Grand
Challenges Raised by Technology:
Will This Revolution Be a Good One?
It’s happened before and it’s happening again:
technology (in the broadest sense of that term) is providing a foundation for
the reorganization of higher learning. At least twice before, such
transformations have radically enlarged the world within the reach of scholars
and students, drawing in more of them while providing richer and more varied
options. Each of previous revolutions enabled unprecedented gains while
simultaneously causing real damage. The third technology revolution, the one
we’re now facing, poses important questions. Our answers will determine
whether the revolution’s results will be mainly helpful or mostly harmful.
The first transformation began
over 2,500 years ago, when learners and scholars moved beyond simple oral
exchange (Socratic dialogue, for example) and began to rely also on reading and
writing. The written word enabled each teacher to reach more learners, prompting
wider access to education. It also enabled each learner to take advantage of
more teachers.
Meanwhile,
the student’s ability to write and read altered the act of studying.
Obviously, reading multiplied the opinions and facts to which the student had
access. And as Walter Ong of St. Louis University pointed out in Orality
and Literacy the deliberate pace and “memory” of reading and writing
also gave teachers and learners more time to create or critique a complex
argument.
Of
course, reliance on reading and writing had a down side. Oral traditions lost
their primacy and sometimes disappeared altogether. Neither writers nor readers
could be certain whether the reader had understood the writing. And the
rigidities of memorization were replaced by the even-stiffer rigidity of the
written word and, later, the printed page.
The second revolution
began when previously independent scholars and students began to organize and
use shared facilities. This campus revolution had benefits and costs that were
surprisingly similar to those resulting from reading and writing. Scholars could
reach still more students. Students could take advantage of even more sources of
expertise and modes of inquiry.
Campuses
also fostered qualitative changes in the academic enterprise. Libraries and
laboratories that no single scholar could have created became possible. By
spending years in residence, students could learn more. Scholars gained by
generations of organized study. Financial support from the state, previously out
of reach for most scholars, became available. And an increasingly complex
constellation of teachers, students, administrators, publishers, fund raisers,
technicians, and others discovered that they could join together in academic
work.
As
with the benefits of first revolution, these gains came at a stiff price:
specialization could foster isolation, “group think,” and passive learners
waiting for experts to tell them what was important. Some students gained access
to education, but others were deprived: they could not afford to travel to the
university cities, or perhaps they simply were not admitted. Some students
probably thrived in the lecture halls and libraries, while others surely had
trouble.
Today,
we are in the middle of a third revolution, a transformation made possible by
computing, video, and telecommunications. The technologies may differ from those
driving previous revolutions, but the gains and losses are surprisingly
familiar. Once again, the learning environment is bursting its previous bounds,
with more people gaining access to a wider range of people and things. And once
again, the duration and pace of interaction—students with students, students
with experts, students with academic resources—are changing. Again, the change
will cause harm as well as good.
Like
the first two revolutions, the third is inevitable because, without it, higher
learning would be restricted to too few learners and too small a range of
resources. But even though
change is certain, its character is not yet clear. Revolutions raise questions.
When people began using writing, what would a book look like? How would books be
organized? How would dialectical methods of teaching be altered to take
advantage of the student’s ability to read and write? The third revolution,
too, poses challenges, several of which are described in the next section of
this essay. Our responses will determine whether this revolution will ultimately
be celebrated or reviled.
The
changing academy, and the changing world in which it functions, call for
important shifts in the goals of undergraduate education. Today’s graduates,
for example, need to function in an environment buzzing with information and
misinformation. Undergraduates, too, need to gather, organize, and critique
information in order to learn, because the array of potential educational
resources and choices has grown. Our schools and colleges had better teach them
how to do so.
I often hear this need
voiced in workshops here in the United States, but I more fully understood its
economic, cultural, and political urgency in talking with educators in Hong
Kong. They realize the urgency of citizens each gaining the ability to gather
information for themselves and to decide for themselves what is true. Happily,
what many see as a weakness of the Web is also a strength. Its information is
clearly disorganized and of questionable validity, which makes it a better
instructional base than print alone for learning information literacy.
Another
skill undergraduates need long before they graduate is mastery of some of the
new genres of electronic communication.
