Ted Hamilton
Technical codes of online education
Presentation – Learning Spaces. Feb. 11, 2005
This presentation comes from a paper I recently co-authored with Andrew, to whom I should also give credit for the title. The paper centres on a case study of an early experiment in educational computer conferencing at WBSI. I’m not going to be talking about the case today, but rather the critical and conceptual framework in which we situate it, which parallels the efforts of Learning Spaces to develop alternative methodologies and approaches to the study of educational technologies. If anyone is interested in reading the full paper, I have some copies here.
In order to set up the kind of work that Learning Spaces is undertaking I’d like to begin by outlining what I term an “evangelical” discourse of online education, rooted in a deterministic philosophy of technology. I’ll then provide a critique of the deterministic basis of this discourse, and introduce the notion of “technical codes” – a concept developed by Andrew to understand how technological development and design are embedded in value frameworks, goal horizons, historical imperatives, and social interests. I’ll conclude by looking briefly at educational applications of the computer. This ties into the work of the Learning Spaces project inasmuch as it points out the need for alternative methodologies and critical research perspectives to account for the social, experiential, and historical dimensions of educational technologies and virtual learning environments as a precursor to understanding how technologies relate to educational organisation and practice. The main goal is to show how there is a need for research in educational technology to subject technologies themselves to questioning and interpretation on the basis of social and experiential dimensions of development, application, and use.
In the late 1990s, online education emerged as an object of considerable political contention in the university. Facing serious budgetary challenges in meeting increasing demands from government and industry for a more educated workforce, university administrators saw in online education a way of eking out new efficiencies from cumbersome institutions. Computer and software companies saw the potential for accessing and developing the legendary multi-billion dollar global education market. Government officials recognised in online education a means of realising important policy goals with respect to emerging knowledge-based economies. In the context of decreasing public investments, rising costs, and calls for the expansion of access, online education came to appear as more than a set of new tools. Indeed, it was called upon to answer some of the deepest economic, pedagogical, and organisational problems of the university. In solving these problems, however, it was also expected to transform higher education in a way that would leave no corner of the university untouched. This is why I refer to this discourse of online education as “evangelical” – online education would bring salvation to the university, but it would come bearing a sword.
Online education thus came to be embedded in a rhetoric of reform which tended to set “traditional” structures and practices in fundamental opposition to “virtual” ones. The “virtual” university stood as a technological destiny, the next evolutionary stage in higher education, and the logical replacement for the awkward and anachronistic traditional institution. Technology, then, came to represent an absolute threshold in university development. The historical trajectory on which technology placed the university and higher education was one in which traditional values, practices, and assumptions would not be extended, but replaced by technologically mediated ones.
In the days of “blended learning” and “instructional enhancement” it may be difficult to remember the potency of these claims to the absolute technological transformation of the university. Nevertheless, it was not long ago that management guru Peter Drucker famously predicted the death of traditional universities at the hands of technology, that administrators were exploring the capacity of networked information technologies to introduce an intensified division of labour into the university as a means of saving costs, and that the possibility “automated” education was not merely the knee-jerk projection of York University historians. Here are a few quotations that demonstrate the extremity of the rhetoric of online education as a transformative movement:
“[…] we would be wise to ask whether the particularly quaint way that we manufacture, distribute and deliver [higher] education will survive the arrival of the information railroad.” (W.A. Wulf, 1998)
“The potential to remove human mediation in some areas [of the university] and replace it with automation - smart, computer-based, network-based systems - is tremendous. It’s gotta happen.” (Robert Heterich, 1997)
“The key to the success of [initiatives in online education] is, of course, detailed execution and associated, institution-wide organizational development strategies with the aim of ultimately enabling the automation of online teaching and learning support systems.” (James C. Taylor, 2002)
It is this type of rhetoric that early critics of online education responded to and came to associate with the real developmental trajectories in the field, regardless of the diversity of actual practice. Boosters such as the ones quoted here depicted online education in an absolute way not only as a substantively transformative force, but as the embodiment of the exact consequences which would follow from its continued innovation. Critics accepted this rhetoric, and similarly confused it with something innate about or inherent in online education as a movement and educational technologies as artefacts. Once “online education” had been solidified as a rhetorical figure, debate over what its consequences would be could be carried out with little detailed examination of the technologies as objects embedded in dynamic socio-historical contexts.
