[I've heavily reformatted this, omitted references and footnotes, etc. Apologies for any glitches.] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" option. For information about RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2002 12:41:36 -0800 From: feenbergat_private Critical Theory of Technology, Second Edition Andrew Feenberg Oxford University Press, 2001 Praise for the Previous Edition of "Critical Theory of Technology" "Feenberg's book is an important contribution to the philosophy of technology and science not only because of its exceptional analyses of technology in the works of Critical Theory, but also because it calls upon the resources of that tradition to supply us with the means to grasp the outlines of another possible industrial civilization within our reach." -- Theory and Society "Timely. The book is appropriate and recommended reading for managers and bureaucrats. It provides perspective. It offers ideas to consider in attempting to discover alternative directions societies and workplaces could take in this decade to address issues and solve problems. The book is appropriate for an academic study of technology and society, or for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course on computers and society. The book is also appropriate for workers in technology." -- Computing Reviews "Short, clear, and wide-ranging. ... Feenberg's book deserves a wide audience among industrial designers, economists, and engineers, and philosophers concerned with technology and democracy." -- Ethics Modern technology is more than just a neutral tool: it is the framework of our civilization and shapes our way of life. Social critics claim that we must choose between this way of life and human values. In this thoroughly revised new edition of Critical Theory of Technology, Andrew Feenberg challenges that pessimistic outlook. This book re-examines the relationships between technology, rationality, and democracy, arguing that the degradation of labor--as well as of many environmental, educational, and political systems--is rooted in the social values that preside over technological development. This new edition of a classic work reflects the growing emphasis of the past ten years on the fields of technological and cultural studies. Andrew Feenberg is Professor of Philosophy at San Diego State University. He is the author of Alternative Modernity, Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, and Questioning Technology. Contents Preface 1. Introduction: The Varieties of Theory Part I. From Marxism to Radical Critique 2. Technology and Transition 3. The Bias of Technology Part II. The Ambivalence of the Computer 4. Postindustrial Discourses 5. The Factory or the City: Which Model for Online Education? Part III. The Dialectics of Technology 6. Beyond the Dilemma of Development 7. The Critical Theory of Technology References Chapter 5 The Factory or the City: Which Model for Online Education? [1] Technology and Modernity Much recent discussion of the Internet emphasizes its promise of epoch making changes in our lives. In no domain are these anticipated changes more radical than in education. We are told that the substantive content of instruction can now be delivered better by computers than by teachers. Are we on the verge of a fundamental transformation of all our assumptions about education as we enter a postindustrial information age, or are we instead witnessing significant but more modest changes in education as we know it? As a participant in the early development of online education, I hope to be able to bring a touch of realism to the debate. The debate is not limited to education, which is simply one among several fronts in the struggle to define the society of the future. The meaning of modernity is at stake in this struggle. One possible outcome is a society reflecting in all its institutions the logic of modern production, obsessed by efficiency achieved through mechanization and management. The Internet could serve this technocratic project in hitherto protected domains such as education. But one can also envisage a very different outcome modeled not on the factory but on another modern institution, the city. The city is the place of cosmopolitan interactions and enhanced communication. Its god is not efficiency but freedom. It is not dedicated to the rigid reproduction of the same, the "one best way", but to the flexible testing of possibilities and the development of the new. Not hierarchical control but unplanned horizontal contacts. Not simplification and standardization but variety and the growth of the capacities required to live in a more complex world [2]. The Internet extends this urban logic in a radically new way. The question implied in the debate over educational technology is therefore: Which model, the factory or the city, will shape the future of education? Online education can serve either strategy in different technical configurations. Automated education is certainly possible although at the price of a redefinition of education itself. The generalization on the Internet of a more traditional concept of education centered on human interaction would facilitate participation by under-served groups and might raise the cultural level of the population at large. This latter prospect recalls a significant precedent. It is clear that the gradual disappearance of child labor and the consequent establishment of universal education has transformed modern societies and shapes the kind of people who inhabit them. To the extent that we are capable of understanding the complex technologized world around us and acting independently within it, this is owing to the extended time for learning modern societies allow. However, there is strong link between education and the division of labor, with the latter determining the former over long periods. Where deskilled production governs educational