There was a time–remember?–when the face-to-face classroom wasn’t a sacrosanct wing, protected by Do-Not-Touch velvet ropes, in the Higher Ed Nostalgia Museum. A time–though to admit it now may seem tantamount to waving the white flag of pedagogical surrender to the advancing corporate-MOOC Visigoth hoards–when we educators used complain about the classroom.

Cari Lyn writes recently on Seminarium Blog about open-source “learning management systems” (LMSes) as one affordable approach to learning platforms, in which students can have opportunities for “[g]roup activities, research opportunities, and freedom of expression.” This has me reflecting on platforms: the face-to-face classroom, the closed LMSes, and the open/distributed platforms. Conversations about learning platforms tend to emphasize the “goods” of the face-to-face platform and the challenges of the online platforms. But before we had online learning platforms to be suspicious about, we used to complain about the limits of the classroom all the time.

So, in this post, I focus on the limits of the face-to-face classroom in terms of “scarcities.” In a second post, I will consider the respective “scarcities” of the closed and open online platforms. This will, I argue, provide a less skewed, more productive basis for comparing platforms or for considering “blended” solutions. So, let’s get started: What’s missing–necessarily, intrinsically missing–from the brick-and-mortar classroom…?