Induction

Movement 1:
Heaven's Gates

Movement 2:
Cyborgs Can't be Educated

Movement 3:
I Don't Want to be a Computer!

Movement 4:
You are Here!

It is usually called "IT" or Information Technology and about the only thing I like about this term is a certain affinity with the protagonist in a Stephen King novel. IT is all about access, delivery, transfer, reach, and storage. IT reduces teaching and learning to the access to information, the transfer of information, and the storage of information. Classrooms equipped with IT are called SMART. IT extends the university’s traditional reach by delivering classes to remote locations serving businesses, distant communities, and the handicapped. New teaching paradigms are described in terms of IT’s reach.

 

IT, to me, is a perfect character in a horror novel, because IT maims and destroys what I understand as the most fundamental objectives and processes of human teaching/learning. IT reduces teaching/learning to the transfer of information, humans to information processors. IT assumes a conduit teaching/learning metaphor, that is, that those who know, who are (like the classrooms) smart, are the ones who have information, use information in their research, and deliver information in classrooms equipped with IT. Those who are learners are, well, they are empty, informationless. IT supports an image of the university as an industry that delivers the certified transfer of information to empty units (students). Since computers are almost infinitely better at IT than are humans, the goal of education under these assumptions, it would seem, is to become a computing and information storage machine.

 

As a model for who we are I think the cyborg beats the processing machine. We think of cyborgs as characters in science fiction, Data in Star Trek. We think of them in the future. But we are already cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) and have been for some time because of the indispensable use of eye-glasses, wrist watches, automobiles, telephones, computers, pacemakers, and countless other cybernetic and mechanical supplements on which our bodies depend. My objection to IT is not that it conjoins us with machines, but rather that IT is bent upon eliminating the "org" from us, on reducing us to mere machines; self-referential, high-speed, information processors, trapped in hyperreality (mere simulacra).

The strategies, as I have observed them, for attempting to develop a vision for IT never even acknowledge, much less question, these assumptions. Thus the conversation turns entirely on the basic issues of access, connectivity, delivery, speed. Even the discussions of paradigm shifts take place only within these confines. In assuming that education is primarily information processing and by interpreting what we presently do in teaching and research as primarily information processing, we eliminate a vital range of potential vision for the future of the technology we call IT. Our vision of IT is limited to an expansion and extension of the present operation, yet severely truncated by seeing it only in terms of IT. We do not ask how this technology offers the potential to completely rethink ourselves as scholars, and teachers; we do not imagine how we might reinvent higher education. We assume that, at least in the general ways of tools and operations and objectives, what we are doing is what we should continue to do and that how we are doing what we do is how we should continue to do it. IT may serve us by making these tools and operations more efficient, faster, and more far-reaching. The bottom line is information.