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[RRE]Agre on IT and the University 1/2
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Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 17:33:42 -0700 (PDT)
From: Phil Agre
The Distances of Education: Defining the Role of Information Technology in the University
Phil Agre http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
Revised text of a speech at California State University, Fullerton, August 1998.
This is a draft. You are welcome to forward it by electronic means to anyone for any noncommercial purpose, and to make a single paper copy for personal use. Please do not cite it or quote from it without permission. References and footnotes to follow. 5700 words.
1/ Institutions and technologies
As scholars we know that Western history has been organized in large part by the dialog of faith and reason. It is characteristic of modern secular society to partition faith from reason, identifying faith with the institutions and methods of religion and reason with the institutions and methods of technology. The historical reality, though, is much more complicated; in fact, faith and reason have interacted in immensely complex ways. This interaction can be seen plainly, for example, in the great era of institution-building that accompanied the dramatic social changes of the 12th century. During this period, scholars first institutionalized Western law. Although they drew particular rules from classical sources, these scholars modeled their conceptual framework on the law of the Catholic church. Similar processes of secularization took place across the whole of society, thereby building into much of the institutional memory of the West a specifically religious and nonsecular experience of the world that comes to the surface in many and varied ways.
Just as the original codification of Western law was patterned on an attempt to emulate and administer God's justice on earth, likewise the origins of Western technology were profoundly and explicitly aimed at emulating on earth the perfection of God's creation. Yet these amalgamations of faith and reason have never been stable, either intellectually or institutionally. The more that man emulated God, the more God receded. And the more distant God has seemed, the more intensively have Western social movements attempted to embody a pure faith in the form of millennialism. Millennialism, too, comes down to us in secularized forms, and many if not all of the accomplishments and atrocities of Western history have arisen through one or another of the complicated combinations of millennialist faith and systematic rationality that we inherit and embody in our every waking moment.
We moderns are frequently unconscious of this inheritance, and yet it is only in these terms that we can understand the claims, suddenly now much louder and more persistent, that the universities are on a collision course with new developments in information technology. Nothing is more secular, surely, than the universities and information technology, and yet history says otherwise. The tension between faith and reason has been central both to the institutional dynamics and the intellectual work of universities until comparatively recent times. And information technology, from its origins, inherited the religious projects of the Middle Ages. Babbage, for example, saw the computer not simply as a calculating device but as the main instrument of the engineer's God-like control over the perfectly created microcosm of the factory. And for Wiener, control theory expressed in technological terms the continual interventions by which God imposes order on the ever-threatening chaos of our world.
To await God or to become God: that is the organizing question of the Western institutional and technological tradition. The reason our contemporary situation seems so confusing is that this question is returning to the surface now in so many different ways. To make sense of the matter at hand, the role of information technology in the university, we need serious ideas both about institutions and technology and about the stories that our society tells about institutions and technology.
"Institutions" here means not simply "organizations" but rather the rules of the game, so to speak, by which human relationships are organized. Institutions go a long ways toward defining us all as individual social beings, inasmuch as we spend most of our waking hours living out the roles that various institutions have assigned to us. Technology, for its part, is a practice of ordering the world. Its most visible manifestations are technological artifacts like dams and engines and laptop computers, and yet technology is incomprehensible except through the far-flung networks that knit these artifacts into systems that are social at the same time as, and in the same ways in that, they are technical.
Institutions have a reputation for stability, remarkably and even notoriously, across decades and centuries; we understand them, however unconsciously, as a timeless intellectual order given material form -- instituted -- in the order of people's lives. Technology has a reputation as a revolutionary force, as a series of wholly novel intellectual systems given material form -- embodied as technique -- in the systems of people's lives. Those reputations -- the clash of order and revolution -- structure the stories we tell about institutions and technology. And these stories take on a special force when the institutions in question are universities, given the special role that universities play in articulating the intellectual orders and systems that then take on material form in the world.
