Technology and Learning

Since the beginning of this semester I have been pondering in my mind what type of project I was going to work on. I want to teach one class of yoga on the Internet. Whenever I tell people that I am a yoga teacher, I hear the same mantra, people telling me how they are so interested in starting yoga, but --oh, gosh-- how little time they have; or, that there is no class located closer to where they live or work. The solution, I thought was an online lesson delivered though this wonderful medium, which interested students can access at a time and place of their convenience.

My client, the yoga teacher that trained me, has been hesitant about my ideas. I asked her to select a class that she was going to teach to her students at the studio. I was going in to take pictures (and get permission from the models to use the pictures), later design the structure, design the Website --CSS and all--, look and feel, perhaps do some animation of sorts… My client has doubts and her own ideas too. Why don’t I use the Internet to explain empirically, the basis of yoga, to make them interested, as to later draw people to visit her studio and join a class? Is she talking about using the Internet sort of like a marketing tool. Is she talking about edutainment? Horrors!

She based her point of view on the definition of yoga: It is to bring mind, and body together in relaxation at one particular moment within class time. And that moment might not happen over the Internet in one class. Yoga is an experiential learning. It might be true that the Internet would convey this experience at one point in the future—perhaps thought some special technology (virtual reality?), but to seriously bring a yoga class --like the one we impart in person, to a group of people,-- with all the subtle energy changes that can be felt physically, and the group energy which unites at one point during the period of class, and the personal relaxation, and the final experience of the meditation, …all this might not be immediately possible today. Or, might be too complex of a task to be able to do it all in one online class.

The questions circumnavigating my mind are: Is technology that efficient and sufficient for this kind of experiential learning/teaching? Is it able to convey an experience of such subtlety? The Internet student, not being able to get that experience in one sitting, might feel bored, or weird, or simply disinterested from the first session. The energy we feel in class while doing yoga together, my yoga teacher pointed out, is what makes yoga differ from any other kind of exercise.