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On
the Evils of Technology in Academia:
A reporter called me the other day with one question:
"Are you for or against the virtual university?"
After a big sigh I replied that I am for any little thing that might
possibly improve education in this country.
"Does online technology improve education?" he asked.
"That depends entirely on who is using it," said I.
Here is what I think. Anyone who says that technology will either
save or corrupt the American college system is flinging fat red herrings off impossibly
high intellectual rooftops. Let me explain.
I had the worst academic experience of my life as a wide-eyed
freshman in Indiana in 1977 -- the Ed Tech Dark Ages. I had to take courses via
warm-body-instruction because no other option existed. I did not own a laptop computer
because no such thing existed. Computers would not fit into anyone’s lap back then;
to be honest, they barely fit into stadium-sized computer science buildings.
On campus at a small, private, liberal arts college, my freshman
year, I had a tenured, Ivy League-educated professor for a course in the History of the
Civil War. This professor never bathed, came to class drunk, incessantly referred to me --
the only girl in the class -- as "chickee baby," and taught not the social and
economic history of the civil war -- which I had come to learn -- but the great winning
military battle strategies of the 1860s as taught to him in his days as a West Point
cadet.
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It was a very long semester. The hardest "A" of my
intellectual life. I won that "A" battle by battle -- and I do mean that quite
literally.
I learned that semester the proper way to bayonet a foe from
horseback. I also learned that not all professors were the intellectual gods I had naively
imagined them to be. I learned that semester that John Henry Newman’s concept of the
university as a great "Alma Mater" or bountiful intellectual mother was perhaps
more of a sentimental Victorian ideal than anything else.
More importantly, I learned that a liberal arts education in this
country is truly open to anyone. Visionaries, geniuses, and madwomen -- come one, come
all. And I learned that this wide range of intellectual aptitude applies as equally to the
professorate as it does to the student body.
My point is that my civil war professor taught poorly for 50 years
using the no-tech tools of chalk and slate. I dare say had he been given a modem he would
have proved no less intellectually deadly.
Likewise, I have recently seen students ground into intellectual
road-kill by poorly designed keyboard colleges. Just this semester I advised a colleague
of mine to take an online course in computer programming from a leading university
provider of online education in this country.
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My colleague may never figure me. She was kind enough to show me the
entire course in action, online. Well, "in action" is probably the wrong term:
educationally inert describes it all much better.
"Where are the instructor’s comments?" I asked.
"What instructor?" she asked. Every week the instructor would e-mail my
colleague some Power Point slides. Just the slides. No comment on what they were meant to
refer to, no reference as to why they were sent. She showed the slides to me. "Do
these help you learn?" I asked her. "No," she said, "They must be
pulled from his face-to-face course lectures because they do not correspond to what
I’m reading here on my own."
Halfway through the course my colleague finally e-mailed the
instructor, who had been dutifully collecting weekly assignments, but not grading them, to
ask about her status. Ten days later she got an e-mail that read: "You hav an a. God
jobe." Except for the baffling Power Point slides, this was the first and last my
colleague heard from her online professor.
Though online discussion boards existed for posting questions, only
the students used the boards. The instructor never typed-in a word of commentary or
concern.
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My colleagues impression of an online university is that she took a
course and dutifully did her part but that no professor ever actually showed up to assist,
mentor, inform, evaluate, or encourage her. She found this odd. I do too.
In my mind what my colleague received online was a high-tech and
somewhat high-priced version of "chickee baby." My point here: technology does
not teach, people do. Not all bad professors teach via modem and not all good instructors
are without the tools of technology. America’s universities may be built of
brick-and-mortar or they may be built of silicon chips: clearly we will have it both ways
in this country because we need it both ways.
Brick-and-mortar is great for 18 year-olds who need the social
emancipation experience that place-bound education delivers in large doses. Desktop
universities are sorely needed by 42 year-old single, working mothers who literally cannot
stuff themselves, their children, and the family dog back into a brick-and-mortar
dormitory.
Technology and education have always been uneasy bedfellows. People
write and speak as if technology in education is a unique new danger for the next
millennium. It is not. When the printing press popularized written texts many warned that
education via printed books would ruin the academy because it would mean that people would
read, write, and memorize rather than speak and debate -- the original methods of
classical instruction honored in both Greece and Rome and, as far as we know, for all of
human prehistory.
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When the printed text entered academia, students and professors
alike lost much of their ability to think and reason on their feet. Teaching critical
thinking via in-class debate fell rapidly by the wayside. And that’s a shame. On the
other hand, both professors and students gained the ability to create more lasting,
complex, and portable arguments and investigations via writing and print technology.
The printed book was the first virtual university. A technological
marvel that allowed for the transcontinental transmission of knowledge. Think about it. A
printed book is a first-class distance learning experience: a class in full swing without
the professor present. Talk about distance learning: the printed book delivers to students
the ideas of those long dead. Yet in the early days of academia the mass distribution of
knowledge via printed books was denounced as technological high evil by many.
The fountain pen for quick note-taking. The printed teaching text.
The CD-ROM course pack. And now Internet conferencing systems. Each time a new tool has
made in-roads into academia the nature of education has changed. Not gotten better or
worse, mind you, just changed.
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America’s universities will be built of brick-and-mortar AND
they will be built of silicon chips. We will have it both ways because we live in a
knowledge society that desperately needs it both ways. When it comes to learning in a
knowledge society, once is not enough. Education must be a lifelong pursuit. Portable
universities will increasingly pop-up inside laptop computers.
Dr. Thomas A. Clark, co-author of the classic book, "Distance
Education: The Foundations of Effective Practice," once wrote: "(Educational)
media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but (they) do not influence student
achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in
nutrition."
Whether students learn anything of use at the universities of
tomorrow will not depend on the edifice of the institution itself. Bigger buildings have
never made better scholars. The quality of education in tomorrow’s universities will
depend, as always, not on the physical edifice, but on the quality of thought and heart
that goes into designing and delivering the overall educational experience.
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