Technology is storming campuses across North America. This takeover is occurring with the same seeming urgency with which technology is penetrating every aspect of life. The hype surrounding computer technology and its educational applications is reminiscent of the introduction of technologies throughout history - big promises, many disappointments, some unintended consequences, some disastrous effects.
The automobile provides a good lesson. Early motorists were lured into the car market by the promises of adventure and freedom through mobility. The folks selling us vehicles for the information highway are promising an improved quality of life and learning. To avoid atmospheric degradation and the techno-travellers' variation on gridlock, we need to take the time to ask some serious questions.
Our teaching has a history, too. Traditional pedagogical approaches emphasized the teacher as knowledge broker and the student as receiver of knowledge. The work was about content mastery. The "new" pedagogy - some refer to it as critical pedagogy, others as social constructivism - emphasizes the student as learner in a social context and knowledge as produced within a social context. This student-centred pedagogy seems to have been more thoroughly adopted at the elementary level where teachers are working to accommodate individual differences and build social systems. It is our argument that the pedagogy that characterizes much of the teaching at the post- secondary level is presently inadequate for evaluating the opportunities and the dangers of educational technology. Insights from student-centred elementary contexts along with ground-breaking work with educational technology at the post-secondary level provide the basis for our insistence that in considering educational technology, pedagogical concerns and support for professional development should receive top priority.
The introduction of new technologies on a mass scale in North America has relied upon a widespread and systematic marketing campaign, one that equates the adoption of new technology with achievement (or increasingly, retention) of the "good life", and ties the failure to adopt new technology with dire individual and social consequences. Historically, a utopian vision has ushered in technological change. It is not until we find ourselves virtually enslaved to it (Mander, 1991) cites the examples of the automobile and the telephone) that we start to identify the wide range of implications, intended and unintended, of its use. The same corporations are using the same marketing plan to urge post-secondary educators to adopt educational technologies - promises and paranoia. There are promises that inadequate pedagogy will be made good by the technology; there is paranoia that without technology societal slippage in international trade will continue, and lowered standards of living will be the consequence for post-secondary graduates who will not have the skills necessary for decent employment.
We are told that North American economies are becoming less competitive internationally. Declining trade advantages are supposedly behind the deficit and the accompanying cuts in social spending. The "good life" is threatened. The only way to revive it is through technological advances. Rising unemployment is blamed on a lack of job related training, and computer skills are portrayed as the means by which individuals can participate in the technological revolution. For this economic revival, we are told we must re-tool our educational institutions to produce a highly skilled workforce.
This marketing strategy ignores the fact that jobless growth has been one consequence of new technologies the introduction of which has been accompanied by the globalization of capital, the internationalization of work, and the downsizing of government.
Rather than delivering the "good life," the impact of computer technology on the economies of the industrialized world has been dehumanizing. Jeremy Rifkin documents the grim story in his book, The End of Work - The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post Market Era. Between 1989 and `93, more than 1.8 million workers in the manufacturing sector in the United States lost their jobs. The steel industry cut its workforce in half in fifteen years. In 1850, 60 per cent of the working population of the United States was employed in agriculture; today it is less than 2.7%. The numbers from Germany, Finland, Canada and Japan are equally sobering.
If you think these workers have landed on their feet in new technologies jobs, or in the expanding service sector, Rifkin suggests you think again. Of the 1.8 million displaced manufacturing workers, one third found new jobs in service, but at a 20 per cent drop in pay. These low-paying jobs are often part-time, and without benefits. Guy Standing refers to the trend of replacing well-paying permanent blue-collar jobs with poorly paying, part-time, temporary, service jobs as the "feminization of labour" (Standing, 1989, pp. 1077-1095). This change in the nature of work has enabled major corporations to pay $22 million less in wages over the decade of the 1980s.
The jobs that haven't been automated out of existence in the industrialized countries have been moved out of reach of their incumbent workers moved off shore to poor countries where poor wages and poor working conditions put more pressure on the remaining workers in Canada and the US to keep their expectations low. This movement has itself been facilitated by the automation of financial work and the virtual world of banking supported by technology.
Promises of the "good life" via the computer revolution have not been realized for most people. The winners of this revolution are referred to by Rifkin as "the new cosmopolitans," as he records the fact that in 1953 executive compensation was 22 per cent of corporate profits; in 1987, 61 per cent. In 1979 the CEO earned 20 times the wage of the average manufacturing worker; in 1988, the CEO took home 93 times as many dollars as her/his employee. And in some macabre sense of balance, the number of people living in poverty has grown remarkably, too. In 1989, 31.5 million Americans lived in poverty, in 1991 it was 35.78 million, in 1992, up to 36.9 million (Rifkin, 1995).
