Michael Schrage, currently a research associate with the MIT Media Lab, is a widely read author whose soon-to-be-published book, Getting Real (Harvard Business School Press), focuses on the role of modeling, prototypes and simulations as media for innovation. Previous works include Shared Minds (Random House 1990) and No More Teams (Doubleday 1995) - books about successful collaboration and collaborative media in business, art and the sciences. His work can also be found on the pages of Wired and Computerworld magazines. In addition, Schrage also serves as a Merrill Lynch Forum Innovation Fellow, and as executive director of Merrill Lynch's Academic Venture PhD Competition.
EDUCOM REVIEW: You've thought a lot about technology as it's used in education at various levels. What's your opinion of what you see out there?
MICHAEL SCHRAGE: I think that there is an extraordinary amount of experimentation going on in educational technology and in bringing technology to education. Unfortunately there is as much unhealthy experimentation as there is healthy experimentation. My personal experience is that the overwhelming majority of people who want to bring technology and the Internet and interactivity to the schools believe that they are inherently doing a good thing, that they are doing God's work for education, K-12 or beyond. And I think that's a hypothesis to be tested, not a proven fact. I think there are ideologues and idealists in the worst meaning of the phrase and I am afraid it is that bias - the bias that better technology or more technology is an inevitably good thing rather than something to be self-critical and self-skeptical about - that is provoking a backlash against technology in education.
E.R.: Are you worried, then, mainly about the bias itself, or do you think a lot of people are doing specific things wrong?
SCHRAGE: Well, I don't think they are doing specific things wrong. I just think there are so many unresolved questions and issues that it is very hard to ascertain what it is they are doing right. For example, get the people who are champions of technology in the schools and then start asking them hard questions. What should the ratio of students to computers be? Are we using the role of the computer to augment teaching or to augment learning? Is the teacher teaching or is the teacher facilitating the computational experience? Is the teacher a leader in the classroom or is the teacher a resource in the classroom? Is the computer the embodiment of the curriculum or is the computer a supplement to the curriculum? Are we using the computer to promote one-to-one individualized education or are we using the computer to implement increased interaction between two students, four students, twelve students, the entire class? These are all absolutely legitimate questions and, unfortunately, we get a range of absolutely legitimate answers to those legitimate questions.
E.R.: Hearing your questions, the second in each pair seems to be the right answer.
SCHRAGE: That's your bias.
E.R.: You're right. And what's your bias?
SCHRAGE: I used to have a bias. I was a big champion of the computer even while I was in high school, and the book that got me to that point was Ted Nelson's Computer Lib and Dream Machines, which my father actually helped Ted do. My father gave Ted office space and resources at the University of Illinois, where my father was an administrator. So I've been in this for a long time and I was a big champion of the idea of computers in the schools as transforming things and dis-intermediating the human, to mitigate for the bad teachers everybody objected to.
But as I've gotten older, if not necessarily wiser, it's become my very strong belief that design sensibility has an enormous impact on these things. Think about it: When we had the telephone revolution, we didn't have Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson calling for a telephone on every single desk of every single student. In the early days of television, we didn't have Kennedy, who was truly the first President to understand the medium, calling for a TV on every desk or one in every classroom. And yet, with regard to the computer, we've somehow developed this bizarre "silver bullet" mentality, that there are single-shot solutions to educational quality, and that the computer, well-programmed or well-networked, is a solution to the problem - that education is a problem to be solved. Well, that's complete nonsense.
My design bias is the computer is a resource that is not yet understood and we are in the process of conducting all kinds of experiments. We should be conducting these experiments with a little more self-criticism, a little more skepticism and a little less championing of the computer. Just because I think the computer is a fantastic, terrific medium does not mean that I believe that, for example, K through 12 students should become educational guinea pigs for a bunch of idealistic ideologues.
E.R.: And what about higher education?
SCHRAGE: I think that once people pass the age of majority that they should be intelligent enough to make choices in their best interests - just as there are people who might choose to go to St. Johns for the Great Books curriculum or people might go to MIT for the intensive engineering, math, science curriculum. I think that higher education represents the best blend of age, diversity, technological resources, sophisticated designers and consumers of design. And I think there are going to be much more and better trickle-down or idea-explosions that emanate, reverberate from higher education to K-12 rather than the other way around. And I think that is a good thing. I think that is a wonderful thing. And, in fact, if there's one thing that I hope, the kind of transformation that I would like to see these technologies encourage is greater links between the university as an educational resource and K-12 as an educational incubator. I think the opportunity of lowering the barriers of interaction and cooperation between universities and K-12 and high school and younger - that is the kind of intra-netting that I hope we will see more of.