expectations, cultural levels remain relatively low. Marx saw no escape from this situation so long as capitalism survived to impose its division of labor. But capitalism is alive and well long after the demand for skill has risen to encompass a significant fraction of the labor force. The consequence has been tremendous educational dynamism. Adult education, for example, now embraces more than half the students in American college programs, a reflection of the shortage of competencies in the labor pool. Yet one wonders how far this trend can go under capitalism. In the first place, the growing demand for educated labor in the advanced capitalist world is accompanied by the export of manufacturing to poor countries. While skilled and unionized manufacturing workers suffer steep declines in income and job security in the advanced countries, old fashioned patterns of industrialization appear everywhere else. The net effect may well be a global increase in deskilled work despite the contrary appearance in places such as Silicon Valley. Second, business leaders appear to be increasingly alarmed by the high cost of education which is now the largest budget item in practically every advanced capitalist nation. In the US, the promise of the Internet has inspired an ideological offensive in favor of automating and deskilling education. These problems suggest the continuing relevance of critical theory to educational policy. The Meanings of the Internet One of the first educational technologies was writing, and like every subsequent educational technology, it had its critics. Plato denounced the medium for its inability to recreate the give and take of spoken discourse. Writing is analogous to painting, he has Socrates argue in The Phaedrus (a text that, fittingly, depicts an intimate conversation between teacher and student). The painters' products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain the most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever (Plato, 1961: 521). In short, Plato holds that the technology of writing has the power to destroy the dialogic relationship that ought to join teacher and student. Technology in the form of writing is the enemy of the human touch, a position familiar from critics of modern life today. How often have we heard that technology alienates, "enframes" and dehumanizes, that technical systems intrude on human relations, depersonalizing social life and neutralizing its normative implications? Could it be that the humanistic bias against the computer can be traced back to Plato? Ironically, Plato used a written text as the vehicle for his critique of writing, setting a precedent that we continue to follow in present-day debates about educational technology: many of the most vociferous attacks on web-based media circulate on the Internet (Noble, 1997). As Plato sees it, the medium in which we communicate determines the quality of our interactions. But this is a deeply flawed view, as we have seen in the case of the Internet. Rather, the social impact of technology depends on how it is designed and used. Writing can lend itself to ongoing dialogues between teachers and students, and speech can easily become one-sided. However, while Plato's condemnation of writing was unfair, he alerts us to a real issue: whenever a new educational technology is introduced, arguments emerge for substituting interaction with the technology for the process of intellectual exchange. But there is something about dialogue, and the active involvement of the teacher, that is fundamental to the educational process and that should be woven into the design of every new instructional tool. Any break with this assumption would amount to an epochal change in the communication between the generations. Ultimately, then, the question comes down to whether we can still defend an understanding of education like Plato's or whether the Internet, a more powerful technology than writing, has finally rendered his conception obsolete. Neither television nor stand-alone computers ever managed to accomplish this feat, but many believe that such possibilities await us just a few miles down the information superhighway. The optimism of these advocates of automated education fuels long-standing humanistic distrust of computers. As discussed in the last chapter, the computer appears as the very emblem of the modern experiment in total rational control. It is this image of the computer that inspires much of the current rhetoric of online education, both for and against. To the extent that social thinkers fear or anticipate an automated society, they loath or admire the computer. While technocrats hail the power of the computer to render social life transparent and controllable, humanists foresee the domination of man by the machine. In 1962, Heidegger offered a typical example of this pessimistic view. He explains the difference between language as saying, as revealing the world by showing and pointing, and language as mere sign, transmitting a message, a fragment of already constituted information. The perfection of speech is poetry, which opens language to being. The perfection of the sign is the unambiguous position of a switch, on or off, as in Morse code or the memory of a computer. Heidegger writes, The construction and the effectiveness of mainframe computers rests on the basis of the techno-calculative principles of this transformation of language as saying into language as message and as the mere production of signs. The decisive point for our reflection is that the technical possibilities of the machine prescribe how language can and should be language. The type and style of language is determined according to the technical possibilities of the formal production of signs, a production which consists in executing a continuous sequence of yes-no decisions with the greatest possible speed . . . . The mode of language is determined by technique (Heidegger, 1998: 140, translation modified). And Heidegger goes on to announce the end of Man under the impact of the computer. Lyotard concurred in his 1979 book on The Postmodern Condition. Here is his account: Knowledge cannot enter these new [computer] channels . . . unless it is capable of being translated into quantities of information. It is predictable that everything belonging to the constituted body of knowledge that is not so translatable will be abandoned, and that the orientation of new research will be subordinated to the condition that the eventual results be translatable into machine language... Consequently, one can expect that knowledge will be rigorously externalized with respect to the 'knower' (Lyotard, 1979: 13, my trans.). Lyotard foresees the disappearance of humanistic culture and the complete commodification of knowledge in a postmodern society (Feenberg, 1995: chap. 6). These thinkers bring out the difference between knowledge considered as pure data, mere information, and knowledge as a living process of discovery, growth, and communication between human beings. A critique of automated education could be built on this basis, but it would be far too encompassing. Heidegger and Lyotard blame the problem on the structure of the computer as such and not on particular designs or applications. If they are right there can be no alternative realizations of the technology with different social consequences. It is digitization itself which is the villain. All this makes fun reading for philosophers, but it is embarrassingly wide of the mark. What has actually happened to language in a world more and more dominated by computers? Has it in fact been reified into a technical discourse purified of human significance? On the contrary, the Internet now carries a veritable tidal wave of "saying", of language used for expression as always in the past [3]. Of course, we may not be interested in much of this online talk, but that is another story. The simple fact of the case is that these philosophical reflections on the computer were wrong. They not only failed to foresee the transformation of the computer into a communication medium, but they precluded that possibility for essential reasons. It was only in the 1980s that electronic communication by computer exploded, moving beyond the corporate settings to which it had been largely confined up to then and entering the home. The first breakthrough occurred in France, where the Minitel system quickly attracted millions of users. Within a decade the Internet was to forever change the image of the computer. It was mainly nonprofessionals (or professionals not associated with the design and management of the systems) who pioneered these unexpected uses of the new technologies. And they succeeded because ordinary people wanted computers to serve personal goals and not just the official functions emphasized by experts. In the process they refuted widespread deterministic assumptions about the rationalizing implications of the computer and revealed its communicative potential. The Minitel was the first large scale domestic computing network. In the early 1980s, the French telephone company distributed six million terminals connected to a packet switching network to which servers could be easily hooked up. This was a national anticipation of what the Internet became on a global scale. The system was designed by telephone company technocrats who conceived it as a means of modernizing French society through improving citizen access to information resources. Human communication over computer networks was not originally part of the design or, where it was mentioned in early documents, it was far down on the list of priority functionalities. As a result, hardware and software were biased against human communication, although it was not technically impossible. Very quickly, hackers opened the network to human communication which soon became one of its central functionalities (Feenberg, 1995: chap. 7). This case is emblematic of the democratic transformation of technical networks by the human actors they enroll, innovating novel social forms. But is this transformation really significant from a democratic point of view? Isn't this just a "market rationalization" responding to commercial motivations? After all, most of the online communication supported by the Minitel system, as later with the Internet, is of no public significance. But transpose the case to a university campus and the point is clear. Suppose that the Chancellor promulgated a new rule forbidding all unofficial conversation on campus. That would surely be perceived as undemocratic, indeed, as positively totalitarian. And why? For two reasons: first, because it would reduce complex living persons to the simple functions they serve inside a specific institution; and second, because it would make it nearly impossible to articulate complaints that might lead to changes in the institution. Absurd as this example must seem, it may well apply to virtual campuses in which automated learning systems are substituted for human contact. In any case, this analogy illuminates the Minitel case. The doubling of real social space by the virtual space of computer networks opens new communicative possibilities for everyone. Limiting interaction to an official subset, such as business and government communication, has undemocratic implications online just as it would on campus. Fortunately, such limits have not been imposed. In the similar case of the Internet, the stakes reach well beyond the Minitel example. Corporate and government organizations globalize on the Internet today without restraint. Obstacles to human communication on computer networks, had they been introduced, would have prevented a comparable globalization of citizen critique. Events such as the World Trade Organization protests would have been that much less likely in an