Judith Weiss
jsweiss@mail.utexas.edu
----- Forwarded MSg -----
>Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 18:33:26 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Phil Agre <pagre@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Subject: The Internet and Education
>
>The Internet and Education
>
>Phil Agre
>pagre@ucsd.edu
>http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/
>
>[This is a revised transcript of comments I prepared for the OERI
>Workshop on Social Capital, Technology, and Education in March 1996.]
>
>I started out as a computer person, and now, after many changes,
>I would call myself a sociologist except that sociologists want to
>reserve that term for people with PhD's in sociology. During my long
>journey, I have learned something about the institutional dynamics
>that have made it difficult to harness the immense potential of
>technology to serve social needs. The difficulty, simply put, is that
>the worldview of computer people is technology-driven. The coordinate
>system of the computer world is defined by "methods" and "problems".
>Every computer person is the master of a particular repertoire of
>technical methods, and computer people look for work by searching
>out problems to which these methods can apply. If all you have is a
>hammer then everything looks like nails, and computer people receive
>a great deal of tacit training in looking at the world, and talking
>about the world, and persuasively portraying the world to others,
>as a vast collection of nails, all fitted to the particular technical
>methods that have been developed to date.
>
>The identification of problems is the interface between computer
>people and the rest of the world. Where do problems come from?
>Any why *those* problems, and not others? In practice, the agenda
>of legitimated problems arises through a negotiation across the
>boundary between the computer people and the people who pay the
>bills. When computer people negotiate with the military, for example,
>and especially an office such as ARPA, problems get defined and
>redefined periodically to suit the larger strategy of the funding
>agency. Most researchers never witness these negotiations personally,
>and most graduate students are simply taught that such-and-such are
>the interesting technical problems right now. ARPA can exert power
>in its negotiations with computer people because it is centralized,
>well-connected, and relatively immune to political pressure.
>Most people whose lives are affected by computer research and its
>products do not have these benefits. And yet it is crucial that
>technology-driven agendas not define the terms of debate over social
>issues or the parameters of practice in nontechnical professions.
>
>Such has too often been the case in education, which has a long
>history of technology-driven visions, each having the effect of
>selling a lot of machinery to schools based on futuristic symbolism
>and hopeful but superficial cure-all theories of education. The
>symbolism of technology has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to shut
>down thinking. Technologies come and go, but the sales pitches all
>sound the same: technology represents the future, everything you have
>ever learned represents the past, and if you want to keep up with
>the times then you will let go of the past and buy these film-strip
>projectors or computer-aided instruction systems or what-have-you.
>
>In each of these cases the problem is not with technology but with
>the technology-driven agenda that bypasses the knowledge and skills
>of professionals, persuasively portraying people's lives as nails
>long enough to sell another batch of shiny hammers. In education
>particularly, the hype for every new technology includes systematic
>stereotyping and denigrating of teachers -- the very people who are
>in a position to identify the gap between techno hype and classroom
>reality -- as backward, resistant, and stuck.
>
>How will we prevent this outcome in the case of the technology du
>jour, networked computing? Instead of a technology-driven social
>agenda, I would suggest, we need a socially-driven technology agenda.
>A technology-driven social agenda posits an inevitable and autonomous
>line of technological development, from which social consequences
>flow. A socially-driven technology agenda paints a picture of
>which computers are just one part, and it tells a story that depends
>simultaneously on nontrivial ideas about how computers work and
>nontrivial ideas about how society works. Like any technology agenda,
>a socially-driven agenda will arise through a negotiation between the
>technologists and the people whose lives the technology will affect.
>The difference this time is that the nontechnologists will be
>organized with the knowledge, the visions, and the power to negotiate
>as equals on behalf of social needs.
>
>What might a socially-driven agenda for networked computing be like?
>Let me tell you three suggestive stories about this, and then conclude
>with three concepts that might motivate educational research in this
>area.
>
>The first story comes from the work of Margaret Riel. Riel has put
>together a series of global consortia of classrooms, all pursuing
>curricula on a given topic in a coordinated way. In a curriculum on
>Antarctica, for example, the students will be engaged in a variety of
>activities, some of which employ computer networking for particular
>purposes and others of which do not. They might do research on
>Antarctica in the library, do science work that is related to
>Antarctica, and write about what they have learned. They might use
>the network to share data with other students or to share their ideas.