E.R.: Take a moment to comment on something you wrote about corporate computing and apply it to academia. In the September/October Harvard Business Review you talk about what you call the "big lie of the information age." Tell us what that big lie is.
SCHRAGE: Well, the big lie of the information age - I do it in mathematical symbols which will be fun for you to lay out on the page - is that Delta I equals Delta B - i.e., that a change in the quality and quantity of your information will equal a change in the quality and quantity of your behavior. And there's a lot of logic to that. If I give you useful information in a timely fashion, it is not illogical or irrational for me to believe that you are going to appropriately adjust your behavior.
Alas, human beings oftentimes do not behave in logical or rational ways. In fact, they frequently do not behave in rational ways - and that's why so many people still smoke even though they know it's dangerous, and why too many people still drink and drive even though they know that it is dangerous, and why they behave in ways that are deleterious to themselves, their family and their friends and their livelihoods.
The myth of the information age is that all of these technologies, that computer technology, that communications technology, that the Internet is about information, that we live in the "information age." And that is stone cold rubbish. It is absolute nonsense. These technologies are really much more about creating and managing new relationships than creating and managing old information or new information.
And, if I may credit your publication, I believe that Educom Review - partly because of its academic origins, partly because of the nature of people you solicit contributions from - understands that the idea of the invisible college, the idea of academic community (accent on community, not academic) and the awareness that a community of scholars is more than just the exchange of symbolic information; and the standards, the ethics, the protocols, the rules of community interaction are every bit as important, if not more important than the data, information and knowledge the academic community exchanges with itself or that it uses to define itself.
As an editor, you understand that your community of readers and advertisers is every bit as important as the content that you put on the pages of your print or Web-site publication. And I want to make something very clear. I'm not talking about information and relationships or information and community as mutually exclusive. I want to put them on a continuum. And unfortunately until very recently - and when I say very recently, I mean the last 25 months - the overwhelming majority of the discussions - the design discussions - the design sensibilities hype the optimized information. How do we do a better job of packaging and managing information? There has been a bias, a skew toward information design as opposed to interaction and relationship design. The design of relationships is more important than the design of information.
In a lot of the consulting that I do and a lot of the talks that I give, I ask the people in the audience a very straightforward question: "If you could have a technology that gave you the ability to do ten times better, an order-of-magnitude better job of managing all of the information that's overloading you, that's flowing across your desk, that's flowing across your PC, that's flowing in through your eyeballs and through your ears - versus the option of having a technology that lets you do a 25 percent - just a quarter - better job of managing your key relationships with your boss, with your subordinates and your colleagues, which would you choose? The overwhelming majority of the people choose the personal relationships tool, because they know in their heart of hearts and in their mind of minds that the bottleneck, the constraints, the coefficients of friction come from the relationships that they have, not from the information they do or don't have access to.
E.R.: Well, how do you see relationships being fostered by the Web? You said recently that you can imagine that the Web would be entirely different if it had been based on a more dynamic metaphor than the publishing metaphor.
SCHRAGE: First off, I'm just the most enormous admirer of Tim Berners-Lee and what he and his people did. And talk about the issue we discussed earlier - information community - Tim Berners-Lee didn't just build, when he developed the World Wide Web and the protocols associated with the World Wide Web, a machine for information dissemination; he was building this technology to support a global community of theoreticians and experimentalists in physics. This is the guy who was clearly designing tools to support community interaction.
But one of the criticisms I have made of Berners-Lee, for the most obvious of reasons, is his metaphor, the design metaphor he chose. What's one of the fundamental media of communication in physics communication? It's publication. You publish. And so he designed things on the basis of pages. Now admittedly they were hypertext pages. He was inspired both by Vannevar Bush's work and Ted Nelson's work in hypertext, as well as Douglas Engelbart's work. Bush, Engelbart and Nelson clearly were strong influences on Tim Berners-Lee in regard to the design metaphor for the World Wide Web with pages, and clearly Mosaic and Netscape built on that in the browsing aspect
But suppose he had picked a different unit of interaction instead of the page! What about the interaction of the Symposium? How would the World Wide Web be different if we talked about designing things to support conversations rather than designing to support posting? Suppose the World Wide Web was really designed more around an interactive e-mail design with an icon that could be appended to it as opposed to laying out pages in publications? Suppose he had been more of a film buff and that bandwidth and compression technology was just a little bit better, and we talked about frames and animation and dynamic simulation being the dominant mode of expression or representation on this medium?
