I have a confession to make. I design multimedia for online courses. I extol the virtues of online learning to anyone who’ll listen. Yet I’m taking a course on-ground. And next quarter, when given the choice between the on-ground and online sections of a programming course, I’ll lean towards the on-ground.

Why? That’s certainly a question I’ve been asking myself. My stock answer is that I’m not disciplined enough for an online course. My wife’s amused by this rationale; she often tells me I’m the most disciplined person she knows. She has a point. I was raised by Scotch-Irish and German Protestant farmers and railroad men whose idea of taking it easy was waiting until after church to chop weeds. So discipline shouldn’t be a problem for me when taking an online course. What gives?

When I take a course on-ground, I know that I’m committed to be in that classroom 3 hours every week. I’ll show up because I know my absence will be noted. I’ll show up because I don’t want to miss any information. And this is important: I’ll show up for the experience of being in a classroom, of being a student among students. I like to see and be seen. Rational or not, it makes me feel like I’m a student.

That last reason is the most telling. Because other than this intangible, what exactly does a classroom have going for it? My current course is taught after work in an airless, overcrowded, and overheated classroom, in which a great number of my fellows are tuned out and concentrating on their Facebook pages or texting one another. I’m exhausted by the workday and hardly at my sharpest. My instructor is overextended and often underprepared and is further handicapped by balky classroom equipment, improper software, and the flagging energy level that frequents evening classes. While there certainly is useful information exchanged in our class, the real learning comes from the readings and exercises, activities that I complete because I want to learn and because I want to avoid the social embarrassment that could result from showing up at the next class unprepared.

So why not take the course online? Why not spare myself the frustration, fatigue, and inconvenience of the on-ground experience? It’s commonly argued that a well-designed online course provides similar or superior opportunities for the exchange of ideas, for meaningful exercises, for peer and instructor feedback, and even for social connections. And there’s the ability to time shift, to log in and participate during the week at times that work for me instead of the demands of the university schedule. The only thing really absent is face time, the presence of others and myself in a physical space. The feel of a classroom.

I don’t really have an answer. But I’m concerned that if it’s this difficult for me to make the switch from on-ground to online when there are so many compelling reasons to do so, then we must be missing untold numbers of potential online learners. And that leaves us with a challenge. We can design a course to create and deliver a viable learning environment. Can we make it feel like someplace students want to be?

A friend sent me a link to a great twenty-minute speech by Stanford University Professor of Law Larry Lessig. The speech, “How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law”, was filmed in March at the TED Conference but was posted just last month at the TED site. I’m posting it a bit late by blogging standards, but it’s a “better late than never” type of thing. It’s a must-see. A twenty-minute cultural moment, like Scorsese’s homage to Hitchcock.And even though many of you have seen this much-forwarded video already, I believe that Larry Lessig deserves as much bandwidth as possible. You won’t be disappointed with this presentation. Lessig is an incredibly engaging speaker who has gained a reputation of being quite a PowerPoint virtuouso. He’s passionate, incredibly brainy, and skilled at making an issue sound extremely pressing. Lessig gives a forceful speech about on how in our Internet-driven age, overly-restrictive control of copyright will truly stifle and stagnate creative expression in the youth today. Youth not only speak in a different way, but create and distribute knowledge in a completely different format. The older generation (music and movie execs included) need to stop and listen.

This presentation has some additional significance. This speech is probably the last public one Larry Lessig will probably ever give on this topic. In June, Lessig stated that he was shifting his academic focusfrom copyright and intellectual property issues to fighting the corruption that’s in the political process. As a founder of Creative Commons, an organization that helps artists, authors and scholars give others the freedom to adapt and build upon their works and improve their creativity without having to bring in any sort of legal counsel, Lessig has given creators a serious, concrete way to share information and build upon ideas without having the pressure and worry of the law breathing down their neck.I’m excited to see what Larry Lessig will be able to bring to the fight against political corruption. I hope he’ll speak with Jeff Tweedy regarding this cause. But I do know that there is still a lot of work to be done regarding Creative Commons, particularly at the higher educational level, where academic publishers seem to have their own stranglehold on creativity with their copyright regulations and such. But that’s a blog post for another day. Until then, enjoy the video. Share it. Remix it. Just don’t remix it with a Prince song.