>They might work together to formulate good questions, and then at a
>scheduled time they might put these questions to an expert.
>
>The key is that the curriculum is in charge, not the technology.
>No need to throw away everything that teachers have learned about
>organizing lessons -- quite the contrary, the point is to build
>on that accumulated experience to understand how best to fold the
>computer and network into the mix, and how not to. If teachers using
>computer networking have learned anything, it is precisely this: that
>you don't just let the kids loose on the net, that you don't just play
>games, but that you organize real lessons in which the network plays
>a rational role in supporting learning. A significant benefit of this
>approach is that it lessens teachers' isolation. They're still cooped
>up in the classroom with the kids for most of the day, but now they
>have a means for collaboration and community-building with other
>teachers. This allows them to share both curriculum materials and
>personal and professional support.
>
>The second story concerns the many local computer societies that have
>organized volunteer projects to wire schools to the Internet. Some
>of these projects are famous, but in the wrong way. It is not very
>helpful, as some projects have done, to swoop down on a school with
>little notice or planning, running some wires through the ceiling and
>disappearing. The projects that work, in my experience, use a more
>professional approach. They talk to the school staff and parents,
>do a proper needs assessment, and draw up an guidelines that tell
>the participants how to do it right. Because the activity of pulling
>the wires is labor-intensive, such projects provide an occasion for
>community organizing. That's the real point: the lasting community
>bonds that can be built and rebuilt around the school. These projects
>provide a valuable experience of working together and a concrete
>sense of what democracy is about. I'll never forget an evening talk
>I gave to a group of computer people about the political aspects of
>computing, drawing on concepts from the American populist organizing
>tradition. Many of these people had been involved in volunteer school
>wiring projects, and their heads were nodding all the way through.
>Everyone had a story about what I was talking about and a lot of
>stories beyond what I was talking about.
>
>The third story is about social capital. I grew up in a town in
>Maryland where I was never exposed to the skills of professional
>networking. When I went to graduate school I was clueless in the
>matter, and so I set about studying the powerful professors around me
>and making theories of their lives. Later I became a voracious reader
>of how-to books. Some of these books are a lot better than others,
>and they're all laced with ideology. But through these experiences
>I formed the conviction that the unequal distribution of social
>networking skills is a powerful force for the reproduction of social
>stratification.
>
>Having social networking skills is not the same as having a social
>network: it is, rather, the habitus within which one is able to form
>new networks. I remember my astonishment, for example, when in the
>midst of organizing a national conference on socially responsible
>computing, I finally figured out that social capital formation in
>professional and elite networks is based in large part on issues:
>identifying an issue of broad concern, articulating the issue in ways
>that a specific audience can find urgent, talking to a wide range of
>people in that audience to gather thinking on the issue, and above all
>organizing a meeting that both supplies a *reason* to be talking to
>these people, thus forming social capital for oneself, and provides an
>occasion to put people on stage, thus doing favors for everyone that
>establish relations of reciprocity.
>
>It was through experiences like these that I resolved to figure out
>how the professional world works and write it down. Pierre Bourdieu
>is doing something similar on a much larger scale in France (a country
>with virtually no tradition of how-to books), but I wanted to do it in
>a way that people could understand and act on. So I wrote an article
>called "Networking on the Network" and put it on the Internet. It's
>a guide to professional networking for advanced graduate students,
>though many business people have used it as well. On the surface
>it's about the Internet, but the real point is to learn to "see" the
>practical logic of the social world, and then to "see", once again,
>how the Internet is only useful when it is used in a rational way as
>one piece of a much larger picture. The Internet does bring changes
>in these skills, but they're incremental changes that should reinforce
>our appreciation for the underlying principles.
>
>I want to emphasize that none of these three projects was organized or
>published as academic research. I think that the social applications
>of computer networking is one area in which practitioners are ahead
>of academics, doing a pretty sophisticated job on their own resources.