It is people's lives we are talking about, not just their educations, and I want to frame my substantive discussion with two stories -- the stories of two people who have written to me about these matters on the Internet. One of them was a middle-aged computer programmer. He was proud of his work, and he was proud of it in a certain way. "Do you know all of those middle managers who were laid off during the early 1990's through downsizing?", he asks (and this is my paraphrase of his words from memory). "Well, I did that. Technology that I worked on made it possible for organizations to expand managers' span of control and thus reduce the number of layers in the hierarchy." Those middle managers were redundant, and he was proud to have put them on the street. His next target, he told me, is college professors. He figures that a suitable cost for four years of college education is something on the order of $60. He knew that I knew what he meant. He was alluding to the economics of the software industry, and of information generally. Nathan Myhrvold says that with personal computers you get $100 million worth of software. Lest this phenomenon seem remarkable, we are already familiar with it at the movies, where we think nothing of, as in the case of "Titanic", getting $200 million worth of movie for $7. A college education in a box, distributed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, could cost billions to produce and still turn a profit, at the cost of putting the great majority of now-redundant professors on the street, and good riddance. At least that is his plan.
My other correspondent was a fellow who was dissatisfied with his undergraduate education in art. None of his art professors, he asserted, would be able to make a living by selling their academic artworks, and these professors made little attempt to teach their students the skills that would let them make a living. His complaint was not that this particular art school had misrepresented itself as a practically-minded place, and he had no patience for the suggestion that he would have been happier if he had chosen such a place himself. His complaint was that such academically-minded art schools existed at all, and he would be pleased for them to disappear.
Neither of these views is at all unusual. The question is, are they reasonable? We will begin to understand our opportunities and responsibilities as members of a university in a rapidly changing technological environment, I would suggest, once we have learned to distinguish the elements of truth in each of these views from the elements of historically conditioned misconception. And that is what I propose to do here today.
2/ The standard theory
To get the process started, we need to put on the table what is, by now, the standard story about information technology and higher education. This story emanates, more or less, from two parties: ideological opponents of the professoriat who believe that the universities have been taken over by tenured radicals whose values are at odds with those of the broad populace, and software vendors such as Larry Ellison of Oracle who see a substantial market opportunity in the provision of content and infrastructure for a radically different institutional model of the university. In each case, and despite some variation, the story is a story of revolution. It has eight parts.
(1) The universities are now a centralized command-and-control system under the domination of an academic elite.
(2) The Internet, however, can change this situation by making instructional delivery possible over an arbitrary distance.
(3) In this new dispensation, students will have more choice. They will assemble their educations, mix and match, by combining courses from many institutions.
(4) Course outcomes will be measured by examination or portfolio systems that are operated independently of the universities by centrally organized testing services or accrediting organizations.
(5) Rather than confine themselves to a university campus for a fixed portion of their lives, students will learn on a just-in-time basis across their whole lifetimes.
(6) Competition in the market will ensure quality and eliminate inputs that do not contribute sufficiently to the measured outcomes.
(7) Universities, unfortunately, are backward organizations, slow to adopt technology, and will resist these threatening innovations.
(8) Those universities that do not adapt, however, will be left behind, their customers steadily siphoned off by more enterprising competitors.
I hope that you are familiar with this story, and that you find my paraphrase of it to be reasonably fair. For even though I do not wish to reject this story in its entirety, I feel that analysis can hardly begin until we take the measure of its remarkable naivete about numerous aspects of institutions and technologies as they function in the real world.
A suitable place to begin is with the aforementioned economics of information. Among all economic goods, information is unique in that it can generally be consumed without destroying it. Once the first copy of a literary work or computer program or newspaper has been manufactured, further copies can be manufactured for a negligible marginal cost. This fact creates paradoxes for economists, who hold that the price of a good in a functioning market should approach the marginal cost of producing it. Information goods, however, mock this principle because of their vast economies of scale. A company with twice the market share, other things being equal, can afford to sell its product for half as much. That is one reason why different segments of the software market tend to become monopolies. Although information technology is supposed to decentralized society, the software industry is hardly decentralized. And as more and more industries begin to depend heavily on software, trends toward centralization and consolidation may intensify.
Proponents of the standard story about information technology and higher education are aware of these phenomena. They believe that markets for higher education will be saved from monopoly by the sheer cheapness of the products, so that price will become a secondary consideration in consumers' decisions. But even this scenario depends on each course being taught by a handful of star professors, each reaching millions of students, as opposed to the thousands of professors who now reach tens or hundreds of students at a time. This tendency of information markets to create powerful hierarchies of stars and also-rans among the producers is not limited to taped lectures and other classware. But it is plainly the opposite of the standard story: a more concentrated elite and more centralization of control over what is taught in universities.
