Thinking and learning have nothing to do with IT

Originally published 3 June 1996

A doc­u­ment titled “Using Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy to Enhance Aca­d­e­m­ic Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty” recent­ly came across my desk.

Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy (IT) is a fan­cy term for com­put­ers. On the cov­er of the doc­u­ment is a pic­ture of two cog­wheels grind­ing away in a daz­zle of light. The pic­ture gives the mes­sage away.

Con­sid­er this excerpt: “The ben­e­fits of shift­ing away from hand­i­craft meth­ods, cou­pled with scale economies and increased flex­i­bil­i­ty, argue for the adop­tion of IT even when one can­not demon­strate imme­di­ate cost advantages.”

And: “The ‘retrain­ing’ of IT equip­ment (for exam­ple, repro­gram­ming) while not inex­pen­sive, is eas­i­er and more pre­dictable than retrain­ing a tenured pro­fes­sor. With­in lim­its, depart­ments will gain a larg­er zone of flex­i­bil­i­ty as the cap­i­tal-labor ratio grows.”

This tech­nob­a­b­ble is offered as a plan for sav­ing high­er education.

Now, I am no anti-com­put­er Lud­dite. I was the first at my col­lege to use a com­put­er as a learn­ing tool, back at a time when we ran box­es of punched cards on a bor­rowed off-cam­pus com­put­er. I use com­put­ers every day in my teach­ing. I encour­age stu­dents to use com­put­ers when­ev­er appropriate.

And there’s no doubt that col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties have a seri­ous cost prob­lem that will have to be addressed in imag­i­na­tive ways, and com­put­ers will be part of the solution.

Hav­ing said that, I hope edu­ca­tion­al admin­is­tra­tors will have the good sense to resist the siren call of “IT.” What­ev­er our prob­lems, they don’t have a tech­no­log­i­cal quick fix.

IT might very well enhance “aca­d­e­m­ic pro­duc­tiv­i­ty,” if by aca­d­e­m­ic pro­duc­tiv­i­ty one means the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of cogs at min­i­mal cost. But IT can also have dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences for lit­er­ate dis­course and humane learning.

Already, teach­ers are being referred to as “infor­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als,” and stu­dents as “knowl­edge con­sumers.” Books have become “book­ware.” Ideas are “thought­ware.” Hand­writ­ing is a “pen- based com­mu­ni­ca­tion interface.”

Here is how an IT tech­no­crat might define edu­ca­tion: The opti­mal uti­liza­tion of strate­gic mul­ti­me­dia plat­forms imple­ment­ing flex­i­ble inter­face func­tion­al­i­ty to facil­i­tate infor­ma­tion trans­fer in a pro-active user-friend­ly net­worked envi­ron­ment for knowl­edge enhancement.

As IT expands its sway, a curi­ous thing is hap­pen­ing, as point­ed out by com­put­er lan­guage maven John Barry.

Increas­ing­ly, human char­ac­ter­is­tics are applied to com­put­ers. Thus, we have dumb ter­mi­nals, neur­al net­works, and for­giv­ing pro­grams. Com­put­ers talk to each oth­er using a tech­nique called hand­shak­ing. They have intu­itive inter­faces. They are well-behaved. They sleep.

Con­verse­ly, humans increas­ing­ly refer to them­selves in com­put­er terms. We no longer talk to each oth­er, we inter­face. We refer to our leisure activ­i­ties as down­time. We don’t get things off our chest, we core-dump. “He lacks band­width” means a per­son can’t deal with mul­ti­ple thoughts simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. “Get off my screen” is a brush-off.

Slow­ly, imper­cep­ti­bly, the world turns upside-down. Com­put­ers become more like humans, and humans become more like machines.

Time to put on the brakes.

Let’s stop talk­ing about IT as the sav­ior of edu­ca­tion. Let’s talk instead about teach­ing and learn­ing. Let’s talk about books, and words, and poet­ry, and art, and his­to­ry, and — yes, sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. Let’s do it in the lan­guage of Shake­speare and Jef­fer­son and Austen and Dar­win and King.

Let’s resist becom­ing cogs in an elec­tron­ic machine.

Does that mean we should remove com­put­ers from aca­d­e­mics? Of course not. Com­put­ers are a fab­u­lous resource, an invalu­able tool. The trou­ble comes when the tail starts wag­ging the dog.

The oth­er night I was with a small group of stu­dents around our new tele­scope in the col­lege obser­va­to­ry. The tele­scope is com­put­er dri­ven. It can point to any one of thou­sands of celes­tial objects at the tap of a few keys.

In pre­vi­ous years I spent long stretch­es of time search­ing for faint objects while stu­dents shuf­fled their feet and wait­ed. Now, thanks to the com­put­er, we sped through the sky, feast­ing on neb­u­las and galax­ies, talk­ing excit­ed­ly about what it means to be human in a uni­verse that con­tains more galax­ies than we can imagine.

It was a beau­ti­ful night, full of soft breezes, glit­ter­ing stars and friend­ship. One of the stu­dents, for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son that I could dis­cern, quot­ed Edna St. Vin­cent Mil­lay:

"Nor linger in the rain to mark
The smell of tansy through the dark."

It was one of those sparks of gor­geous spon­tane­ity that define the best of edu­ca­tion. Mean­while, the com­put­er was there, unob­tru­sive­ly doing its job, as com­put­ers should.