DRAFT! December 7, 1998
Many college presidents today worry that we've passed the point of no return when it comes to spending money on technology, but we don't know where we're going. (Steven W. Gilbert)
Computers have played an important role in some undergraduate program's for decades. Video and telecommunication have been used for higher learning even longer. Pundits have periodically announced that an educational revolution had just begun or would begin shortly. A certain skepticism has greeted their claims. Today, however, more educators and people in government seem willing to proclaim the revolution. Are we really justified in labeling today's technology-based changes in education as revolutionary? Does that label of "revolution" help us foresee where we're going or what problems are looming?
If there is a technological revolution in education, it began to pick up speed only recently. Kenneth Green has documented how, for many years, the use of computers for teaching was confined to a tiny minority of faculty (perhaps 3-5%). In the last few years, however, those percentages have been growing sharply, rising rapidly toward half the faculty using technologies such as e-mail.
Why is the use of technology now increasing so rapidly? The price of computing power has certainly fallen but cheap chips aren't the reason by themselves: the total bill for computers and networks is going up, not down. Most technology spending by institutions and/or students seems driven by the needs to:
Is it really an educational revolution if we use e-mail instead of just telephones? Do any of our ways of meeting these needs constitute the beginnings of a revolution in the organization of learning?
My questions for them have always been the same. "What was education like," I ask them, "at the time of Socrates?" We think of that time today as an educational Eden: Socrates and his students talking with one another in the Grove of Academe. Into this Eden crept a technophilic snake. "I've been to the workplace," this enthusiast might have said, "and the new technology there can revolutionize education!" That enthusiast was talking about reading and writing, of course. Obviously no one actually called reading-writing a technology nor did they talk in terms of a revolution, but we do know that the reliance on reading-writing was controversial at that time and that Socrates thought that it was dangerous for people to learn by reading. We've had 2,500 years to get used to this idea. From today's perspective, with 20:20 hindsight, how is higher learning better than it would be if we somehow had to rely only on talk? How is education worse because of the ways we use reading and writing?
While half the people in the room are thinking about the benefits and costs of this media revolution in higher learning, I ask the other half to consider a second transformation. Until early in the second millennium, higher learning relied almost entirely on free lance scholars. Students would seek out these teachers individually. But then in the West, in cities such as Bologna and Paris, students and scholars began to organize and to share facilities. Sometimes the students got the buildings and engaged the faculty, while in other places the scholars got the facilities and the students. Once the university got started, it could attract more scholars and students. Sometimes the city would also invest, in order to attract more people of learning. Let's call this the "Campus Revolution" to focus our attention on the way facilities, scholars and students were shared in a single place. How are we better off in education today because of that revolution? How are we worse off than if we were still to rely on independent scholars and independent learners?
Answer these questions yourself: If you try this same exercise, you'll understand this essay better: I've found that there's no substitute for spending an hour with other interested folks thinking as hard as you can about those two questions. I suggest that you could gather a group of colleagues, the more the better. If there are more than five or six of you, divide into small groups, three to five people each, and take an hour. I've attached a worksheet you can use. Even if you read the remainder of this essay first, going through this inquiry yourself will still help. You'll see more issues and you'll understand them better.
You've probably heard arguments in which one person says, "There's something good about using this technology so we should use it!" A skeptic then replies, "There's one thing bad about using this technology so let's not!" In contrast, participants in this inquiry always find large numbers of gains and losses. One reason I've done this inquiry eighty times is that each time I always hear about gains and losses that no previous group has noticed. The losses are usually closely related to the gains. For example, reading-writing opened the doors of learning to far more people. They could read the words of masters who could never otherwise have taught them. Yet, at the same time, this same innovation closed the doors of learning to people who could not read or write (even though education continued to rely in part on dialogue). So did the reorganization of higher learning around reading-writing open access to new learners or deny access? "Yes!" is the answer. This kind of shimmering quality applies to the answers of many such questions:
These parallels are so startling because the three revolutions depend on such different technologies:
All three revolutions have also changed the nature of academic work and who does it. For example as reading-writing became more common, organized processes for copying manuscripts emerged. With the growth of the university came the invention of administrative roles. The third revolution has brought computing support staff and Web masters. Some of these new roles and organizational structures are linsiden education and some, like textbook companies, are outside. Some are specific to education and others, like computer companies, are used by education but are not of education.
The first big question raised by our inquiry is this: "With technologies as different as paper, buildings and silicon chips, why are the consequences of their use so similar?"