environment where business was ever more cosmopolitan and citizens still provincial in their contacts and attitudes. This is of course not to say that the Internet causes or determines anything in particular on either side of the lines of battle drawn in Seattle. But the exclusion of ordinary human communication from the Internet would certainly have had undemocratic consequences. This is the context in which to evaluate the opening of the networks by users to innovative communicative applications. Wise after the fact, we look back on the history of computing with the certainty that it was always meant to facilitate human contacts and then complain that it doesn't do as good a job as it should. If we "follow the actors", as Bruno Latour advocates, we discover a very different picture in which the networks are invented and reinvented by users as places of human encounter. Just twenty years ago, few imagined what the future would hold for apparently trivial applications such as email. But it seems obvious today that the computer is a vital medium of communication, and not just a calculating and information storage device. Its definition has changed in a direction determined by a social process. And the story is not yet over. The computer is not yet a finished product. It is still in flux, its evolution subject to a wide range of social influences and demands. But this fact also means that to the extent we depend on computers the very definition of modern life is still up for grabs. As universities move into online education, they are becoming one of the most significant fronts in this struggle over the meaning of modernity. The new computer-based initiatives polarize around two alternative understandings of the computer as an educational technology. Is it an engine of control or a medium of communication? This choice which faced Minitel and Internet users decades ago returns today as a live option in the world of education. The automation of education relies on the first option, an informating solution that incorporates human-to-human teaching relies on the second. In the remainder of this chapter, I will argue for that second solution as a progressive technical alternative. Automating Education Why would one want to automate highly skilled educational tasks? Some may argue that technology can deliver education more effectively than can faculty, empowering the learner who is presumed to be oppressed or at the least badly served by the teacher. Others would claim that automated instruction offers "consumer-friendly" options for working adults. Automated education is said to foster postindustrial virtues such as temporal and spatial flexibility, individualized products, and personal control. But in the final analysis, the main reason for automating is obvious: to cut costs. Costs, of course, are the concern of administrators and for too many of them the big issues in online education are not educational but financial. They hope to use new technology to finesse the coming crisis in higher education spending, and to accommodate exploding enrollments of young people and returning students. Automated online education is supposed to improve quality while cutting costs of delivery. Students in virtual classrooms need no new parking structures. What is more, courses can be packaged and marketed, generating a continuous revenue stream without further investment. All this should have a familiar ring since it describes traditional correspondence schools. These schools fed written documents or TV and radio broadcasts to isolated students studying in their homes. Compared to classroom education, the economies of scale in the production of documents and broadcasts yield tremendous cost savings. Labor costs approach zero as the school acquires a body of reusable materials and substitutes low wage graders for professional teachers. The Internet can raise the level of correspondence education inexpensively by improving the materials available to the student. To the extent that earlier attempts at replacing teachers failed for purely technical reasons, the Internet does show promise. In its ability to transmit graphically exciting materials and programs, as well as text, it represents a considerable advance over the correspondence schools of the past. It can even offer crude imitations of teacher-intensive tasks, such as answering questions using FAQ's (Frequently Asked Question lists) and "Ask the Expert" help programs. "Intelligent agents" can adapt computer-based programs to students' learning styles (Kearsley, 1993). And, incredibly enough, it may even be possible to automate the grading of some types of essay tests, as Peter Foltz and Thomas Landauer claim in describing their "Intelligent Essay Assessor", based on a technique called "Latent Semantic Analysis" (Foltz, 1996). According to a Coopers & Lybrand white paper, this kind of software will soon have a radical impact upon the daily realities of higher education. "[A] mere 25 courses" of packaged instructional software could handle 80% of enrollment in core undergraduate courses; a 24-hour help desk would add a personal touch (Coopers & Lybrand, 1997). The key to automation is to separate out informational "content" from "process". A small number of well paid "content experts" will work as "star" performers, while the delivery process is deskilled so that inexpensive tutors can handle interaction with students. In a really low cost solution, discussion can be replaced by automated exercises. Eventually it will be possible to dispense with campuses altogether. Students will pick out courses at an educational equivalent of Blockbuster and "do" college at home without ever meeting a faculty member or fellow student (Agre, 1999). As we saw in the last chapter, strategies of automation go way back. Skilled workers are expensive, and automation is a time-honored strategy for cutting costs. The story begins in