The theme of the EDUCOM'93 conference that took place October 1993 in
Cincinnati was "Crafting New Communities." The questions were: "What
constitutes a community? How is information technology redefining our
traditional notions of community? How will these new tools help us cope
with an increasingly complex society?"
Here are some of the answers that were given to those questions.
They are taken from presentations made by Joseph Guglielmi, Chairman and
CEO of Taligent, Inc.; Jennifer James, cultural anthropologist; Lewis
Perelman, author of School's Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology and
the End of Education; Neil Postman, author of Technopoly; and Blenda
Wilson, President, California State University, Northridge
Technology as Philosophy
Technology is not only a means, it is also a philosophy. If you put
television into a culture, you don't have, say, American culture plus
television, you have a new culture, not just because of the way it's
used, but if you look at it, and you see what its structure is and what
it does, you know it has a psychic agenda. I mean if you build a 747,
you wouldn't use it to carry commuters from Scarsdale to New York. If
you build that machine, you're going to have to have intercontinental
air travel, so it comes with an agenda. So I think it's rather dangerous
for people to talk about technology as being neutral or being merely a
means over which we have control if we use it for good or ill.
-- Neil Postman
Tools of the Future
Anyone out there who can honestly say they can beat an average seven-
year-old at Nintendo? . . . because most of us can't. My husband, who is
a techie, cannot beat our seven-year-old neighbor, and he claims he
practices. The difference is that my husband reads the instructions and
the seven-year-old just feels his way through, and since Nintendo
doesn't tell you the rules, you've got to discover many of them by going
through it. It's a very different kind of learning process, and it shows
you how quickly we shift; and so we have all kinds of educators arguing
that, instead, you should buy your children Lincoln Logs and Legos for
the sole reason that you can still beat them at Lincoln Logs and Legos!
Instead of understanding that we need the tools of the future.
-- Jennifer James
Mixed Blessing
I submit to you that those who are in love with technology for its own
sake may be less than truly attentive to our special needs and purposes.
Many who urge more proliferation of information technology in higher
education also tend to believe that and behave as though its blessings
are without disadvantages, and they therefore overlook the unintended
consequences of otherwise useful technical change. Technology is a mixed
blessing.
-- Blenda Wilson
Isolation of the Classroom
It is the classroom that is isolating; it is the box that cuts people
off from participating in the real world of their community. It puts
them into a cloister that was designed to mimic the fifteenth century,
and holds them there for sixteen or twenty or twenty-four years.
-- Lewis Perelman
Optimizing on People
The bottom line is that we have to change our paradigm. We have to stop
optimizing on hardware and software and start optimizing on people
instead. I think this may be the biggest challenge for these new
ventures. We have to develop software that reflects the way people
naturally do work, in a form that's delivered in a usage model that they
already know and understand
-- Joseph Guglielmi
A Disciplined Approach
Rather than embracing technology with the abandon we see all around us,
higher education should continue to take a very disciplined approach to
technology enhancement. And I say that for two reasons. The first is I
believe that we ought to force the suppliers to produce products that
specifically serve our needs and purposes. We are, after all, a $146-
billion industry. Rather than scrambling to purchase the info-glut
technologies or the bells and whistles that are driving profit seeking
in the computer industry, we are in a position to ensure that the design
of the technology remains with faculty members and staff in our
institutions, and is congruent with our notions of effective learning
and teaching. The second reason is so that we can place ourselves in a
position to raise the more fundamental questions about the meaning and
impact of technology on teaching, and learning, and indeed on our
culture itself.
-- Blenda Wilson
Memory and Intelligence
Imagine yourself riding around your farm at the turn of the century--
1900--on your horse for a week; how much data would come into your
short-term memory versus driving to work today listening to the radio
for half an hour? The only reason twenty-five-year-olds can remember
things is that they have empty space. You don't. Your brain is
absolutely full. What is the IQ of the future? the intelligence of the
future? the aptitude of the future? It's information retrieval. It's
problem solving. It's strategic thinking. It's using the highest level
of the human brain. It's the ability to understand basic morality. It's
eye-level negotiation skills. It's the ability to use our brain in the
ways that take us to higher and higher levels of civilization. But how
many of us are willing to make that shift?
-- Jennifer James
Hyperlearning
Hyperlearning, the technology which I put a label on to represent the
revolution we are now going through, is being driven precisely by the
excessive glut of information that more intelligent technology is now
being designed and implemented to alleviate. And that's why I speak not
about the Information Age--which I think is over--but about the
Knowledge Age; the fundamental characteristic about hyperlearning is
that it provides the bridge from information to knowledge.
-- Lewis Perelman
Solution or Problem?
The great problems of education are of a social, and moral, nature, and
have nothing whatever to do with dazzling new technologies. In fact, the
new technologies so loudly trumpeted at this conference and in other
venues are themselves not a solution to anything, but a problem to be
solved.
-- Neil Postman
"Community Computing"
I think a model that has great potential is to think of systems in the
future as communities. By taking the focus off "personal" computers and
thinking in terms of "community computing," I believe we can make great
strides in making computing personal again.
