Computers In The University
Lots of talk, when it comes to computers and education, about those who “get it” and those who don’t. Until 2004, I figured I not only “got it” but understood well what it was I was getting. In some important ways, I was right, but in many more crucial ways, I was wrong. I didn’t understand what I had been given, or why. I didn’t understand why the people who built networked interactive computing had done so. About the time I began writing this blog, I began that journey of understanding, a journey that continues.
The other day, i was preparing for the class I’m teaching this term, a new variant of my Intro to New Media Studies course that I’ve renamed and focused on what I feel was its true subject all along (and it only took me 4 1/2 years to find the focus): “From Memex To YouTube: Cognition, Learning, and the Internet.” The eerie thing is that once I found that focus, more discoveries began falling from the skies into my eager arms. Preparing for the class on J. C. R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” I re-read some material from Mitchell Waldrup’s epicThe Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal.I’ve read this book about three times all the way through, and I dip into it habitually to relive those defining moments of the emergent digital age–including the defining moments of rank unbridled idiocy that almost strangled the revolution in its cradle, such as the British Postal Service’s refusal to let the team that developed packet-switched communications develop their innovation, in any way, for any purpose. Too disruptive, you see; an entrenched bureaucracy and its reliable revenue streams were at stake. Precious years and opportunities for transatlantic collaboration were lost as a result. I have to think that the bureaucratic self-preservation also meant some spirits were bruised or even broken. Perhaps I’m just projecting.
Anyway, as I read The Dream Machineagain, I fell upon a lovely Licklider quote that I’d seen before. This time, though, because the pupil was ready (at last–I’m running hard to catch up), the teacher appeared. Did he ever:
No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continuously. Perhaps the brain, like the heart, must devote most of its time to rest between beats. But I doubt that this is true. I hope it is not, because [interactive computers] can give us our first look at unfettered thought.
The letters glowed as if lighted from within. “Where do you find time for all these Internet things, Dr. Campbell? Don’t you think we’re in danger of being overwhelmed? Don’t you think Google is making us stupid? Aren’t you a little bit, well, zealous about all of this? Don’t you think all the junk on the Internet is just time-wasting drek?” And just about half a century ago, Licklider dared to give the radical answer. “No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continuously.”
But of course if we want to find the answer, we have to take care to help fashion and nurture and valuecreative brains. We have to think of unfettered thought as a worthy ambition. We have to acknowledge what Blake called our “mind-forg’d manacles” and yearn for them to drop away.
This time the words were on fire in that quotation from The Dream Machine, and I had to find the source of the flame. So I checked the reference, and found that the quotation came from a volume called Computers and the World of the Future, the proceedings of a 1961 conference at MIT held in their School of Industrial Management. Such a provocative title! And such an ironic occasion: as the rest of Licklider’s remarks made clear, this great man championed the digital multiuser computer as the device that could take education out of the industrial management paradigm and into something new, something as rich and bold and full of emergent potential as the human brain itself:
The impact of the digital computer upon university education, it seems to me, will stem mainly from the changes the computer will produce in intellectual activities generally. The pedagogical responsibility of the university is not to lecture or assign problems or grade them. It is to create a situation within which most bring students will automatically learn. The multi-user digital computer opens new horizons for anyone eager to create such situations. (my emphasis)
Licklider was greatly interested in artificial intelligence, and I part company with him in his over-valuation of the idea of teaching machines. Yet the core of his ambition is, I think, exactly right. I say “is,” even though Lick uttered those words above over fifty years ago, because I have many colleagues who share the ambition, the eagerness, to create those “situations in which bright students automatically learn.” Perhaps “automatically” is a bit too strong. Students need nudging, encouragement, a few jokes and some tough love to make it through some of the more arduous roads to understanding. Yet I take the spirit of Licklider’s words to be that when we aim to perfect our lectures, assignments, and grading, we may (and typically do) neglect our own eagerness, our own continuously creative brains, and the prime pedagogical directive of education: to create situations that stimulate curiosity and self-directed, intrinsically-motivated learning.