the early 19th century, when textile manufacturers in northern England discovered that they could replace skilled with unskilled labor by mechanizing. The whole history of the Industrial Revolution is dominated by this strategy. Here is how the 19th century "philosopher of manufactures" Andrew Ure described the goal in 1835: By the infirmity of human nature it happens, that the more skillful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregularities, he may do great damage to the whole. The grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity (Ure, 1835: 18). Is such a gloomy version of the future of education really plausible? Is it likely that "self-willed and intractable" professors will disappear as have weavers, shoemakers, and typesetters? Probably not, but whether technology is about to deskill the professoriate is less important than the fact that this idea occupies a key place in the imagination of many educational reformers. The idea of replacing teachers by computers is an old one, but until recently few educational technologists and administrators were convinced. The ideal of automated education is no doubt still a minority view, but it has gained sufficient plausibility from advances in computing and the Internet to occupy a considerable space in public discourse. Other current buzz words such as "self-paced individualized instruction" feed into this trend. The essential idea is that in a future virtual university, accomplishment will no longer depend on contact hours, indeed, on contact with professors. Much of today's reform rhetoric, with its appeals to the revolutionary potential of virtual universities and competency-based degrees, hints at the obsolescence of the traditional campus and its teaching methods, arousing suspicion among faculty that technology will be used against them. In the longer run, should teachers really be expelled from the classroom, we would truly enter a new era. One fundamental project of modern societies, the substitution of technical control for traditional methods and devices for social arrangements, here overflows the sphere of production to which it has been largely confined up to now and enters the realm of social reproduction. In this model the "disembedding" of the educational process, its disconnection from the local setting of the campus, is also its depersonalization. If human contacts are no longer central in so fundamental a growth process as education, then surely we are headed for a very different ideal of adulthood and a very different kind of modern society from the one we live in at present. But is this a necessary consequence of modernization? Ironically, contemporary theory (if not practice) in the business world has left behind the industrial era's fascination with deskilling. Starting with Peters and Waterman's 1982 best seller In Search of Excellence, Frederick Taylor's old model of deskilled labor and hierarchical management was blamed for everything that ailed American business. Since then the lesson has been hammered home in dozens of similar books devoted to exploring a third way, an alternative to the old opposition of "man" versus "machine". As discussed in chapter 4, Shoshanna Zuboff's contribution to this literature emphasizes the complementarity of human and computer capabilities. While humans are best at dealing with unexpected situations and responding to novelty, computers can organize the vast amount of data required by modern production. A similar complementarity is at work in education: the teacher manages the complex and unpredictable communication process of the classroom, while data is delivered in textbooks (and now by computers as well). The specifics of the business literature do not always apply to colleges and universities, but Zuboff's emphasis on technological choice is relevant. Unfortunately, though, higher education hasn't quite gotten the message. Many college presidents continue to sell their constituents on the inevitability of computerization, as though the very existence of these new devices sets the reform agenda in some clear-cut and unambiguous way. And there still exists plenty of faculty opposition to the supposed consequences of the new media, as though their impact were predetermined (Feenberg, 1999; Farber, 1998). Higher education has a $200 billion budget and employs and services many millions of people. The shape of the educational future is the shape of our society, and increasingly it is corporate rather than professional models that prevail. The erosion of traditional faculty status continues apace in innovative institutions serving adult learners, now half the students in higher education. Even the older universities that now teach a declining fraction of students employ more and more part-timers in the search for "flexibility". And it is becoming more difficult to resist arguments against tenure which carry conviction with the public if not with most members of the university community. This explains why there is so much faculty resistance to new technology. Faculty detect continuity in administration enthusiasm for cost-cutting at the expense of traditional educational roles and values. Between 1970 and 1995, the number of full-time faculty increased by about half, while over the same period part-time faculty multiplied two and one half times. If the trend continues, part-timers will overtake full-time faculty on college campuses in several years. At community colleges, part-time faculty are already in the majority. This worrying trend parallels the growth of the nontraditional or returning student population. These students require different course schedules than the traditional ones to which faculty are attached. Largely because of this, adult education has developed outside the standard academic departments and procedures under direct administrative control. As a result, a vast parallel system of higher