I’m not talking just about how to use an e-mail system. Our students (and our
graduates) have to go beyond that to become adept at working and learning online
with people from around the world, even when they can’t see the other
person’s face, even when they don’t initially know the cultural background
of their teammate. That’s not easy to learn. Consider how simple it is to
stumble over someone else’s culture when you do see the other person’s face
and when you initially know a bit about that person’s culture.
Most
important, our students (and graduates) have to be avid, skilled learners. The
third revolution offers far more options to the individual learner than ever
before, within and beyond the frame of the college course. Even in individual
classes, students will be more likely to diverge: so many different directions
beckon, so many resources are at hand. To make use of these opportunities,
undergraduates must have the desire and ability to take more responsibility for
their own learning, individually and collectively. They will need to be more
conscious of how they learn, more able to assess their own learning, more able
to work in learning teams, and more able to take joy in what they learn.
Information
literacy, proficiency at intercultural communication, and a love of learning are
indeed important competencies for students to develop, but how specifically
should these skills be taught and assessed? What other such changes in the
undergraduate program are equally important? We need to do some serious research
to discover the most universally important skills, how to teach them, and how to
assess them. That task represents what the science establishment might call a
“grand challenge”: a problem for research and development so complex and
long term that it requires a serious international commitment of resources.
Each
revolution has raised the temptation to let or compel students to study alone,
or in a lonely crowd. But educational research tells us that interpersonal
interaction is usually a main ingredient for helping students learn. Such
interaction challenges students to become aware of their preconceptions about
natural and social phenomena, and about themselves. It enables them to be role
models for one another as they discover new ideas and as they learn how to feel
about those insights. It helps them to acquiring sophisticated personal skills,
such as the ability to compose music or design scientific investigations. Most
important, interpersonal interaction teaches students how to deal with other
people, in political communities, workplace teams, and families, and it prepares
them for admittance into communities of inquiry and professional practice.
Previous
revolutions had a multifaceted impact on interaction. Their direct effect was
negative—interaction stalled while students read or sat in lecture halls or
libraries. Yet the way educators structured their response to those earlier
revolutions also enriched interaction: in seminar rooms, for example, and in the
coffeehouses near the campus.
The
third revolution could kill interaction if we let it. Or, if we choose, we can
turn the forces of revolution to our benefit by taking advantage of greater
student diversity, drawing in outside experts, providing a moderate pace for
thoughtful conversation, and offering a safer space to have such conversations.
New
technologies such as e-mail, computer conferencing, and video conferencing make
it possible to draw together more diverse students and faculty. Faculty members
can take advantage the differences in student backgrounds, settings, and values
to spur more energetic, productive conversations. A team led by Gale Young and
Terry Jones at California State University at Hayward created a video and a
CD-ROM to help faculty members learn how to use diversity to spark difficult
dialogues on race, gender, and ethnicity.
Audio
conferencing and e-mail can connect students with experts. Similarly, many
students enjoy doing assignments that get published on the Web; they sometimes
get impressive feedback (not always positive) from surprising sources.
Instructors can take this practice a step further by using experts from the
larger world as judges of student projects.
Campuses
offer two paces of conversation. One pace was often too fast (the rapid-fire
exchange of the seminar room that can leave many students tongue-tied) and the
other, too slow (the homework assignment, which frequently fails to provoke any
useful intellectual exchange). E-mail and its cousins, however, are fast enough
to foster real conversation, but slow enough to give students time to think
about what they have read and heard, and to compose a reply.
Many
faculty members report that some of their students who remain silent face to
face become quite outspoken when using e-mail. There are many reasons for this
phenomenon. Some students worry about interrupting in a traditional class; when
online, they no longer have this worry. Others feel protected by the
facelessness. I’ve always loved a story from Norm Coombs, an award-winning
faculty member who taught African American history at the Rochester Institute of
Technology. He reports that it was only when he began to use e-mail to teach his
course that someone asked (by e-mail), “What’s a white guy doing teaching
black history?”
Dean Julius Caesar is famous
for his remark, “All the world is divided into two parts: on my campus and off
my campus. And only what’s on my campus matters.” Obviously, in recent
decades, campus walls have been less of a limit. The online library is growing,
as are the collections of scientific instruments available over the Internet.