-- Joseph Guglielmi
Learning for Living
Learning is now a loop; it used to be thought of as a curve, a linear
thing that just accumulates, but now it's a cyclical process that goes
back and forth through the Internet, through cyberspace, the sharing and
the participation and the creation of knowledge, and that is the
fundamental and core technology of all modern businesses . . . . So
learning is what everyone in the world is going to have to do, not to
prepare to make a living, but to "do" a living.
-- Lewis Perelman
Inside and Outside the Compound
The problem is that the problems inside the compound are not that
different from the people outside the compound managing them. If you
noticed during those Waco negotiations processes, Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms was playing heavy metal music. As a negotiating technique!
That's what my son used to do when he was fourteen. This is not
sophistication. We're looking at a society where we're going to see more
and more Wacos because of the inability of people to make these economic
shifts, and when you get vast numbers of disenfranchised people who
cannot handle the complexity of the technology, let alone the people
skills, you get the kind of behavior and chaos that we had.
-- Jennifer James
Contexts
Another thing object technology and higher education have in common is
the ability to provide contexts. A university allows people with
different but specific interests to share a common environment. As a
result, individual groups can have disparate interests without
replicating the support structure for each and every discipline. In
object technology, the context is provided by something we call
frameworks, which are basically prebuilt miniapplications. A framework
knows how to do menus, for example; it knows how to read and write
files, how to cut and paste, and how to print. An advanced framework may
also know how to create a movie, travel across a network, or contain the
process for solving a complex problem.
-- Joseph Guglielmi
Solved Problems
The problem of getting information to people fast, and in various forms,
was the main technological thrust of the nineteenth century, beginning
with the invention of telegraphy and photography in the 1840s. It would
be hard not to notice that that problem was solved and is therefore no
longer something that any of us needs to work at, least of all become
worked up about.
-- Neil Postman
When Does Education End?
You'll be in a nursing home with three days to live and someone will try
to teach you a new telephone system. You'll say, "I'm not planning to
make a call."
-- Jennifer James
Parallels
There are an enormous number of parallels between object technology and
higher education. For example, in higher education, knowledge is a vital
asset: scholars create it and then make it available to their peers;
others build on it--shaping it and then adding new insights of their
own. In much the same way, object technology allows the reuse of code;
the original pieces of code, or components, are created and stored in
libraries, and people can reuse and build upon them later. With object
technology, applications can be assembled rather than fabricated. The
benefit is that these applications are easy to customize, easy to add
new functions to, and also easier to maintain.
-- Joseph Guglielmi
Significant Problems
New technologies may not always solve significant problems or any
problem at all. But because the technologies are there, we often invent
problems to justify our using them. Or sometimes we even pretend we are
solving one problem when in fact the reason for creating and employing a
new technology is altogether different.
-- Neil Postman
Inheriting the Earth
The economy that can give you more stuff is the one that will be
successful. That's the only reason the Soviet Union failed. They
couldn't give the people stuff. Now, you get stuff from energy. The
culture that uses energy the most efficiently is the one that can give
its people more stuff. Now, think about energy and how we changed it.
The wealth of nations used to be natural resources. But Japan has very
few. The wealth of nations used to be industrial plants, but you can
move them to Mexico in three weeks. The wealth of nations is of course
human energy, the renewable resource of the human brain. The nerds will
inherit the earth.
-- Jennifer James
Questions and Answers
What impact will multimedia technologies have or should they have on the
structure of courses and on the curriculum? Does fifty minutes still
work? Does the semester still work? How will the technological
communities that you are committed to create impact the face-to-face
communities that are the foundations of our valued democracy? What a new
technology will undo is at least as important a question as what the
technology will do. Issues of equity, ethics, and privacy have already
begun to surface within the higher education computer world, and many
more such questions will surely arise. I think we ought to ask them and
we ought to answer them before we permit the inexorable acquisition of
computer products to redefine our conception of human learning and human
progress.
-- Blenda Wilson
Waiting
The sophistication required to operate this technology and to live in a
society that is dependent upon this technology is unbelievable; it's not
being taught in our schools, it's not being taught at home, and when I
ask teachers, "What are you going to do? You're supposed to carry us
over this abyss, over this bridge into the future!" this is what
teachers say to me: "We're waiting for the administrators to die."
-- Jennifer James
The Technological Society
America is the world's first fully committed technological society,
which is most evident in the vast changes that are being introduced
within American business and industry. Information technology accounted
for over 14 percent of U.S. capital investments last year--up from 8
percent in 1980. And the dominant cultural message for all of us in
education, in our homes, and in business is, get with it or get left
behind.
-- Blenda Wilson
Technology Is More Than Problem Solving
One of the things about technology is that it doesn't need to be created
or implemented simply to solve problems, although it is one of the ways
that human beings go about trying to solve problems. But there's a more
creative force, as my friend and colleague George Gilder has often
written, behind the drive toward human progress, which is that it is
human.
-- Lewis Perelman
What Schools Are For
If anyone argues that technology can give people access to more
information outside the classroom than could possibly be given inside
the classroom, then I would say that that has been the case for almost
100 years, and what else is new? In other words, the information-giving
function of the schools was rendered obsolete a long time ago.
-- Neil Postman
Final Thoughts
Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.
-- Blenda Wilson