education has emerged in which faculty have low status and less power. Since it serves adult learners -- precisely the students most likely to be open to distance learning -- this parallel system has a free hand to experiment even if traditional universities resist. These trends set a precedent for administration strategies which, many fear, are moving from deprofessionalization to deskilling. The replacement of full-time by part-time faculty is merely the opening act in the plan to replace the faculty as such by CD ROMs. A new economic model of education is being sold under the guise of a new technological model. This is the route to what David Noble calls "digital diploma mills". Understandably, this is not a route many faculty wish to travel. The issue of educational technology must therefore be framed in a broader context because it is not primarily a technical issue. It reflects the changing relation of management and professionalism, which in turn concerns issues of career patterns, standardization, quality, and control. The resolution of these issues and the evolution of educational technology will go hand in hand. In short, there exists a great temptation to think of technology as a managerial tool for centralizing the university. Something like this may actually happen in the confusing environment created by technological change. Once in place, bad decisions will be locked in technically and difficult to reverse. Informating Education Technologies are not mere means to ends; they also shape worlds. What kind of world is instituted by the Internet? The basic fact about computer networks is scarcity of bandwidth. This limitation can be overcome now to the point where audio and video can be distributed on the Internet. That possibility inspires plans for automated education. But writing is the oldest technology we have for dealing with a narrow bandwidth. Plato was no doubt right to complain that writing cannot reproduce the actual experience of living human interaction. On the other hand, we now have a rich experience of written dialogue online. And we have discovered in that context that writing is not just a poor substitute for speech and physical presence but another fundamental medium with its own properties and powers. It is not impersonal, as is sometimes supposed. We know how to present ourselves as persons through written correspondence. Nor is it harder to write about ideas than to talk about them; most people can formulate difficult ideas more easily in written form than in speech in front of an audience. These considerations on writing hold the key to the informating of online education. The online environment is essentially a written world (Feenberg, 1989). In this section I will argue that electronic networks can be appropriated by educational institutions with this in mind, and not turned into automated teaching machines or poor copies of the face-to-face classroom which they cannot adequately reproduce. Wherever education takes place, the basic medium must be carefully distinguished from the enhancements and their roles distributed correctly. Speech is the basic medium in the classroom, supplemented with labs, movies, slides, text books, computer demonstrations, and so on. Similar enhancements to written interaction are possible on networks. No doubt these enhancements will continue to improve and perhaps someday change the nature of online education. But for many years to come, writing will continue to be the basic medium of online expression, the skeleton around which other technologies and experiences must be organized to build a viable learning environment. Confusing the medium with the supplementary enhancements leads to the pedagogical absurdity of teacherless education. To replace online written interaction with the enhancements makes no more sense than to replace the teacher in the face-to-face classroom with labs, movies, slides, text books, and computer demonstrations. That was tried long ago with educational television and computer-aided instruction without success. Despite the promise of automation, the ideal of dialogue has inspired some educational technologists since the early 1980s, and considerable progress has been made in using online education to support new forms of interaction among teachers and students (Harasim, et al., 1995: chap. 3; Berge, 1999). In 1981 I worked with the design team that created the first online educational program. This was the School of Management and Strategic Studies at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California (Feenberg, 1993). Our goal was to enable busy executives to participate in a humanistic educational experience despite job demands that made it impossible for them to attend regular university classes. The only way to do this at that time was the old-fashioned correspondence course, the reputation of which had fallen so low in the US we did not envisage it. Instead, we opted for computer networking, a still experimental technology available primarily in a few large computer companies and universities, and on small publicly accessible servers such as the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. These were the obscure forerunners of the Internet as we know it today. We succeeded in placing our school on EIES, and for nearly ten years I helped with its operation, trained teachers, and myself taught courses in it. When we started out online education was essentially untried. The equipment was expensive and primitive. We used Apple IIE's with 48K of memory and 300 baud modems. (Multiply by 1000 and 100 respectively to get current averages.) The complexity of basic computer operations in those days was such that it took a full page of printed instructions just to connect. The only available electronic mediation was asynchronous computer conferencing, which allows private groups to form online and share messages. Current online educational