Educational research and common sense both answer that question in the same way: the revolutions are similar because different technologies are being used to meet similar needs in similar ways. Knowing that paper is used in a school tells us nothing about its consequences. Once we know that the paper is used for mathematics, or art, or spitballs, then we can talk about consequences. If we know that both computers and paper are used for mathematical calculations, we can guess that the gains and losses (relative to people doing math in their heads) will be similar.
So answering one question leads to another: "What needs define all three of these transformations as revolutions? In what ways are their uses of technology parallel?"
Here's my answer to that question: Looked at from today's standards, each transformation enabled simultaneous gains in both access and quality -- they used technology to help each of a larger number of learners make use of a greater variety of educational resources and experiences.
The reading-writing revolution: Compared with education based purely on small group dialogue, reading-writing enabled more learners to learn from at least one scholar (access gain) and each learner could usually learn from more scholars (quality gain). Available expertise included scholars that learner could never have met, even scholars long dead. Reading-writing could also alter the character of the interchange between scholar and student. In classrooms, some of us have been tongue-tied when the faculty member asked a question; we didn't have the time for a thoughtful answer so we said the first thing that came into our heads, or remained silent. In contrast, with reading-writing, students could interpret at a more thoughtful pace and decide how to reply at a thoughtful pace, too. Reading-writing helped learning burst out of the restraints of that tiny Grove into a much larger world of learners and learning. In the United States in the last century, James Garfield once said that the ideal university consisted of a pine log with a student on one end and Mark Hopkins (president of Williams College) on the other. That says something about the power of dialogue, but Garfield's ideal of one great teacher is also a prison if the student lacks books written by other teachers, pen and paper.
The campus revolution's facilities and continuity enabled more scholars and students each to have access to an even larger collection of specialized intellectual resources collected over the generations. Time was pushed back in other ways, too. For example, each scholar or learner could spend years or even decades full-time inside the walls learning and sharing. By organizing into specialties, they could teach more ambitious, specialized programs. Universities could be international because of the Web of their day: the use of medieval Latin as an international language for books and lectures (a second language that barred potential teachers or learners who could not use it). Government played a role, subsidizing the universities in order to attract more learned people to the city and its economy. Once again, higher learning had broken out into larger worlds of learners and learning.
Although the Third Revolution is certainly in its infancy, its outlines are already clear because the Third Revolution is so similar to the first two. Once again, we are using technology to reorganize teaching and learning activities so that we can achieve both affordable gains in access and affordable gains in quality. The signs of this simultaneous improvement are beginning to appear all around us:
Both critics are acting from the same reasonable assumption: that some crucial educational resources (e.g., faculty attention, rare library books, laboratory equipment) cannot be "stretched" without diminishing their value. Unless spending is increased, these critics assume that an educator or legislator has only two choices: stretch those limited resources among the many to increase access (while watering down quality), or concentrate them in the hands of a few (thus endangering the extent or equity of access).
That tradeoff between affordable access and affordable quality is not immutable, however. For example, all three revolutions have resulted in certain affordable improvements in both access and quality (but at the cost of certain losses, too, as we've seen).
How do revolutions achieve this seemingly miraculous effect? They do so by relying on the same three mechanisms:
Technology-based reorganization helps each learner and scholar interact with more people and with more kinds of people. Thus more, and more kinds of, learners and scholars can take part in higher learning. Technologies make this possible both by bridging distance and by redefining time. In the Third Revolution, one of the time-redefining technologies has been electronic mail and its cousins. These modes of asynchronous communication provide a pace of dialogue that is faster and more conversational than homework exchange but more thoughtfully paced than real-time, face-to-face conversation. E-mail is often used in ways that increase the percentage of students who participate. Some people who are completely silent in a face-to-face classroom open up when using a computer. There seem to be several reasons for this. For example, e-mail enables more people to talk "at once" without worrying about interrupting one another. Learning can improve when communication improves; three of the research-based "Seven Principles of Good Practice" involve communication with students: faculty-student interaction, student-student interaction, and rapid feedback to students about their work. So if a revolution enables better interaction among more people, the change can improve quality as well as access.
Each learner and scholar can choose among more academic resources. This change is made possible by the ways in which the new technology can bridge distance. More subtle is the ways in which time is a factor. Writing, for example, allows instructional materials to be used by learners even at times when they cannot be with the author. Libraries in universities accumulate resources over generations. The World Wide Web and networked access to supercomputers are among the more recent and spectacular advances in the academic resources now available to huge numbers of scholars and learners day and night, seven days a week, year-round.