And let’s not get distracted by the word “bright,” either. Lick may have meant “highly intelligent,” but even if so, I’ll expand that to mean “any student whose eyes are capable of lighting up.” I’ve seen those bright eyes, and so have you, no matter what the Gf scores report. I’ve also seen the lights go out when school forgets its pedagogical responsibility within the compliant “industrial management” strategies of the so-called “learning management system.” We don’t need any more “learning management systems.” We need “understanding augmentation networks.”
Lick gets the last word:
The conclusion at which I arrive is that the present problem is not to assess the role of today’s digital computer in today’s university. It is to get to work on tomorrow’s computer and tomorrow’s university.
If we “get it” about computers and education, it’s because we were “given it,” decades ago, by the people who envisioned new horizons and the continuous creativity that those horizons could stimulate. So forgive me if I’m eager to create the situations Licklider describes above. The waiting is the hardest part–and I swear that I’m just about done (i.e., fed up) with it.
Works cited:
“Computers In the University,” in Computers and the World of the Future. Martin Greenberger, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962
Waldrop, Mitchell.The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Lickliderand the Revolution that Made Computing Personal.New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2001.
Blogs and Baobabs
I do not much like to take the tone of a moralist. But the danger of the baobabs is so little understood, and such considerable risks would be run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid, that for once I am breaking through my reserve. “Children,” I say plainly, “watch out for the baobabs!” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince.”
I’ve long thought of blogging as a way of unschooling or deschooling within the framework of schooling. Why not simply deschool entirely? Edupunk it all? For me, that’s a waste. The framework of school can be a helpful point of focus, and at its best can convey a sense of occasion that would not be so strong or inviting without the lovely intensity of an expert imaginatively convening a group of fellow learners, or a group of learners imaginatively convening themselves around an expert, a wise expert who knows how to prize students. I am painfully aware of how seldom one finds wisdom, love, intensity, strength, and prizing within the structures of school, especially these days with the almighty gods of assessment and accountability and so forth installed in a pantheon that has little to do with cognition or relationship. But the abuse of an institution does not necessarily mean the institution itself has nothing to offer. School at its best gives a shape and a collegial society to my yearning for betterment. “Do It Yourself” doesn’t mean “do it by yourself.” School ought to give one a way to find the former without concluding that the only way forward is the latter route.
But sometimes I wonder whether schooling’s distortions can be overcome–or to put it another way, whether school can create within itself spaces for deschooling, moments of release from the dead hands of “rigor” and professorial imitation. Where is the recess for the mind, the space in which freedom within a general sense of direction and purpose can elicit self-surprise, emergent phenomena, essayistic discovery?
For me, blogging has been that recess. Its rigor arises from the non-trivial effort it takes to focus on something while one is exploring it, to focus on it byexploring it,and then to try to create an enjoyable, interesting experience for the reader. Joy, interest, and focus are rare in the land of college writing, even when one requests or invites them. Instead, at least in my experience, one gets book reports, meandering attempts to ape authoritative writing, or rushed slapdash vacuity that can’t have made much sense even to the desperate writer during the overnight frenzy it took to produce it.
I began using blogs in my classes because I was very tired of papers beginning like this: “For hundreds of thousands of years, men and women all over the world in society have….” I was tired of my best writers producing stilted academic prose. I was tired of my worst writers either stressing so much over the mechanics that their papers got worse, or paying so little attention to what they were thinking and writing that any spark of interest or joy or wisdom that lurked beneath the awkward diction and inept sentence boundaries was snuffed out long before the comma splices began.
