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.