These first two advances - linking more people and more things - help education increase its scope and scale. Growth is sometimes thought of as "more of the same" or "cramming more students in" or "doing more with less."
In revolutionary transformations, growth in scope and scale can enable new things to happen:
I've seen three levels of such vision in action, and thanks to these discussions about the three revolutions with so many people over the last few years, I can imagine a fourth level of vision.
The lowest level of vision imagines, implicitly, that technology is magic. A few academics and people in government still believe that if they merely provide enough hardware or network connections, education will become better, faster, and cheaper. But showering technology on instructors and students without adequate training, support, and reorganization is almost always frustrating, wasteful, and demoralizing. No matter which revolution we're talking about, the power of technology is released only through skilled use within an appropriate social or organizational structure. Giving people (only) computers and network connections makes no more sense than giving illiterate people reams of paper and stacks of pens.
The second, better type of 'vision worth working toward' takes one of two forms:
This pair of visions governs a good deal of today's investment in technology. Attend any conference on technology and learning and most presentations will boast of only one type of gain: either in access or quality but rarely in both. We ought to leave this kind of vision behind as quickly as possible because, with resources so tight and needs so great, we can do better.
The third type of vision uses technology in activities that simultaneously increase both access and quality. This is a truly revolutionary vision. We have listed a number of such activities in the preceding section, activities such as online seminars that include at least some people who could not otherwise have learned while also giving every participant a more thoughtful pace of dialogue. Another example: online libraries that offer larger collections to more people. We ought to ask this question of any program reform proposal that uses technology, "Could this program become even better and more cost-effective if it used technology to improve both access and quality?"
This revolutionary vision is beginning to excite an increasing number of scholars, students and people in government: a world in which higher learning is breaking out of the walls of the campus to include more scholars, more scholarly resources, more learners, and new paces and types of learning. We're just now breaking through. We stand in the sunlight of a larger world, blinking, wondering, and anxious.
Fortunately we can look to the past for help with basic directions. For example, from the example of libraries, we know that students don't learn just by being near lots of instructional resources; they need librarians and a curriculum that helps them learn to exploit the library in their fields. The same is true about the Web.
This kind of lesson suggests a fourth level of 'vision worth working toward.' We know from the first two revolutions that certain tradeoffs and losses are predictable. If we can predict such tradeoffs, we can move to minimize them and thus to control some of the risk that comes with revolution. By realizing in advance that we face hard choices, we can make those choices more wisely.
For example, in the late 1980s the state of Maine began to move toward more virtual forms of education. The Education Network of Maine, as it is now known, combined such technologies as microwave video and a multi-institutional public-private virtual library that would mail books to distant learners. Educators and government realized their move to increase access could also endanger access if students had to buy their own access to the networks. Instead Maine created a network of high schools where students could go to participate electronically in state-wide college courses. Thanks in part to Federal funding, Maine equipped schools with computers, fax machines, and links to their video network. Thanks to those government investments, students, even older adults facing rural distances during the Maine winter, could come to a nearby high school to take part in lively classes composed of students on campuses and around the state. They could fax in their homework, use computers (including using the computer to do library searches), pick up books. The student did not need to travel long distances or buy expensive technology for the home. Unemployed learners also had access because the Maine system did not depend on access via the employer. Maine exemplifies how aggressive public policy can extend access while damaging access as little as possible.
To summarize the argument, looking backward at previous transformations of education provides some guidance for today. The reorganization of education around the use of reading-writing and of campuses led to a variety of advances featuring interdependent improvements in certain aspects of access (who can learn) and quality (what they learn). These gains were made possible by the use of technologies to help current and new learners and scholars take part in a richer set of interpersonal connections, to help them each gain access to a wider range of academic resources and experiences. The range of possibilities was further increased by increases in the scale of the operation that enabled qualitative, not just quantitative, changes in the way education operated.
The Third Revolution, based on a very different technology, is making similar gains at a similar price, because it too is make possible improvements in who can learn and in what they learn. The many parallels among the three revolutions suggest that we subject new proposals for technology-based instructional improvement to two simple tests:
[2] Perhaps because I was trained as an engineer, it is natural for me to think of pens, paper and what we know about how to use them (reading and writing) as technology. "Technology" refers not only to the means we use to achieve our ends, but to what we know about using those tools. Campuses are both technologies themselves as well as collections of technologies (e.g., blackboards, lecture halls, seminar tables, drawing boards, studios, etc.)