To use blogs in this way, I have had to develop an entirely new vocabulary of encouragement, nudging, framing, and evaluation. I have had to examine my own allegiance to the academy (frankly, I find myself working harder to justify the academy surrounding me than I do to justify the blogging within it). And as I have worked within the academy to help my colleagues understand the value and nature of this essayistic endeavor–and to recall that the word “essay” means attempt, not accomplishment–I have had to meet, greet, and push back against many objections. How will I grade it? What justifies this terrible invasion of the student’s privacy? Why should I endure–even encourage–sloppy informal writing that’s not up to academic standards? These questions and their many kin imply assumptions I no longer share, a separation that makes it difficult for me to find persuasive replies. I find we may no longer speak the same language–and given the pervasiveness of these assumptions within school, I feel like the foreigner. But I still try.
Several months ago, I was talking with a colleague about an opportunity for his students to blog, and I tried to explore the new vocabularies and conceptual frameworks I’ve tried to develop as I seek the recess of the mind blogging affords. (Yes, I hear you: “recess” signifies both what I advocate, a kind of cognitive playfulness and inventiveness, and what my colleagues fear, or say they fear, which is a receding emphasis on rigor, formal argument, etc.) I advocated blogging as a place in which Carl Roger’s “freedom to learn” is vividly present as an ongoing source of strength and inspiration within the course of study, even over a lifetime of learning. The blog offers a space, I said, in which the teacher can exercise the humility and delight Heidegger recommends as the highest and most strenuous calling within education, the teacher’s willingness “to let learn.” My colleague replied,”It may be learning, but it’s not academics.” I’d never heard that distinction made so sharply and explicitly. I was amazed by the implication that learning alone wouldn’t make the grade.
In my mind’s eye, I could see the baobabs of academics surrounding the little asteroid of learning, a little asteroid soon to be split into pieces, its fragments sent spinning through a void that must one day, in an ultimate irony, consume the baobabs themselves. But not until those sad and wandering little spheres are reduced to rubble.
Colleagues, I say plainly, and to myself as well: “Beware the baobabs!”
Last week two examples of these baobabs came into my view. In both cases, I’m sure that the professors meant well–and I do not mean that at all condescendingly, since not every professor does in fact mean well. Yet the awful pressure of academics upon learning is everywhere within these articulations, dismayingly so. Even as I write, I feel my own failures and struggles emerging, but I have to say it anyway: it’s probably better not to require blogs at all than to require blogs that are strangled by the baobabs of academics. Save the academics for term papers and other more formal assignments! Instead, preserve a zone in which we can “let learn,” in which there is genuine freedom to learn. I won’t link to the authors’ websites, as I do not intend to attack them, and because what I believe to be the problems with these specific examples represent a far wider set of attitudes and practices. I single out these two assignments as examples only, ones I happened to run across. It would be unfair to hang the entire weight of my critique on them alone. I also want to salute both these teachers for actually putting their syllabi online instead of trapping them within a “learning management system.” But I feel I must speak plainly.
Here’s the first example.
Blogging (15%):One of the key aspects of your work this semester is our course blog, on which youll write frequently, using your posts to respond to our course readings, to draw your classmates attention to articles and artifacts youve found, and so forth. You are required to post at least one entry each week, which should directly engage with the weeks readings, before the start of class on Monday; this entry should be as formal as a printed reading response would be, paying attention to the quotation, citation, and explication practices involved in close reading. Other entries are greatly desired; these can be as informal as you like. You can explore issues that have been raised in previous class discussion, but you must significantly expand on that discussion and not simply rehash whats already been said. You can skip two of these reading response posts with impunity. You are also required to read your classmates posts and leave at least two comments each week, before the start of class on Wednesday. (Note that you dont have to post the the two comments at the same time; just make sure that week-to-week you get those entries and comments in.) This weekly requirement is meant as aminimumacceptable level of participation; I hope that youll all contribute more, creating an ongoing, engaging dialogue.