software such as Blackboard or Web CT continues to perform many of the functions of these early conferencing programs. None of us had ever been a student in an online class or seen one in operation, and we did not know the answers to the most elementary pedagogical questions, such as how to start a class, how long or short messages should be, and how often the teacher should sign on and respond to the students. We soon discovered that computer conferencing was not very useful for delivering lectures, and of course it could not support any graphical contents, even the simple drawings teachers like to scribble on the blackboard. After considerable trial and many errors, we discovered how to sustain a Socratic pedagogy based on virtual classroom discussion. The school soon grew to include over 150 students in 26 countries around the world and inspired other experiments in online education. The field grew slowly and quietly on this original dialogic basis throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Using email and computer conferencing, faculty in many American universities have for years now been reproducing the excitement of classroom discussion online. For the instantaneous back and forth of real-time discussion, a slower but still engaging day to day rhythm is substituted. With time to reflect and compose questions and answers, students who might never have participated in a face-to-face setting bring forward their ideas. The use of writing imposes a discipline and helps focus thinking. Faculty learn to grasp students' ideas at a much deeper level as they engage with them online. Innovative pedagogical techniques such as collaborative learning have been adapted to the Internet and new forms of interaction invented (Harasim, et al., 1995: chapter 6). In successful experiments, small classes are the rule: twenty is a good working number. There is little doubt that competent teachers under these conditions are able to reproduce a true equivalent of classroom interaction [4]. At WBSI, the emphasis was on human communication. Our version of online education was conceived in a break with the correspondence school model. We gave up the use of elaborate prepackaged materials in exchange for living interaction. That choice is no longer necessary. The Internet can now do more than merely improve the materials available in the traditional correspondence course; it can also add human contact to an educational model that has always been relatively impersonal. Using email and discussion forums, groups of students can be assembled in online communities where they can participate in classroom discussion with teachers on a regular basis. The gap between correspondence education and online learning as we implemented it twenty years ago can now be erased. An automated system of online education does not take advantage of this new potential of the Internet but perpetuates the old correspondence school model. It simply extends the economies of scale associated with the distribution of written materials into the wide range of media supported by the Internet (Agre, 1999). But the social condition for the cost savings achieved by correspondence schools, whether traditional or web-based, is the isolation of the student. On the other hand a system that also includes live interaction does so at a price: a qualified teacher must be in attendance at every iteration of the course. Institutions may save money on building costs but not on educational labor, the single largest item in most university budgets. What does this say about the ambition to replace campuses with virtual universities? Large markets for distance learning will undoubtedly emerge, and this will be a blessing for many students who cannot attend college classes. This trend has important implications not only for working adults in the advanced capitalist world but for residents of rural areas in poorer countries. But if higher education is cut loose from the traditional university and its values, the blessing will turn into a disaster. The best way to maintain the connection is through insuring that distance learning is "delivered" not just by CD ROM's, but by living teachers, qualified to teach and interested in doing so online. Then prepackaged materials will be seen to replace not the teacher but the lecture and the textbook. Interaction with the professor will continue to be the centerpiece of education, no matter what the medium. And of course for most people that interaction will continue to take place on campus if they have the means and the mobility to attend a college. Conclusion: The Future of Educational Technology Today we are confronted with two very different directions of development for democratic societies, one of which defines citizenship in terms of the functions individuals serve in systems such as markets, workplaces, and administrations, while the other conceives of the individuals as bearers of a range of potentialities that surpass any particular functional realization. The definition of those potentialities occurs in aesthetic experimentation, ethical and political debate, and technical controversies. The first view characterizes modernity as we know it. The tendency of this modernity is to replace human communication wherever possible by technical or bureaucratic systems that enhance the power of the few in the name of efficiency. Education, from this point of view, should be narrowly specialized and tightly controlled, both in terms of costs and content. Automated systems in which communication is restricted to the delivery of data and programs could serve this project. The second view holds out the possibility of an alternative modernity realizing human potentials ignored or suppressed in the present society. Many of those potentials are specifically communicative and depend on the very practices being eliminating under the present dispensation. Furthermore, those