[3] When a new technology helps learners who couldn't perform well using old technology, some odd things happen. Socrates opposed reading-writing in education. He said that students could counterfeit knowledge by merely repeating what they had read (but failed to understand). Thatms certainly true. But something else may have been worrying him, too. I caught a glimpse of this kind of worry about ten years ago. A faculty member told me that he was worried because of a young woman's sudden improvement in academic performance. He had had twenty years of experience in teaching French, he told me. He could tell early in the term what student'm final grades were likely to be, and this young woman had seemed likely to get a "C"n She used the technology available four times more than other students had, and got an "A." In the second course in the sequence, one where no technology was available, she had indeed gotten a "C." lSo you see,n he told me, "I was right about her. She really is a 'C student.' Does this mean that the technology was a crutch?" Both Socrates and this faculty member were accustomed to a certain teaching environment and had developed sensitive intuition about who was lsmartn and who was not - intuition based on that older environment. Change the technology and suddenly "dumb" students may excel. Is the technology providing illegitimate help?
References Chickering, Arthur and Stephen C. Ehrmann (1996), "Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever," AAHE Bulletin, October, pp. 3-6. http://www.tltgroup.org/ehrmann.htm
Chickering, Arthur and Zelda Gamson (1987) "Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education," AAHE Bulletin (March).
Green, Kenneth C. (1998), lreferencen URL
Agreed upon Stopping time for this task: _______
Name of Recorder/Reporter: ____________________
This workshop is designed to help your team think about large scale structural changes in education: revolutionary shifts who can learn, what they learn, how they learn, and what it costs.
Such technology-enabled transformations have happened before. Those "paradigm shifts" were not identical to the possibilities and perils raised by computers, but the issues are not altogether different either. Many people have found it useful to think together about the issues raised by reading and writing, and by the advent of the campus, as a warm-up to considering today's strategic challenges.
These are easy questions to answer, but impossible to answer completely or with complete certainty. The two questions below can be answered simultaneously (half the people in the room think about "A", while the other half thinks about "B") or in sequence.
Question A: Imagine yourself in Fifth Century BC Athens. Higher learning is all talk and thought (Socrates and his students in the Grove of Academe). Along comes a technophile who points out that there is a great workplace technology that ought to be "integrated" into higher learning, that education could be revolutionized if students also employed reading and writing as well as speaking and listening.
Cluster in groups of 3-4. Identify at least three ways in which relying on reading and writing would somehow improve education, and three ways in which it would damage education. (Probably at least some people in the room already know that Socrates was the first recorded critic of educational technology - reading. Just reassure them that they don't need to know, or restrict themselves, to what Socrates had to say. Twenty-twenty hindsight is fine. What really happened?)
Question B: Consider a revolutionary technology on the horizon some 1500 years later. Higher learning "now" takes place when a student hires a tutor. In our fictionalized version of academic history, imagine a "techie" tutor-scholar who exclaims, "I've got a revolutionary idea. Let's share a building! We'll organize and buy one together. Students will hire us as an organization. They'll study in our building for years, and rent rooms from us, too. We'll have a couple of big rooms for lectures, a shared library, and great faculty offices. What do you say?!" Cluster in groups of 3-4. Identify at least three ways in which relying on reading and writing would somehow improve education, and three ways in which it would damage education.
Instructions for Facilitator: After they've had about ten minutes or so, the groups share their ideas. The reporter writes phrases representing their ideas on an easel or computer display (we use a word processor to create a table with columns, so the 'wishes' and 'worries' can be visible, side by side).
It usually works best to write down every idea, rather than spending lots of time arguing about whether a particular idea is correct. You can certainly ask if everyone agrees and, if there are contrasting points of view (as there often are) write those down, too. The reaction is likely to be vigorous but, if conversation lags, you can ask groups about how the use of these technologies changed the chances that:
Follow-up Questions
What patterns can you see in the issues you've identified - similarities and differences between reading/writing and campuses, for example?
What similarities or differences do you see between these issues and the issues now raised by computers, video and telecommunications? Are the changes associated with current uses of computers, video, and telecommunications likely to be as revolutionary as the earlier transformations?
The groups have identified many losses due to the ways we use reading, writing, and campuses. Why do we use these ktechnologiesm despite these losses? Were there gains that we absolutely had to have? Which ones?
Do any of these patterns suggest fresh insights about needs and opportunities today? Problems to anticipate?