Educause: Throw Tech At It

Cross-posted as a response at Kairosnews in slightly abbreviated form.

cel4145 at Kairosnews has posted an interesting story featuring two links (PDF warning on both) from Educause, an organization that I feel really ought to have a .com domain, or at the very least a .org, but definitely not a .edu: after poking around their site for a bit (check out the corporate stuff), it’s pretty obvious these guys are total shills for corporate technology in education. Not that it’s really surprising, given the tenor of the articles, or even the organization’s motto (“Hello, tech support? Yes, the state has cut our budget, there’s a cheating scandal in the Physics department, the adjuncts are trying to unionize, the English faculty has been snacking on continental philosophers again, and our quarterback’s in jail; we’d like our university bugfix service pack 4.8.3b, please”), but worth noting, since both articles demonstrate unproblematic alliegance to the philosophies that (1) technological advance as the production of ever-more-sophisticated consumer goods is an independent and value-free force driving social change, (2) universities in providing education qua consumable good must respond to that technological advance as the production of ever-more-sophisticated consumer goods, (3) universities in their responses to that technological advance should serve corporate/consumer culture. To be even less surprised, check out what Educause says about their readership and their corporate sponsors and advertisers.

Maybe you can tell that I didn’t much care for what either article had to say.

With that in mind, I hope you won’t fault me for the glee with which I take a few small swipes at specific techno-determinist points offered by Oblinger and Frand. The mindset from which they seem to be writing, however, offers implications for higher education that I find troubling on a much larger scale, which I’ll try to sum up at the end of this post, although — since this is my first rather ranty response — I haven’t entirely thought them through yet.

Jason Frand’s article seemed far less careful than Diana Oblinger’s, which usefully corrects a little of his foolishness. With the unsupported assertions of his first sentence (“Most” students more comfortable on keyboards than with notebooks, and more comfortable with screens than paper? Apparently, I’ve had “most” of the exceptions in my classrooms) and the gee-whiz futurist nonsense of the rest of his first paragraph, Frand paves the way for an absurd definition of technology (“telephones, automobiles, and television aren’t technology”), the opposition (decried elsewhere by tengrrl) of the ever-popular catch-all term “critical thinking” to “interacting on the Net” (sorry, blogosphere: none of us are thinking critically, apparently), use of ridiculous ancecdotal evidence, the downright hilarious remark that “In the physical world, dual-cassette recorders make copying an audio- or videotape easy. Why should copying a CD, a computer application program, or material from an encyclopedia be any different?” used as support for the assertion that “the entire structure of HTML supports this sharing/borrowing/taking (dare I say “stealing”?) of others’ intellectual property” (uh, this “structure” being the structure of a. . . language?), and finally the conclusion that the proper “new” pedagogy for “the information-age mindset” is — wait for it — the Socratic method.

Oblinger’s particulars don’t get under my skin quite so much. The way she follows a nice list of historical incidents defining the perspectives of Generation X students with a set of completely unsupported generalizations distinguishing “Millenials” from their predecessors (“gravitate toward group activity”: huh? So GenXers and Boomers were uniformly a bunch of loners? Likewise the other list items) left me scratching my head, and the way she builds an argument on students’ discontentment with the way teachers use technology strikes me as a failure of memory: how many teenages are actually happy being in class and impressed with the way their teachers and professors use the VCR or the InFocus?

All of these are minor quibbles, though. (And, as such, they’re rather picky and petty of me to bring up. Sorry: another cranky reading.) It’s towards the end of Oblinger’s article that the implications start making me really uncomfortable; taken in conjunction with Frand, they point to some ideas about higher ed that strike me as seriously troubling. In her Customer Service section (“For today’s learners, customer service is an expectation, not an exception”: Hi, the small liberal-arts college B.A. you sold me didn’t make me into the witty and urbane young citizen of the world that you advertise in your glossy brochures; can I exchange it for a professional certification program of equal or lesser value?), Oblinger approvingly describes the intellectual assembly-line work of various Rio Salado College programs that effectively recreate Henry Ford’s division of labor (or the numerical “Press 1 for. . .” navigation of a tech support voicemail tree) in an academic context and ensure that professors answer questions related only to course content and nothing more, thereby contributing to the academic trend towards specialization and the move from the liberal education to the vocational education.

Oblinger’s conclusion (or, to be fair, one of them), that universities can best adjust or adjust to the new attitudes of today’s students by the proper use of information technology, is a rehearsal of the same old tech booster notions that throwing money for computers at academic problems will solve everything, an idea that doesn’t seem to go away no matter how often or how well it’s critiqued. As Charlie’s pointed out, spending more departmental money on computers means less departmental money for faculty salaries. Charlie’s analysis is far more nuanced and insightful than my crude reduction, but the simple formulation that buying more tech equals hiring fewer teachers serves my purposes. Technology-as-capital is what the corporate sponsors of Educause are pushing, with the idea being that administrators will certainly understand that Capital Generates Return On Investment, and thereby brings money back to the university in cash-strapped economic times, whereas — by the neoclassical model — the wages paid to academic labor are an Expense To Be Minimized.

Furthermore, the shift in students’ tastes and preferences (according to Oblinger and Frand) results in a perceived shift in demand for technology in academia. The university’s response to this perceived shift in demand may result in the university having to make do with fewer faculty, which would contribute to a favoring of the increased efficiences offered by programs like those at Rio Salado. These programs, in turn, contribute to increased specialization and the placing of students into more narrowly defined vocational tracks and a decrease in the application of the liberal education model; if these phenomena then contribute to a widening of the wealth gap in America, will we ever reach a situation where future students’ tastes and preferences are affected to the point where the cycle corrects itself?

It’s a silly question. There are way too many variables to even support some of the wild sequence I’m imagining, much less its end.