Of course, this critique has my tongue in my cheek but the essential design point is real: to an extraordinary extent, our metaphors are both our platforms and our prisons when we talk about this. Which ironically but appropriately brings us right back to the whole question of what's the appropriate role for computers in education.
Let's forget about the Web; let's concentrate on paper. Remember the debates in the '50s and '60s about how many pictures a textbook should have? Should they be word-heavy? Should they be accessible? Should there be lots of questions? Should there be lots of white space? Should we design textbooks to be read on one's own, or should we design them to be part of the social system of the classroom? Hundreds of millions of dollars - and entire curricula - have been invested in these questions, and yet now, with regard to the computer, we are seeing the reinvention of many of the questions that haunted the introduction of print into academe.
What I find particularly disturbing is that we have champions of new media who insist on being prisoners of the particular design metaphor or the particular design ideology that they think best. And let me hasten to add, Tim Berners-Lee is not one of these people. This is somebody who has really looked at the World Wide Web as the beginning of a dialogue rather than the end of a discussion. And I think if there is one thing that I truly admire about the technologists in this sphere - in fact something that I admire more about the technologists than the people that seek to apply this technology - is that the technologists, the ones whom I have had the great good fortune to interact with, are looking at these technologies as things that are evolving and that should be getting better and better and better. They are looking at them as platforms as opposed to conclusions. And I cannot tell you how much I abhor the fact that the people who want to apply the technology seem to be much more technological determinists than the technologists themselves. The technologists, typically, seem more open-minded than the self-described humanists.
E.R.: With respect to dialogue and conversation and community, say something about one of Sam Goldwyn's famous malapropisms - the one where he said, "Include me out." Isn't one defining part of a community actually who is "included out"?
SCHRAGE: Absolutely. It's very interesting that you mention that. I think the diversity issues that we see haunting higher education and trickling down into K-12 - these are very serious concerns. There's not a shred of doubt in my mind that we will be seeing all kinds of discrimination, a denial of access to various people, to various Web sites or various things, because people want to just associate with their own kind - except in this case the associations will be virtual associations as opposed to physical associations. But, you know, a part of me says, so what? If the underlying motive to your asking me the question is, are we going to see a Balkanization of things as a result of the Web - the marginal technical cost of excluding people is dropping. I think that's absolutely true. Whether that's going to be ultimately harmful, I don't know.
One of the most interesting controversies I've gotten good at provoking is by asking people: "In your organization should people be allowed to send anonymous e-mail? Should people be allowed to post anonymous comments vs. attribution?"
I get vociferous debate, because some people think you should be able to criticize anonymously, because if you have your name attached to it, people will counterattack you, right? And you can't be honest. The organization punishes people who attach their names to criticisms of the organization. But, of course, the downside of anonymity is that people make unjustified accusations. Now in academe we talk about the importance of attribution, right? But look at the bulk of the professional journals. What do you have - you have anonymous review.
Usually everybody knows who the reviewers are, but that's not the point. Ostensibly, it's anonymous. Well, when we publish documents, or professional journals on the Web, what does anonymous review, peer review - who gets to read it, who gets to comment on it - what does that mean? How should that be done? I think one of the wonderful things that this new medium is doing is forcing institutions of learning, higher education and professional publication to come to grips with all these difficult questions of anonymity and attribution, inclusivity and exclusivity in a different technological context.
E.R.: In addition to the fragmentation issue, there's the issue of quality. Talk radio is a nice idea until you listen to it. It's mostly just gibberish, just as CB radio was mostly just gibberish. And, of course, a class discussion can sometimes degenerate into gibberish, and a student fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be brighter than the others may find a heated class discussion to be pretty boring stuff.
SCHRAGE: Sure. But as much as you point that out, there are huge debates about whether tracking is good or bad in high school. And even in universities there are issues about tracking - eligibility for these things. And now you are coming to the heart of the question. What gets customized for the individual? What gets customized for the small group or the large group? There's a world of difference if you are in an introductory physics section with 500 people in the class which is being run by a TA or you're in "the honors sequence" and you've got 15 people.