Online education appears in one of two registers in this “evangelical” discourse. For critics, it appears that online education is an extension of administrative power and corporate interests into higher education. It’s an instrument for the commodification, corporatisation, and commercialisation of higher education. David Noble provides, of course, the most familiar statement of this view:
“[...] the universities were not simply undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialisation of higher education. For here as elsewhere technology is but a vehicle and a disarming disguise.” (Noble, 2002: 26)
This kind of critique highlights technologies as instruments of power and control in social contexts, wielded by the powerful to achieve an effect that is pre-determined by the powerful – in this case, administrators, state bureaucrats, and the private sector. In this critical discourse, online education and educational technologies are reified around the political-economic interests which they are imagined to unequivocally represent. They are already uniquely compatible with and instrumental to corporate and administrative interests. The only option is to resist and reject the technologies as mere symbols of something else, as is reflected in Noble’s effective dismissal of questions of technology – it is, after all, just a vehicle and a disguise, so there can be little point in doing anything else but assuming what it is and what its effects will be. We can simply squeeze it into existing models of critical political-economy and everyone can be satisfactorily discontent and aggrieved at the slow technocratic dissolution of higher education.
But as I’ve already suggested this basic position is, unfortunately, not unique to the critics. Many proponents of online education, those who perhaps saw Noble as the very devil, also adopt a very similar understanding of technology, one that again uses technology as a figure for making other kinds of claims about the kinds of change that are required in higher education. For many proponents, technology provides not an instrument, but a substantive force for change in its own right. Here changes are required from the university in order that the potentials of the new technologies, both pedagogical and economic, can be realised. This version of the evangelical argument stresses the need for adaptation, adjustment, reaction, and other passive modes of change that are incumbent on the introduction of networked educational technologies.
“[Online education] can be used to transform the institution enabling new markets, new learning outcomes, and new strategic goals to be achieved. However, the latter requires radical changes to the current operation of universities, in particular the way teaching is organised [...Universities] will need to transform, or they will die.” (Bates, 2004).
Statements such as this reflect the belief that technology gives direction to institutional change independently of social forms of control: in this way, its alignment with specific goals or interests is incidental to its functionality, and should be interpreted (as the critics eventually interpret it) as something inherent to technology. And once again, reaction, adaptation, and adjustment are the only possibilities.
At this point, I’d like to stress that I try not to take either side in this debate. Indeed, it is easy to recognise elements of truth in both sides: online education does emerge in a contentious political-economic context which merits critical attention from academics; it also introduces novel conditions into educational organisation and practice in which many old ways of doing things may not work. The objection I have is to the common philosophy of technology on which both accounts are based. Critics and boosters may polarise around the evaluation of the consequences of technological development for higher education. But rarely do they ever appear to doubt that these consequences are exactly what will or must follow from the diffusion of new educational technologies. Both sides, then, rely upon a deterministic approach to technology – an approach which has been rigorously critiqued in both empirical and philosophical research over the last thirty years.
There are four major premises through which both sides of the debate characterise educational technologies and online education.
technology is a fait accompli: this discourse imagines that all the important decisions have been made prior to the introduction of new technologies. All we can do is accept technology and adapt to it, or reject it and risk being left behind.
Consequences of technology are irreversible: to accept technology means to accept a pre-given set of outcomes. Technologies are imagined to have their consequences embedded within them, and again we are left in a reactive, adaptive position with respect to a form of change which is for all intents and purposes beyond control or intervention.
Absolute nature of technological change: the polarity of the views of critics and proponents renders their individual positions mutually exclusive with respect to technology. Rather part of what comes to mark the development of educational technologies is the assumption that we have to trade-off between essentially oppositional value-frameworks.