Technology has definitely delivered on its promise of efficiency and productivity growth. Market forces and globalization have turned these productivity gains into handsome profits for a very small sector of society. We have to wonder what substance lies behind the promises associated with emerging technologies in education, and whether the distribution of advantage will be as uneven as it has been in the manufacturing sector.
The silicon snake-oil sellers (Stoll, 1995) do not draw to our attention the dangerous consequences of technology. The same automobile that promised freedom and adventure has fouled the neighbourhood, snarled our adventure with congestion, threatened our supply of fossil fuels, made a mockery of "rush" hour, and killed many of our citizens. Chernobyl, the greenhouse effect, PCBs in breast milk, the Love Canal, and asbestos come to mind as we reflect on our technological "progress".
The naive view of technology as value neutral has been challenged by scholars who have demonstrated that technology is conceived and constructed within specific social circumstances and has implications for social relations. Ursula Franklin makes a distinction between holistic technologies and prescriptive technologies, the former being technologies that enable egalitarian relationships by their use, the latter being technologies that are founded on hierarchical relationships.
Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal- smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. (Franklin, 1990, p. 18)
In contrast, prescriptive technologies entail a division of labour whereby "the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps" (Franklin, 1990, p. 24). A worker or group of workers carries out each step in isolation from other workers performing different steps. It is this very combination of the division of labour and atomism of tasks that necessitates a supervisory relationship. The distinction between prescriptive and holistic technologies is one between control-related and work-related production processes.
Franklin counsels us to attend not only to what technology enables, but also to what it prevents. The efficiency and potential for precision associated with prescriptive technologies have produced products that have raised our standards of living while at the same time creating a "culture of compliance" through inappropriate application of this model to virtually every sphere. She warns of the danger of imposing a prescriptive model on education, for example:
If there ever was a growth process, a process that cannot be divided into rigid predetermined steps, it is education. (Franklin, 1990, p. 29)
Postman notes that "the uses made of any technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself... functions follow from its form" (Postman, 1993, p. 7). Encoded within the technology are criteria for social relationships.
Just as technologies, or specific uses of technologies can separate bosses from workers, they can create insiders and outsiders in other ways. Rifkin's data speaks to the winners and losers of the technologically restructured economy. Postman identifies the insiders who "can do" when he observes, "those who cultivate competence in the use of a new technology become an elite group that are granted undeserved authority and prestige by those who have no such competence" (Postman, 1993, p. 9). Insider and outsider status along gender lines is documented by Wajcman who notes, "As with science, the very language of technology, its symbolism, is masculine" (Wajcman, 1991, p. 156). The earliest contacts children have with computers leave a masculinist imprint - from the home-computer usually purchased for the boys in the family to the harassment of girls in schools by boys monopolizing computers, from the war-game based video games and software culture to the association of computing with mathematics rather than language. Girls are either denied access to this sphere or not encouraged to become involved in it the way that (especially middle-class) boys are (Hickling-Hudson, 1992, pp. 1-21). In the world of work, the kind of contact women have with computers tends to reinforce women's marginalization. Computer technology reflects and reinforces existing relations of power in society.
Postman has special concerns about the impact that technology in the classroom can have on social relationships.
In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred-year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility ... Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? (Postman, 1993, p. 17)
The promise and paranoia of technology in society are duplicated in our schools, with zealots guaranteeing educational transformation, and critics warning of the development of a generation of antisocial nerds. If technology has earned mixed reviews in society, what is its school report card?
The Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) project in the United States, launched ten years ago to study the productive use of technology in schools reported recently that "What happens in the classroom is largely the responsibility of the teacher. More or better technology isn't enough" (Fisher et al, 1996, p. 215). Fisher et al concluded that the problems holding back the use of technology in schools are social, not technological (1996, p. 219). If technology alone could improve teaching and learning, their research would have documented improvements in student learning in all subject areas, improvements they say were simply not to be found. They cautioned schools against the rush to "glittery application", recommending instead "technology use ... grounded firmly in curriculum goals, incorporated in sound instructional process, and deeply integrated with subject-matter content" (Fisher et al, 1996, p. 200)
At the post secondary level, too, researchers are cautious about crediting technology with educational improvement. Schierman and Jones acknowledge that there is an assumption that technology is de facto beneficial to educational endeavors. However, they conclude from comprehensive, large-scale analyses of reports of benefit (e.g. Wilkenson 1980; Clark 1983) "that claims of large gains in achievement are not warranted and, indeed, that the attribution of measurable gains in achievement to the use of any educational technology should be viewed with caution, since factors other than those cited as the cause of achievement gains may be responsible" (Schierman and Jones, 1996, p. 65).