Nor does the standard story deliver greater competition. Universities already compete intensively for students, differentiating their programs and building their reputations. Competition for the best faculty is strenuous as well. Students choose their educations in two- or four-year blocks, but they have thousands of universities to choose from. Information technology reduces costs by distributing the same information to many people, and in so doing it reduces choice by the same factor. True, the market for higher education will increase as prices drop, but the opportunity cost of studying will soon dominate the other costs for most students at the margin, and so the magnitude of this effect -- and the net effect on competition -- remains to be seen.
Another element in the standard story is what British universities call "modularity" and American universities call "articulation" -- the ability to assemble a degree program from standardized elements chosen from many different universities. To the extent that a testing service or accrediting organization defines the boundaries of the modules, substantive choice is once again reduced; universities are compelled to shift from a strategy of differentiation based on their programs as a whole to a strategy of cost competition based on their individual offerings, each of whose contents is now effectively controlled by an institution that better resembles a centralized command-and-control system than anything we have now. Curricula will be standardized, and faculty will effectively lose the ability to write their own syllabi.
These depressing consequences of the standard story are particularly ironic given the reality of its claims that universities are slow to adopt technology. The Internet was largely developed in an academic environment, and the United States' aggressive policy of providing college students with free access to the Internet is largely responsible for the very rapid diffusion of Internet use through American society. Academics embraced computer networking for pedagogical purposes from its early days, and already in 1982 Andrew Feenberg, a philosopher at San Diego State, was conducting some of the first distance education classes under the auspices of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. Before the great majority of the public had even heard of the Internet, and before the great majority of the ideologists and software vendors who now promote the standard story had come to recognize the Internet's importance, academics had already conducted and reported upon scores of diverse experiments in Internet-based instruction. These experiments developed naturally within the Internet's governing philosophy of democratic, bottom-up, interactive, and decentralized modes of interaction -- all of which stands in stark contrast to the centralized, top-down, command-and- control oriented systems that the proponents of the standard story, advertisements notwithstanding, are in fact envisioning. A university is not a database.
On critical examination, then, the standard story about the place of information technology in higher education is a mess, and yet this intellectual realization does remarkably little to shake the standard story's hold on our imaginations. Why is this? The standard story exerts its hold, I would argue, because it is one branch of a much deeper story about technology and institutions -- a secularized millennialism that functions very much as a religion gone bad. In contemporary discourse, this sort of millennialism is indexed by the notion of cyberspace: a space of disembodied relationships whose logic will inevitably displace the familiar logic of the corporeal world. The Internet, on this view, is the herald of a total, discontinuous revolution. The reasoning is very much that of a cult: all of your experience and common sense represent the past, the technology represents the future, and so if you want to have a future then you will let go of the past and adopt the technology. Implicit in this reasoning is a cast of characters: those who accept the inevitability of the technology are the vanguard of the revolution, and those who reject the technology deserve nothing but scorn. It is important to see that this choice -- accept or reject the technology -- is itself an artifact of the millennialist reasoning. Those who actually do reject technology, in other words, are playing a role in the very same drama as those who enthusiastically embrace it. The choice itself is false.
3/ Values in technology
Part of the problem here lies with the word technology, which tends to shift silently among a number of different uses. Its narrowest use, as I explained at the outset, pertains to physical artifacts. But technological artifacts do not simply drop from the sky. They normally come to us as part of a package deal, surrounded by a cloud of cultural meanings and knitted into a network of institutional arrangements. Yet because we tend to focus our attention on the artifacts, the artifacts tend to serve an ideological purpose: the cultural meanings and the institutional arrangements become invisible, as if they were inscribed into the artifact, or as if they issued forth inevitably from its technical workings narrowly defined. In fact, the relationship between artifacts, meanings, and institutional arrangements are complicated and highly variable. Does the Internet bring us a decentralized society? Certainly not. Does the world that brought us the Internet also bring us a decentralized society? That is a different question. Do artifacts dictate how they will be used? Only partially. Does the world that brings us artifacts dictate how we will use them? Never totally, but sometimes quite a lot.
Another problem pertains to information technology in particular. Information technology is enormously plastic. The way you design a computer, after all, is to pick a metaphor, any metaphor, and ```
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