Technology as a product: ignores how technologies themselves come to be constituted through complex socio-historical processes – that is, it favours the interpretation of social contexts of use through appeal to technical requirements rather than the interpretation of technologies by appeal to social, experiential, or pedagogical factors.
There are three main problem areas with the deterministic approach to technology in online education and educational technology.
starts with technology: The kinds of questions we ask of technological change in higher education often exclude any fundamental questioning of technology itself. Rather, technology is taken for granted or rendered invariant. But technologies themselves only “work” in social situations and processes on the basis of a definition of the situation or process to which they are applied. Some concept of educational communication, pedagogy, interaction, knowledge, and so on must inform the technology as it’s developed and designed. These are actually important questions for diverse interests within the university, and not only static or inevitable features of technologies.
Subordinates social factors: Again, intervention in technological change is only in the context of use. This makes it appear as if the choices we have with respect to technologies and technological change are only ones of acceptance or rejection – are we going to adopt it or not? It assumes that the social interests with which the technology is aligned are native or natural to it rather than designed in as technologies are appropriated into different projects for socio-technical change. But, once again, the alignment of technologies and social interests is not independent of choices that are made at the level of design and development, which themselves are conducted in social settings whose manner of organisation contributes to what the technologies will ultimately be and do.
Generalises from potentials: What technologies can do is often equated with what they will do. The abstract functionality of artefacts is thus extrapolated in understandings of their invariant effects in social contexts, as if these contexts could not mediate, mitigate, or re-direct them, but were merely subject to Darwinian modes of adaptation.
Philosophy and sociology of technology over the last three decades has increasingly adopted critical perspectives on technological innovation rooted in the notion that technologies are the outcomes of complex and dynamic historical processes, social contexts, institutional structures, and experience-based interventions. This approach to technology stands in stark contrast to deterministic claims of technological autonomy. It also calls upon researchers, critics, designers and developers alike to innovate ways of taking account of the social foundations of technologies.
Critical theory of technology supplies one such innovation in the notion of “technical codes”, which can be defined as the often implicit background of values, assumptions, priorities, interests, and goals that guide processes and patterns of technological development, design, and implementation. They provide designers and developers with a framework within which certain choices appear rational with respect to both the functional parameters and substantive goals of technological innovations. Technical codes might best be understood as socially relative and historically contingent points of articulation between social, political, cultural, or institutional values and imperatives, conceptual and discursive frameworks, and technical forms. This might best be seen through a brief example.
This diagram presents a vision of how computer mediated education takes place. A set of objects – say a pair of pliers or an ICBM – provides the range of material to be known. This material is fed into a learning management system – essentially an empty shell for storing information. It is then delivered through a particular medium – it doesn’t particularly matter which, all things being equal. This diagram presents us with an interpretation of what education is, how it takes place, and how technology fits into the process of education. Education is information delivery, it takes place through collecting, arranging, storing, and transmitting information, and technology acts merely to process, store and delivery that information directly into the human brain.
This interpretation of education and of educational technologies is reflected in many critical accounts of the “impacts” of the computer on education. Critics have tended to see the computer in terms of the commodification of knowledge, the automation of instruction, and the subordination of education to technocratic ends. Lyotard sees the computer as rigorously externalising knowledge with respect to the knower, reducing it to quantities of information. Aronowitz concurs in his critique: in computer-mediated education, students “respond to pre-packaged material”, delivered by a casualised labour force. In a projection depicted by Gary Klass, this casualised labour force is replaced by actors. Noble, too, follows this line, seeing in online education a successor to the commodified products and Taylorised labour processes of early 20th century correspondence schools. In each case, computer mediation means a reduction of education to information, of faculty to deprofessionalised “content providers”, and of the university to a site of commercial information production.