Nonetheless, the technology has its champions who say that achievements online are equal or superior to those generated in face-to-face situations (Harasim et al, 1996, p. 27). Harasim and her colleagues argue that the primary goals of the virtual classroom are to improve both the access to educational opportunities, and the quality of the educational process itself. They claim that in the majority of cases, these goals were achieved (Harasim et al, 1996, p. 88).
Furthermore, they argue that, "Active learning is a major outcome of learning networks" (Harasim et al, 1996, p. 29). Indeed, they seem to claim that because of technology, learning environments are more democratic, teachers and students are more respectful of group knowledge, interaction is increased, and is of better quality (Harasim et al, 1996, p. 28).
Chris Dede is another who extols the virtues of virtual education claiming that,
The innovative pedagogies empowered by these emerging media, messages, and experiences make possible an evolution ...into an alternative instructional paradigm: distributed learning. In particular, advances in computer- supported collaborative learning, multi-media/hypermedia, and experiential simulation offer the potential to create shared 'learning-through-doing environments' available any place and any time. (Dede, 1996, p. 4)
The implications of the technology are complex, the jury is not yet in on the benefits. As busy educators, from Kindergarten to post-secondary levels, the choices about technology in our classrooms are troublesome. We could ignore it, committing ourselves to the classical tradition. We could leap on the bandwagon and hope we can determine where it is going. We could be fatalistic, acknowledging the inevitability of the technological takeover of our social and intellectual lives and admitting to our own powerlessness in the face of it. We could engage critically, applying our own skills of scholarship and accepting the responsibility for advocacy that accompanies our chosen profession.
Assuming that technology will not be absent from the future of the students we teach, we support Penley and Ross's call for the creation of a technoliterate critical mass. While acknowledging that "the odds are firmly stacked against the efforts of those committed to creating technological countercultures," they argue that there is a "pressing need for more, rather than less, technoliteracy - a crucial requirement not just for purposes of postmodern survival but also for the task of decolonizing, demonopolizing, and democratizing social communication" (Penley and Ross, 1991). Technoliteracy is the work of the classroom.
Post-secondary institutions are experiencing their own "new economy" of competition, shortages of resources, and drive for "market share" in the form of recruitment of students and "increased productivity" of faculty. Technology is promised as a solution to these campus problems, one that will reduce costs, improve teaching, provide evidence of the "currency" of the institution, and help graduates develop the job specific skills that will make them employable in Rifkin's brave new world.
Technology, of course, will not necessarily do any of these things. It does seem however, to attract endowments and contributions from corporations, and it seems to be an aspect of campus infrastructure that even cash-strapped institutions will consider as an investment. It may also introduce enough tension and dissonance in the traditional classroom as to provide opportunity for teachers and students to examine the way they work together. There is some evidence that when one change occurs, all things suddenly seem to be open to review.
In arguing that technological change is ecological, says that
It is not possible to contain the effects of a new technology to a limited sphere of human activity...one significant change generates total change (Postman, 1993, p. 18).
The ACOT reviewers reported that their project provided an opportunity to demonstrate how children and schools could work differently. They described technology as an engaging medium for student thought and collaboration, and claimed that the smart (our emphasis) use of technology could increase student academic performance and support the acquisition of a whole new set of twenty-first-century competencies (Fisher et al, 1994, p. 29).
What is a smart use of technology, and who are the smart users? Is Harasim correct that active learning is an outcome of online education, or is online learning only productive if it is active? Are teachers who use technology smartly predisposed to democratic, collaborative, problem based pedagogy, or does technology bring these behaviors into the classroom? Can we analyze the impact of technology separate from the impact of teaching with technology? Does improved student learning occur only when technology is introduced along with different teaching practices? What teaching practices are best suited to maximizing the potential of technology to improve student learning? Or more fundamentally, what teaching practices are best suited to improving student learning?
The attributes that Harasim assigns to online learning can and do exist in thriving non-wired classrooms, especially at the elementary level. A similar set of attributes appears as the Principles of Learning established by the Government of the Province of British Columbia, principles intended to "guide all aspects of educational practice including curriculum development, instructional planning and practice, resource selection, school and classroom organization, assessment, evaluation and reporting." These principles are:
It is the expectation of the government, at least theoretically, that in all classrooms learning will be "purposive, reflective, negotiated, critical, complex, situation driven, and engaged" (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 1993), emerging technology or no emerging technology.