potentials can only express themselves in a communicatively open environment. This vision implies a broad education for citizenship and personal development, as well as the acquisition of technical skills. Educational technology will not determine which of these paths is followed. On the contrary, the politics of the educational community interacting with national political trends will steer the future development of the technology. And this is precisely why it is so very important for a wide range of actors to be included in technological design (Wilson, 1999). Students and faculty bring a number of considerations to the table, including the desire to create tools that support human interaction, a desire that has already manifested itself forcefully in the earlier evolution of the computer. Systems designed by administrations working with corporate suppliers will be quite different. Automating the classroom feeds directly into a preference for video, which seems to offer the closest equivalent to "real life" and a lot more entertainment. We are not talking about the old fashioned talking head video broadcast on TV networks, but a new kind of computer mediated video capable of much more elaborate presentations. This has implications for course design. Automated products will tend to be quite elaborate since they must rely entirely on the computer to dramatize their message and motivate the student. Courseware designers and producers will manage the work of star faculty who can offer polished performances in the new medium. Predictably, educational technology will evolve to Hollywood levels of complexity. When they actually engage with the new teaching technology, faculty sense immediately that it is not mature. In the actual experience of online education, technology is not a predefined thing at all, but an environment, an empty space faculty must inhabit and enliven. They have a craft relation to the technologies rather than a development strategy. They try to get the feel of it and figure out how to animate it, to project their "voice" in it. In doing so they are acting out of an ancient tradition which assigns education to human relations rather than devices. This difference is reflected in different technological emphases. While it would be nice to be a "star" professor in an automated virtual class, most faculty do not aspire to that exalted status. Live video, with its complicated and intimidating apparatus, holds little attraction for either teachers or students. Of course this may change as high-speed access over the Internet becomes commonplace, but we are many years away from achieving this in campus settings much less in the home. The graphical capabilities of computers are better compared to blackboards than to classrooms; they are supplements to, rather than replacements for, teaching. These considerations govern the design of online courses animated by a live professor. They will generally be created under his or her control in relatively simple and flexible formats. No computer professionals need be involved. As in the conventional classroom, much of the interest will lie in the interaction among students and between students and teachers. As far as techniques of presentation are concerned, a certain healthy amateurism is to be expected. Prepackaged computer-based materials will not replace the teacher but supplement his or her efforts, much as do textbooks today. Software designers will pursue user-friendliness and simplicity to serve faculty needs. Although neither video conferencing nor automated learning have caught on with faculty, there is a long history of interactive text based applications such as the experiment at WBSI described above. These experiences go back to a time when there were no more elaborate alternatives; it is widely assumed that the introduction of image and sound renders earlier approaches obsolete. But perhaps that is a mistake. The latest equipment is not always the best for the task. Could it be that our earliest experiences with computer conferencing were not merely constrained by the primitive equipment then available, but also revealed something important about electronically mediated education? I believe this to be the case. Even after all these years the exciting online pedagogical experiences still involve human interactions and for the most part these continue to be text based. But here is the rub: interactive text based applications lack the pizzazz of video alternatives and cannot promise automation, nor can they be packaged and sold. They do not conform to the fantasy of total central control over a flexible, disseminated system defying spatial and temporal boundaries. On the contrary, they are labor intensive and will probably not cut costs very much. Hence the lack of interest from corporations and administrators, and the gradual eclipse of these technological options in public discussion (if not on campus) by far more expensive ones. But unlike the fancy alternatives, interactive text based systems actually accomplish legitimate pedagogical objectives faculty and students recognize and respect. To resist the automating trend in education is not simply to wallow in an old-fashioned Mr. Chips sentimentality. Rather, it is a question of different civilizational projects with different institutional bases. The traditional conception of education must be preserved not out of uncritical worship of the past but for the sake of the future. I have tried to show here that the educational technology of an advanced society might be shaped by educational dialogue rather than the production oriented logic of automation. Should a dialogic approach to online education prevail on a large enough scale, it could be a factor making for fundamental social change. This prospect is explored in all its utopian implications in the next chapter. end
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