Some observations. The tone veers between encouragement and a kind of hectoring, with occasional instances of what feels like peremptory insistence on what the students “will” do, what “is desired” (by the teacher, presumably), and what kinds of behaviors will not be punished (skip two posts “with impunity”). I have no problems with requirements when it comes to blogging, as I’ve written elsewhere, but I do think it’s unwise to try to require commitment by specifying all the forms it must take; one gets commitment to specifications, not to values, and it’s almost certain that the fundamental desire for “an ongoing, engaging dialogue” will not be fulfilled. Instead, one is most likely to get, at best, a simulacrum of such a dialogue geared to what students believe the teacher will find engaging, not what the students themselves find engaging. There can be overlap there, of course, and I fully believe the teacher can and should lead the students into much deeper engagement than they are likely to encounter or realize on their own. But that requires detection and extension of what they’re already engaged by, and this blogging assignment doesn’t appear to be framed in that way.
To state it more simply, the item missing from the initial catalog of what students will use the blogs for is “to explore your thoughts, interests, and puzzlements in relation to this course of study.” Then the reader’s response is over-specified, and we end up with an academic assignment, not a blog. At what point is “what is desired” awakened within the learner, not simply imposed upon him or her? Such awakenings need canny nurturing and all the arts of intellectual seduction.
Even more seriously, the required reading-response post is a formal assignment whose strictures are so definite and school-familiar that I can’t imagine the completion of that required post will feel like an invitation to more informal posting afterward. That’s not to say that a formal reading-response exercise is not valuable. On the contrary. But I wouldn’t call it blogging, and I think the assignment inadvertently conveys a set of values and expectations that is antithetical to the real power of blogging within a course of study.
The professor must judge the difference between significant extension and rehash, between committed effort andlackadaisical coasting, between emergent insight and irrelevance. No question. But blogging provides a space in which that judgment can be rendered flexibly, lightly and joyfully, as an invitation to exploration and quality of commitment.
Here’s the second example. Given that there’s a list, I’ve commented item-by-item.
Blog Participation
1. Comments of 500 words or less on the class blogthat are helpful to the classwill be worth 10% of your grade.
I’m not much on “class blogs,” as I think blogging needs to be personal, not in the sense of divulging private information, but in the sense of emerging from and feeding back into the personhood of the learner. I’m also confused: are the students publishing blog posts of their own, or simply commenting on something already posted? The latter is particularly restrictive and typically involves a teacher’s felt obligation to supply “prompts.” Such promptings can be fine in other contexts, but in my view they make blogging into something pretty much teacher-centered, and thus something other than blogging. And why the limit on length? Comments over 500 words may be unwieldy or distracting, but this is a matter to be discussed within the class, in my view, not specified on a syllabus.
Also, I’m interested in whether the class has a mechanism for signalling what it finds helpful. Or does “class” not mean “group of learners” but “the material I the teacher am covering?” If the latter is true, then the baobabs have truly done their work.
2. You may make as many comments per week as you like. However, you will only receive credit for up to two comments in any given week. The real goal of the blog comments is to help you internalize and think about the material on an ongoing basis. Cramming comments does not help you with that, nor does going back to comment on old subjects .I will have random cut-off dates for participation grading throughout the semester. They will not be pre-announced. Therefore, you should consider every day to be a possible cut-off date.
I understand that commenting doesn’t work if students either flood the channel with thin and thoughtless material just to get “extra credit,” or bunch their comments together after several weeks of ignoring the ongoing dialogue. I certainly agree with the “real goal” as it’s articulated above. That said, the idea of random cut-off dates brings in a note of surveillance and gotchas (every day’s a hangin’ day!) that doesn’t invite commitment so much as it inspires either a) dread or b) a desire to find another way to game the system. It’d probably be better to discuss these issues in the class meeting without trying to over-engineer an airtight system of discipline in this way. But then I’ve never agreed that a syllabus should be a contract. The commitment needed for a rewarding course of study is too big and too delicate to be specified exhaustively within a single document. If one tries to do so, the result is legalistic behavior on the part of the students, in my experience.
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