A closer look at Dede's 'technologically empowered' pedagogies reveals that they are
analogical, case-based, learning-by-doing ... giving learners constructivist experiences, facilitating comprehension and ability to generalize ... structuring group dialogue and decision making, facilitating collective activities. (Dede, 1996, p. 13)
While it may be pointless to have a "what came first" debate about technology and critical pedagogy, we must concede their interrelatedness. It is important to focus our attention on what Fenstermacher calls the "manner and method" (Fenstermacher, 1992), or Postman the "metaphysical and mechanical" Postman, 1995) of teaching. To fail to recognize, as Cuban says, "Our character as human beings and how we teach become what we teach" (Cuban, 1992, p. 9) is to concentrate on the carving tools while ignoring the sculptor.
Martin Haberman puts it bluntly, "No school can be better than its teachers" (Haberman, 1995, p. 777). He calls for teachers to know what they do and why they do it. The technology they use is not neutral, nor is their pedagogy. The ACOT researchers found that well-grounded teachers were positioned to make the most of new tools.
Classroom innovators are often teachers who have strong beliefs about how students can learn, a passion for teaching, and some idea of how technology can help everyone involved to do things a little better or a little differently. (Fisher et al, 1994, p. 207)
And, ACOT indicated, teachers made fundamental changes in their practice.
Over time, ACOT's design changed from computer saturation which supported the existing knowledge transfer approach to learning, to the current emphasis on routine access where technologies are used to support collaborative, project-based knowledge construction. (Fisher et al, 1994, p. 268)
Experienced designers of distance education programs at the post-secondary level concur that good learning experiences for students are the result of careful foresight.
We invite course designers to foster the open-ended, collaborative, and reflective processes that this medium can deliver, while still relying on conventional ISD models as heuristics. Designers need to attend to both the role and the extent of online activities to their total course, as well as seek a match among teacher, learner, format and content. (Berg and Collins, 1996, p. 79)
Further, there are specific teaching behaviors that seem to be influential at the Virtual U. Harasim says
a learner-centered (rather than teacher-centered) model has been found as the best fit online. CMC is meant for the sharing and building of ideas, information and skills among the participants to strengthen knowledge building, integration and application of conceptual information. (Harasim et al, 1996, p. 24)
She devotes considerable attention to the consequences of moving from teacher to facilitator, identifying key behaviors that may or may not exist "offline" but are considered essential to successful teaching online, including setting the stage, monitoring and encouraging participation, forming groups, assigning role responsibilities, moderating and facilitating group processes, establishing norms and grading performance.
While Paulsen acknowledges that "moderators [of computer conferences] will perceive their role ... in light of their basic theories and philosophies toward education," he cites the work of Mason, Forsyth and Brochet in identifying "task roles and socioemotional roles", "organizational, social and intellectual roles" or the contribution of the moderator as "goal setter, discriminator, host, pace setter, explainer, entertainer" to ensure a successful computer conference (Paulsen, 1996, p. 83).
Rohfeld and Hiemstra, too, define the electronic classroom as a place for collaborative learning. They return to the "essence" of learning, plugged in or not.
Teaching through discussion relies on a learner- centered approach, whether the participants meet face to face or on the computer screen. It rests on principles of collaborative learning and egalitarian relationships." (Rohfeld and Hiemstra, 1996, p. 91)
Because helping learners take increasing control over personal learning is a goal for most educational endeavors, computer-mediated conferencing can be supportive of such fundamental educational values. (Rohfeld and Hiemstra, 1996, p. 102)
The preponderance of references to student-centered learning, a democratic learning environment, the shared construction of knowledge and the changing of teaching practices in these reviews of the positive presence of technology on campus persuades us that technology and critical pedagogy have a promising relationship. Still, the improvement of pedagogy is a good end in itself, and critical pedagogy has a role larger than guiding learning online.
It is not enough for educators to provide students with a map of the information highway. There are critical questions to consider about highways in general, and how humans travel through their environment.
Introducing new technologies into our classrooms is an activity of great consequence, because, like other technological change, it is the re-tooling of the social. Postman reminds us that
New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop. (Postman, 1993, p. 20)
At the same time, in urging us to avoid demonizing technology, Haraway argues that the boundary between the "natural" and the "artificial," i.e. the technological, is entirely political. She points out that we fear the technology that is alien, while we welcome other technology, such as the contact lens, the ball point pen, general anesthesia, convincing ourselves that it is not "really" technology (Haraway, 1991). This confusion characterizes our failure to view technology as social practice and hence in need of the same attention and skepticism that would accompany say, a change in policy with respect to legal drinking age. By recognizing technologies as social in origin and social in consequence, we provide ourselves with a much needed critical foothold to engage with the technology, and to engage about the technology.
Research and debate in classrooms at all levels about the politics of technology should surround any skill building technology curriculum.