Academic discourse is often conducted online now, and students frequently study
with peers on other campuses using e-mail. In short, many scholars and students
now live and work partly online and partly using the opportunities of the
physical campus.
Unfortunately,
our budgets and benefactors are being asked to finance two complete and somewhat
redundant campuses to support the same people and the same academic program: a
physical campus and a virtual one. We can’t afford the luxury. We need instead
to create physical and virtual campuses that complement one another’s
strengths, that together support a single environment for learning.
Consider
the physical spaces where people gather on campus. Some are tiny, for one-to-one
and small-group interaction. That’s a strength of the campus and should be
retained. Some spaces are gigantic, for ceremonial and social occasions: another
unique strength of the campus. But if we need to reallocate money from the
physical to the virtual campus, perhaps we should ask questions about the
middle-size classrooms, where the typical student rarely speaks. Perhaps these
lectures should be given to small groups of students in a “studio” while
most students either watch and respond from computers; faculty could ask
students questions every few minutes and see graphs of their answers. Students
in dormitory rooms or offices could press a key at any time to say, “I don’t
want to interrupt, but I’ve lost the thread.” And students could watch the
video of the lecture whenever, wherever, and as often as they want.
Shouldn’t
the virtual campus grow to reflect the distinctive values and work of the
generations of students that have used it? Shouldn’t the virtual campus help
today’s students learn from the hard-won experiences of yesterday’s
students? Enjoy their humor? Reflect on their differences? Virtual working
environments can potentially reflect more of a community’s distinctive history
and character than do physical campuses.
No institution today is
completely independent. Each depends on vendors of textbooks, publishers of
research literature, suppliers of Internet services, and other sources of
support. They import most of the ideas they teach. The third revolution will
increase the number and variety of partnerships, vendor-supplier relationships,
cooperatives, and other interconnections.
Consider,
for example, a program for the study of a foreign language and culture. When
e-mail was novel and unusual, pen-pal programs enabled students learning English
in one country to interact with students in another country. Such academic
pen-pal programs could be created on an ad hoc basis when few students and
faculty were involved. But imagine a service big and stable enough to engage
tens of thousands of students in thousands of courses in Spanish. That would
require a complex organization and contractual relationships.
Consider
also that some faculty members, departments, and institutions want to attract
students from far away, where their institutions are unknown and where providing
services, such as proctoring for exams or technology support, is difficult
because of distance. Such institutions will probably need a partner that has a
“brand name” and services that help make the connection between new learners
and the distant institution.
Such structures have been
growing slowly for some time in many countries around the world. Some have been
created by university consortia (National Technological University, for
example). Some have been invented by one or more governments. Others are offered
by corporations, and yet others are operated by professional associations. When
are such superstructures worthwhile? We should, for example, ask if new
collaboration is beginning to attract and support more students than separate
units could alone. Is the collaboration able to offer each student a wider
variety of specialized offerings? Does it help a student studying a particular
topic gain access to a more varied set of intellectual resources and
experiences? Does the teaching-learning structure offer an improvement in
assessment, compared with what the individual departments could have supported?
Another
important question is whether we can take advantage of the third revolution to
strengthen academic community and make our programs more coherent and effective.
Or will the forces of transformation disintegrate our communities and programs?
The
kinds of partnerships I just noted could weaken institutional identity. But
it’s also possible for institutions to use the challenge facing them to make
themselves intellectually more distinctive in order to survive. They might
specialize in certain types of offerings and certain approaches to learning,
while offering their students access to the programs of other, equally
specialized institutions.
Other
facets of the revolution also have this doubled-edged implication for community
and identity. For example, faculty members teaching online can live far from one
another and from their students. That’s a tempting prospect for many
institutions: to engage talented, well-known faculty who might not want to live
where the institution is located. Even resident faculty members could travel
more extensively, using networks to keep up with their teaching back “on
campus.” Students, too, might spend more time off campus traveling, working on
distant internships, or simply holding the better-paying jobs they need to keep
their debts down.
The
nightmare scenario emerging from this opportunity is an academy eventually
unable to maintain a coherent curriculum and cohesive community of values. This
disintegration could be accelerated by an increasing sense that education and
intellectual property are objects to be sold and controlled. If the academy
loses its internal sense of mission and identity, students will be the losers,
especially those who don’t thrive easily in the new learning environment. The
results for both access to higher education and quality of programs could be
disastrous.