>Academic research, however, does have an important role in providing
>conceptual foundations, institutional legitimation, social networking,
>replication of successful strategies, and formalized training in the
>newly emerging skills. I want to suggest three areas of research
>-- three concepts -- that academic work could develop in support of
>the numerous initiatives that are already going on. These concepts
>are collective cognition, community system design, and developmental
>democracy.
>
>First, collective cognition. What the Internet is really good
>at is supporting what I call the lateral institutions of society.
>These are the institutions, formal or informal, that people create
>among themselves based on a shared structural location, a shared
>life situation, a shared problem. Examples would include professions,
>support groups, quilting clubs, labor unions, or the PTA. What people
>mostly do in these lateral institutions is think together: they share
>stories, they share language, they share information, they share
>social connections, they share emotional support. This is "thinking"
>in a broad sense, but I believe that we should define it broadly.
>Lateral institutions engage in this sort of collective cognition
>through many means and media, but the Internet is particularly
>useful in holding the process together across distances or between
>face-to-face meetings. Riel's teachers provide one example, and
>just about any Listserv discussion group on the Internet will provide
>another. And yet we know little about the mechanics and dynamics and
>evolution of collective cognition, nor how to design systems that can
>support it better.
>
>Second, community systems design. My story about wiring schools
>is a more or less spontaneous example of what people in Scandinavia
>call participatory design: viewing systems design and implementation
>as a social process, with equal emphasis on both of those words, and
>systematically involving all stakeholder groups in every stage along
>the way. Wiring a school is not just a delimited technical exercise.
>It is also an occasion for a community to articulate and express its
>values. Where do we want the terminals to be? How will we make sure
>that the boys don't push the girls aside? Do we want the kids working
>alone or in groups? How will we support teacher development? Who
>else in the community do we want to provide access to? What other
>institutions in the community do we want our school connected to?
>How do we want to support ongoing relations between the school and
>the parents, and among the parents? How much money do we want to
>be spending on this? How many books could we be buying instead?
>What kinds of software do we want our kids getting into? What sort
>of WorldWide Web pages do we want them getting into? All of these
>questions involve value choices, and all of them can influence the
>finest technical details of design and implementation. Perhaps the
>most important outcome of the process is social solidarity, social
>asset mapping, social capital, and the community's sense that it is
>taking control over its collective life and fate.
>
>Third, developmental democracy. I wish that somebody had taught me
>how to organize a meeting when I was a child, and I wish the same for
>all children. Katherine Brown at UCSD pointed out to me that that's
>what Junior League theater productions are for, but involvement in
>such activities is currently as stratified as everything else. How
>can we incorporate such things into the daily life of teaching and
>learning? To achieve this goal, we need some sense of developmentally
>appropriate social organizing skills. At what age should children
>be able to organize a phone tree? At what age should they be able to
>identify an issue that their peers all want to learn about and talk
>about? At what age should they be able to build consensus in a peer
>group? At what age should they be able to articulate issues that
>create occasions for dialogue among different groups? At what age
>should they be able to write an announcement for a meeting?
>
>Having identified these milestones, we can then ask about pedagogy.
>What kinds of activities can create opportunities for apprenticeship
>in these skills -- what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger call legitimate
>peripheral participation? I think that networked computing provides
>a useful occasion for thinking about these things. Not only is it a
>powerful tool of social organizing and collective cognition, but it is
>new enough and strange enough that it invites us to think all of these
>issues anew, giving us a chance to drop old habits and consciously
>form new ones in accord with democratic values.
>
>In sketching these stories and concepts, I hope to have conveyed
>some sense of what a socially-driven agenda for networked computing
>technology might be like. Social values and professional skills
>lie at the center of such an agenda, and the technology is just one
>piece of the picture. We know that we have really begun to develop
>a socially-driven agenda once the technology seems *contingent* --
>no longer inevitable or monolithic but a matter of choice that we
>can shape in a conscious way. Having gotten this consciousness, we
>can participate as full partners in the negotiation through which
>technical "problems" are defined. No longer nails being hit with
>technologically-driven hammers, we can choose our own future, our
>own vision, and our own lives.
>
>end
--Posted to the Learning-org list by: jsweiss@mail.utexas.edu (Judith Weiss)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>