September 10, 1999

Disappearing Ink

By TODD GITLIN

Hearing that a new Internet company is now posting free notes for core courses at 62 universities threw me back to a time in the 1980's when I was teaching a large class in a lecture hall at the University of California at Berkeley. The student government had approved a note-taking service called, for some arcane reason, Black Lightning. With the professor's approval, a graduate student would attend lectures, take notes and type them up, whereupon Black Lightning would duplicate the notes and offer them to students for a nominal fee (and to the professor for free). 

With some trepidation, I agreed. Students wanted the service. I read the first few sets of notes and was reasonably impressed. The graduate student in question evidently knew what he was doing. My thinking looked tidier in his transcription than in my own notes. In fact, a professor who wanted to regurgitate the same notes year after year could use those nicely printed notes the next time and the next. 

But I soon saw that class attendance was down. Not drastically down, but down. I also became aware that questions in class were slacking off. I have long encouraged students to interrupt lectures with questions, partly to raise the plane of comprehension, partly to keep them thinking, partly to generate arguments. Enough students normally did pipe up, during an 80-minute period, to enliven the class. But now that the notes were available in cold black type, the students were less available in spirit. 

So when that semester was over, I stopped giving permission to Black Lightning. Some students weren't pleased. But I didn't and don't think that the University of California had hired me to please. Needless to say, in an age when the Bill of Rights seems to begin with the right to nonstop entertainment, this is a controversial belief. 

Now, it may well be argued that universities are already shortchanging their students by stuffing them into huge lecture halls where, unlike at rock concerts or basketball games, the lecturer can't even be seen on a giant screen in real time. If they're already shortchanged with impersonal instruction, what's the harm in offering canned lecture notes? 

The amphitheater lecture is indeed, for all but the most engaging professors, a lesser form of instruction, and scarcely to be idealized. Still, Education by Download misses one of the keys to learning. Education is a meeting of minds, a process through which the student educes, draws from within, a response to what a teacher teaches. 

The very act of taking notes -- not reading somebody else's notes, no matter how stellar -- is a way of engaging the material, wrestling with it, struggling to comprehend or to take issue, but in any case entering into the work. The point is to decide, while you're listening, what matters in the presentation. And while I don't believe that most of life consists of showing up, education does begin with that -- with immersing yourself in the activity at hand, listening, thinking, judging, offering active responses. A download is a poor substitute. 

I can't comment on the quality of the notes posted at StudentU.com, the new, advertising-supported Internet venture. When I tried to register yesterday a message came back that my ZIP code in lower Manhattan was unrecognizable to the machine in charge. 

Perhaps the server is located on Mars, or is suffering the death of a thousand hackers. No matter. The quality of the notes isn't the point. Glitches will be de-glitched, and similar sites will follow as surely as advertisers follow a market. No doubt someone is about to register the Internet addresses Notes!.com and CollegeforDummies.com. 

I.P.O.'s won't be far behind. And higher education may be as virtual as black lightning. 

Todd Gitlin is a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University and the author, most recently, of "Sacrifice," a novel.Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company