Since
disintegration is intolerable, what policies, practices, and structures could
help an institution strengthen its sense of community and mission, even when its
faculty and students are more scattered? What policies can help bolster their
intellectual sharing at a time when every instructor could become an
entrepreneurial educator?
Creating
policies to support a sense of community and sharing in higher education is one
of the most troubling of the grand challenges. As usual, past responses to
similar obstacles provide a starting point. For example, Alverno College’s
approach to collaborative assessment might help it, and institutions like it,
maintain a collective sense of mission and identity. Evergreen State College’s
traditions of team teaching and seminars also suggest how other institutions
might strengthen their shared values and sense of mission.
In
this essay I’ve briefly outlined five of the grand challenges raised by the
third revolution: (1) What new skills does this world (and the changes in the
academy itself) require undergraduates to master? (2) How can the growing
distributed-learning environment be made into an asset for interpersonal
interaction? (3) How can we create physical and virtual campuses that complement
one another? (4) How can we create large-scale interdependence while
strengthening programmatic coherence and community? (5) How can we improve
academic community when institutions are becoming less defined by place?
To
tackle challenges as difficult as these, academics must be able to discern how
their colleagues and students are already using technology. Consider
interaction. Few faculty members or administrators now know how well, or poorly,
students in a major communicate with one another, or with their professors, as
they move through the course of study. Each observer sees bits of interaction,
but in most programs, no one sees the patterns of interaction that determine who
is likely to complete the program and what those graduates have learned. As
programs become larger and more “virtual,” noticing program-wide changes in
interaction becomes even more difficult.
Fortunately,
it is possible to shed light on this darkness. The Flashlight
Program of the TLT Group, the teaching, learning, and technology affiliate
of the American Association of Higher Education, helps institutions study
interaction, and the role different technologies can play in aiding or hindering
it.
Faculty
members are not the only ones who need such data. Students enter higher
education with their own deeply held ideas about how to study. If students
believe it is better to study alone, they are unlikely to use e-mail to
collaborate. Evaluative tools such as the Flashlight Program could help students
test their own theories of learning, and how to use technology to best support
their own learning. If students are to make sensible use of technology, and of
interaction, they, too, need better feedback about how they and their peers use
technology to promote (or escape) interaction, and the consequences of their
interaction for what they ultimately learn.
Another
step we can take to get a better grip on interaction is to research how students
deal with one another online. For example, we need to understand the pathologies
that can distort or block interaction in virtual communities of learners. Most
of us have had experiences with flaming—interactions that both parties
experience as unprovoked thoughtless, sarcastic, or even vicious attacks by the
other. As Judith M. Smith, director of distance learning at the American
Institute of Architecture has pointed out, good research into the roots of such
disruptions could give us clues about how to diagnose problems while they are
still small and turn them into learning opportunities. No one institution can do
all the research it needs by itself; it makes sense for different institutions
to focus on different research problems and then to share data. Accreditors can
facilitate this kind of sharing and help inform a larger public about what we
are learning about good and bad practice.
All
our research in this area needs to feed faculty development. Imagine that we
trained people to fly airplanes the way we teach faculty members to use
technology to foster interaction. We’d say, “Here’s the plane, here’s
the starter button, Paris is that way, feel free to carry thirty paying
passengers, and there’s a help button on the dashboard if something serious
should happen along the way.” Faculty development must draw on research and
evaluation to prepare professors for the real issues that will confront them as
they transform courses in their disciplines.
We
can understand the unfolding third revolution only in outline. We glimpse its
promise, and we would do well to fear its dark side. We can see some of the
things we need to learn, invent, and discover: grand challenges to the academic
enterprise involving educational goals, community, interaction, the
physical-virtual campus, and interdependence . The way we deal with these
challenges in the next few years, both thoughtfully and thoughtlessly, will
determine just how good, or degrading, the third revolution will be.
A revised version of this
draft was published as:
Ehrmann, Stephen C. (1999) "Technology's Grand Challenges," in Academe.
Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, Sept., pp.
42-46.