when the world is on the desktop opens up the possibility of teaching and testing from a sum of knowledge much greater than a handful of textbooks; for example, testing real-world reasoning under a time-limited environment, an invaluable skill after graduation whatever job they choose. Instead, we fear the possibilities, and look for ways to retain the old information-poor testing environment.

But college as High School 2.0 also explains ads that denigrate the old rite-of-passage jobs such as at fast-food restaurants. If students are in college only because, what else would they do?, ads like “supersize her dreams” make more sense. Because why would you take a part-time job at a fast-food restaurant to pay for High School?

But most likely, the job they take when they graduate will be because, what else would they do? The rapidly rising popularity of graduate study among undergraduates seems less like a love of learning and more like a failure of undergraduate education to inspire students to want to do something other than stay in school.

It’s got to be an insulting ad, though, to people who do choose to work through school. Or who did work through school and are now being asked to give to scholarships because “today’s students are better than that.”