Movement
1:
Heaven's Gates
Movement
2:
Cyborgs Can't be Educated
Movement
3:
You are Here!
Movement
4:
A Cyborg Humanist's Vision
Chips from a Cyborg Workshop:
I Don't Want to be a Computer!
I Don't Want to be a Computer!-2/3
Increasingly, it is clear why we are eager to have computers read essay exams, as they have been doing other kinds of exams for a very long time. It is because our model for the educated is the computer itself. The machine treats all data consistently and objectively. It can always come down to a yes-no decision and it never sits in a quandary over which choice to make. It is fast. And, as the growth in computer hardware demonstrates, the extent of its storage of information, its ability to transmit and receive information, and its processing speed correlate with its value.
I’d suggest a principle. The operative ideal educators have for an educated person is most perfectly represented in the methods by which we communicate with students in our process of evaluating them. If we evaluate students using a method of sstanding the student before an examination board that grills her or him, we hold the ideal educated person in a model of hierarchy, perhaps aristocracy, where one’s place determines who one is. The educated have the privilege even of harassment. Here education is a process of initiation into realms of power. Successfully educated one accedes to roles higher in the hierarchy and gains the power to manipulate others. Little surprise that this method is common to military schools and law schools. If we evaluate students by method designed to advance learning as much as to evaluate, say a conversation in which it is possible that the teacher may shift and modify her/his positions through interaction with the student, we present a model of an educated person as one open to interaction with and capable of learning from all others. If it exists at all this method might be found in humanities programs in liberal arts colleges. If we evaluate students by objectivist criteria exacted by computing machines, we see the machine as the model of the educated person, the cyborg de-emphasizing the "org."