There are, of course, plenty of critical, theoretical, technological, and economic precedents for this critique of the computer. Critically, similar judgements have been pronounced upon educational technologies and media from Plato’s critique of writing to the fear in the 1950s that TV would usher in the era of the automatic student and the robot professor. Plato could easily have been speaking about the educational application of the computer when he had Socrates say that “students will receive a quantity of information without real instruction” as a result of alphabetic writing. “Real” instruction, which requires dynamic contexts of co-presence, is transformed for Plato as for Lyotard and Noble, into a debased form of information delivery and acquisition. All of these understand technology – writing or the computer – in terms of a formal conception of how they act on information. The technologies are conceived as essentially representational, and it is as such that they are understood to relate to and remodel the education process.
Early educational applications of the computer such as CAI reflect exactly this reduction of education. CAI draw upon the representational affordances of the computer as a stand-alone information processor. As a result, the computer doesn’t appear to be differentiated at all from earlier forms of educational technology also predicated on information delivery – correspondence and educational broadcasting in particular. The computer merely intensifies, individualises, and enhances the information delivery capacities of earlier systems. CD-ROM or web-based courseware extend the same model of education, replacing social, interpersonal interaction with machine processes. In all of these cases, the computer is configured as an information processing device, and the education process is divided into discrete production tasks.
Theories of distance education support this view, as well, particularly after Otto Peters’ industrial theory of distance education, the claims of which appear to remain central to the discipline. The chart I showed earlier reflects this very industrial production model, and enhances it by underlying a presumed equivalence between the human mind and the computer – they bear equivalent functions in education as information processors. Human communication is also reduced to a machine process, one which apparently does not change according to context, content, history, experience, or other social factors.
It is easy to see why critics might disparage such a view of computer-mediated education. Reduced to information-delivery and acquisition, it no longer requires its traditional mediations – the physical classroom, the university as an institution, or the professional teacher. It can be organised like a process of industrial production of commodified goods consumed by isolated individualised learners. It is also easy to imagine who might find such a vision attractive. It is a short step from a pedagogy of information delivery to an industrial model of information production and a commercial mode of information consumption. As long as technologies can be interpreted or appropriated to realise education in a commodified form, then the potential for developing new revenue streams and new markets is strong.
So it becomes clear that the pedagogical model relates to particular social and economic interests – an economic logic which sees education as a variety of e-commerce appropriates the available technology as a system for distributing representations of information. If these technologies can divest higher education f a need for classrooms, physical plant, and teachers, they can also reduce the operating costs of universities. While often disguised behind claims of improved quality, access, and a more flexible “student-centred” approach, the economic motives behind this pedagogical-institutional model are enough to tar educational technologies irredeemably with the brush of Mammon.
What I have tried to depict here is a historical conjuncture between a pedagogy of information delivery and acquisition, a cognitivist interpretation of mind and communication, the prevalence of an economic discourse of higher education and the computer as an educational technology. These are tightly interwoven and supply a background against which a certain project and form of online education emerges – namely the evangelical model referred to earlier. In this discourse, even when the computer becomes established not only as an information processor, but as a communications device – an environment for social interaction and dialogue – it is still interpreted in representational terms, to the detriment of the enhancement of its relational affordances.
But it is precisely these relational affordances that opens the computer up for re-interpretation and re-appropriation in educational settings, that enables the appropriation of the technology within pedagogical (and critical) frameworks other than those of the evangelical discourse. The latter must be seen as supporting a certain expression of online education based on particular pedagogical, theoretical, institutional and economic priorities, assumptions, and goals. Shifting these priorities, assumptions and goals might allow us to see educational technologies not as absolutely opposed to traditional forms, practices and values, but as capable of intervention, redirection and change – capabilities which deterministic approaches do not allow us to see or explore.
In light of the clear limitations of determinism as a framework for understanding educational applications of technology, there’s a need for research approaches, such as those being developed in Learning Spaces, that throw technology itself into question rather than taking it as pre-determined or invariable. The development of a phenemenological method for studying the user experience of virtual learning environments thus constitutes an important step towards opening educational technologies to socially- and experientially-based forms of interpretation, rather than merely extrapolating their effects from their formal properties, or imagining them as mere instruments of change about which there is nothing of particular importance to say.