Many serious educators insist that the most important learning does not go on in the classroom, it goes on in your study group outside when you do your outlines and share your notes and discuss how cases should or should not be cited or interpreted. Well, designing a Web site or designing a Lotus Notes environment, designing a Netscape interaction, designing groupware that supports, let's say, a Harvard Law School study group - that's going to be interesting. Because you are supporting very intense personal interactions that are also very knowledge- and data-intensive.
I think one of the most profound impacts - and profound challenges - on the Web right now is the issue of scaling technology-mediated interactions. We have the telephone which enables certain kinds of dialogue. You can have two or three people call into this number and you could have sort of a conversation going. How scaleable are conversations? My joke line on this is: How do you go from dialogues to kilologues to megalogues to gigalogues to teralogues? What do conversations with thousands and millions of people look like?
I don't know the answer to those questions. I wish I did: I'd go entrepreneur in a picosecond. I think that at some point, words collapse, and we use iconographic or dynamic simulations and creative ways of annotating or printing one's conversational flag in the midst of an interaction which becomes a new genre of interaction and communication. I don't know how these things are going to evolve. I don't think historically, genetically we've evolved to go from conversation - you know the Platonic ideal of the size of a town being everybody who could listen to the sound of a single voice - to managing megalogues in an organization or in a city or in a state.
E.R.: Aren't you worried that a conversation of that scale is really something close to demagoguery? Mass hysteria?
SCHRAGE: Yes. Of course. Absolutely, I'm worried about it. And for many years I was worried that, you know, that weapons of mass destruction would lead to mass destruction. But it's sort of interesting. Do media of mass communication inherently lead to mass delusion or mass hallucination or what? Sometimes, yes; sometimes, no. But, remember, we're not just scaling broadcasting here; we are scaling interaction.
E.R.: And you think that's possible?
SCHRAGE: You know what? I don't know. I'm comfortable in saying that tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars - and the future of education - rest on how effectively that kind of question is answered. I will point out, though, that the most successful ad campaign the old Bell system ran was not "Reach out and inform someone" or "Reach out and exchange data with someone at 56 kilobits per second" but it was "Reach out and touch someone." And there was an affective quality, there was an emotional quality of the interaction that's there. So, you know, yeah, we have brains; yeah, we have minds; but we also have hearts, we also have feelings, and I don't know what kind of art forms are going to emerge that facilitate the ability to have thousands of people "conversing" at the same time.
Remember the jump cuts in "The Train Robbery" - 1903 - didn't occur until 20 or so years after people were playing around with movies - what did people originally do with cinema as a medium? They filmed plays! And what we have done in the century of film is create a new language, a new semantics of image. We have yet to create a new language and semantics of digital interaction. We're at the very beginning of that phase. I mean, yes, the Internet is 25 years old, but in terms of its being a mass medium, it's barely four or five years old. And yes, it's true that you can watch the first years of television. But it's also clear that we have seen everything from MTV to ESPN and the effort now is to blend Web sites with classic broadcast television. We are seeing new genres of representation and interaction emerge.
E.R. Well, let's conclude by asking you for some free consulting advice. If you, tomorrow, were talking to presidents and administrators and faculties and students, what would you say to them? What should they be doing?
SCHRAGE: Keeping in mind that free advice is worth what you pay for it, I do have some suggestions. The single most important one is that academic institutions should have the courage to decide what they're not going to use technology for. What experiences and interactions do they want to keep uniquely human and interpersonal? What should be the "Internet Free Zones" in the university?
The other challenge is to ask administrators and deans and chancellors to see how they can bring market mechanisms - auctions, for example - into determining what kinds of digital investments yield the greatest returns for the time and money. How does the institution want to manage its portfolio of technologies for educational development? What's the venture capital investment? What's the equivalent of the T-Bill?
Tom Malone, an MIT Sloan School Professor once made a comment that I take partial credit for because I goaded him into it: "The more choices you have, the more your values matter." Less than a decade ago, technologies confined and limited our choices. Today, we have more choices than we know what to do with.
In a way, universities - like so many other institutions and enterprises - are now surrounded by insurmountable opportunities. Technology will become a dominant way universities embody their values of scholarship, teaching, earning and community. A lot of that is going to happen by default. The most successful universities - the ones that others will seek to emulate - will be establishing design sensibilities that create new ideas for marketplaces as well as marketplaces for ideas.
Michael Schrage, a research associate with the MIT Media Lab, writes and consults on the design and diffusion of digital innovations. [email protected]