What support is there for post secondary educators to develop and nurture the beliefs and skills of critical pedagogy that seem to undergird success with emerging technologies? Kearsley argues " ... we are still trying to employ 19th century pedagogical ideas in the 21st century.' ... A vast conceptual gap exists between the kinds of technologically based learning and teaching methods that Chris Dede is talking about and those practiced in almost every classroom and training center. Never mind whether suitable hardware and software is available to teachers and students to carry out such endeavors (it is not). Wholly missing on the part of most teachers is the knowledge of such methods, the opportunity to try out and practice such methods, and the time to think through ways to change the curriculum to incorporate these methods" (Kearsley, 1996, p. 57).
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching conducted a series of surveys with 5,000 faculty members in 1989 to clarify the status of the professoriate and to provide a portrait of American higher education, including the balance between teaching and research. The majority of these faculty reported that they consider teaching to be a central mission of the university and a rewarding activity but that the reward system of their institutions was heavily weighted towards published research rather than effective teaching (Boyer, 1990). In a subsequent study of the relative importance of teaching, research, administration, and service in determining basic salary, involving more than 4,000 full-time, tenure-track faculty in four-year colleges and universities, James Fairweather reports that teaching activities seldom were rewarded. In some cases, time spent on teaching was negatively related to salary. Results showed the dominance of a research-oriented faculty reward structure for each type of institution regardless of professed mission. Reward structures favouring good teaching are lacking even in the four-year liberal arts colleges whose specific mission focuses on undergraduate teaching. Boyer concludes that without significant changes in institutional reward structure, teaching at the post-secondary level will not improve appreciably.
Faculty preparation in graduate school continues to offer very little or no instruction on how to teach. Faculty continue to rely on the teaching methods they have always used - this despite research documenting the need for students to learn actively. More often than not the choice of instructional method is a habitual one rather than a reasoned decision based on the instructional objectives of the course and content for the day.... college teachers teach pretty much as they were taught. (Weimer, 1990, p. xi)
Some institutions have established a specific unit on campus to provide instructional support resources. New hirings include more attention to teaching record than in the past. Still the reward systems remain fundamentally unchanged and does not contribute to an environment hospitable for the Trojan horse of technology. Not only must teaching itself be deemed important, but teaching itself must get serious attention. Once again, the K-12 teachers offer good counsel that the introduction of new technologies must be accompanied by a commitment to teacher development.
The ACOT projects acknowledged that "Successful technology use implies both change of underlying frameworks as well as the incorporation and appropriation of technology benefits into classroom practices" (Fisher et al, 1996, p. 199). They point out that for innovative programs to be successful, training and staff- development components should constitute approximately 30 to 40 percent of the total effort. This effort should include:
Francis Oakley notes that the appropriate use of technology requires organizational change. We suggest that the very organizational change required for the appropriate use of technology in educational contexts is the provision of supports for good teaching. Without time and resources for professional development and without a reward structure that responds to pedagogical development by faculty members, educational technology will be hard pressed to deliver on any of its promises.
Critical pedagogy facilitates the development of a language of critical discourse. If we use it as a social force we may be able to foster a generation of technoliterate skeptics, equipping our society to engage critically with both the content and the consequences of new technologies. Support for this critical engagement is an important contribution educators can make to efforts to trouble boundaries between insiders and outsiders as society shifts and changes.
Elementary teachers know that hungry children don't learn much beyond the immediate experience of having their basic needs unmet. And yet school lunch programs are hotly contested in school district and state politics. Educational settings mirror, or at least are structured in relation to, the larger social context. The politics of hunger and exclusion in the elementary context have their parallels in post-secondary institutions where institutional practices have remained virtually untouched through the post-war era.
However, recent climate studies and challenges to the canon have revealed institutional practices of discrimination. They, in turn have met with a backlash against so-called political correctness. When considering educational technologies, post- secondary educators need to confront the ways in which technologies are likely to line up in the construction of boundaries between insiders and outsiders on campus, and whether this system break will permit the re-tooling of the social in a liberating way.
It might be that educational technologies bring with them to campus the resources, time, and attention that enable educators to engage critically about the social. It may be that failure to engage critically will enable the emerging technologies to entrench outsider educational and social practices. We see the technoliterate skeptic participating in critical dialogue with her peers as the only person able to function as a citizen in the face of these dilemmas. The role of the educator in modelling this skepticism cannot be overemphasized. Yes, we really should bother.
Menzies refers to the information highway as a restructuring agent (Menzies, 1996). The argument we've made in favour of engaging with educational technology can be summarized rather bluntly: restructure or be restructured!
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