Mediating Instruction with Technology
By Tony Tremblay
“The university has to become a technical school so that each student may instantly fill a position in this technological society. And people are horrified that the university does not accommodate faster and better. These imbeciles are totally ignorant of what the university’s role should be, they sneer at the value still attached to the ‘humanities,’ at the uselessness of Latin, of history and philosophy. They want the university to be a technical cog in a technological society. Of course, these are the same imbeciles who give pompous speeches on tomorrow’s civilization and technological humanism. . . . In effect, it is quite likely that this adjustment to the technological world will condemn any possible university to death.” (Jacques Ellul, The Technological System, 245)
Tony
Tremblay operates his computer in his office at St. Thomas University
The discourse analysts among you will notice first in my title the syntactic fracture from what has now become the fluid “Technology Mediated Instruction.” That is intentional. I want to focus in this short piece on both the action of mediation and the attempts to steer discussion away from that action. “Technology” must therefore be put at the end of a title to be made strange (which, for most of us on the inside of education, it is).
My observations in this piece come from two memorable “learning” experiences in the last few months, the first Greg Sprague’s opening component of our most recent ETI (“How Multimedia is Changing Our Lives,” April 2000), and the second Dr. David Brown’s talk on “Assessing the Impact of Technology on Learning” (Brown Bag Seminar, September 2000). Both presenters occupied a common ground; that is to say, both announced that they would “assess impacts,” which at least to me suggested some critical evaluation, if not preliminary interventions in the form of questions, contexts, considerations, implications, and so forth. What both delivered, however, was overdetermined hyperbole of the sort that tends to ignore evaluation for declaration, specifically, declarations of the speed, power, and wizardry of the machine. Neil Postman calls this the “gee whiz” approach to discussing technology in education, and points out that it is a standard rhetorical strategy used to optimize persuasive bullying while removing that which is contentious from the realm of reasoned debate.
So what was said? Greg Sprague, UNB’s then-incoming Director of Computing Services, began by saying that Intel’s CEO was “the new guru.” Of what exactly, we were not told, though the inference of his importance (whatever it is) was assumed to be clear in both the language and spirit of animation that followed. The flood of terms alone was impressive: “global revolution,” “electronic revolution,” “screenagers,” “e-company” (versus “ex-company”), “cyber-squatting,” “e-solutions,” and “affordability.”
Eldridge’s Axiom— “faster, better, cheaper” — informed Sprague’s whole presentation, and without any thought whatsoever to the impact of all this on our learning and teaching environments, let alone what gets taught and learned. Without reference to the shifting ground, or to the work of Jacques Ellul or Neil Postman or Ursula Franklin or countless others whom we in the liberal arts know a little about, the clear messages in Sprague’s overdetermined hyperbole were these: that there can be no debating the importance, indeed the necessity, of technology in the classroom, and that to believe otherwise renders one roadkill on the information superhighway. Imagine being told that by UNB’s Director of Computing Services, and that since “business is driving the revolution,” we must therefore fall in line.
To make any sense of the foundational logic in all of this, one had to be at the next “learning technologies” presentation by Dr. David Brown, in which a regional IBM executive sat next to the previous Director of UNB Computing Service, David MacNeil. Coincidence or instructive recurrence? (Probably the latter, since Dr. Brown was quite open in his admission that IBM was underwriting some of the cost of the two-year laptop replacement policy at his university.)
Dr. Brown opened his presentation with the comment, “computers save student lives,” and proceeded from there to espouse with merriment — equal to Sprague’s own — the supposedly research-corroborated benefits of delivering instruction via technology. I say “supposedly” because while he claimed that research existed to prove that laptop technology did enhance learning, he also said that he could produce no paired or matching-set studies that made the case — a curious instance of his text embarrassing its own ruling logic. In that absence, all he could do was assure us that it was so, that technology was the answer. Foremost among the benefits he identified was the idea that “with [technology-induced] ubiquity, the culture changes.” And with that comment and matching PowerPoint slide, Adorno rolled over in his grave.
Moving in that narrow range from surety to declaration — believing, in other words, that technology is a panacea for education and then saying so — what these speakers didn’t seem to understand is that technology itself changes both the learning environment and the content of what is learned, and that as reflective educators we tend to care deeply about those changes. Which doesn’t mean that we necessarily fear them (a position their oppositional logic forces us into), but that we want to attend to them, discuss them, and feel our way slowly. Moreover, as scholars of argument and utterance, we tend not to be swayed by rhetorical tricks, meaning that most of us understand that if “e-solutions” are proposed, then non-“e”-problems can be found. If you don’t own a spaceship, then getting to Mars is a real problem, especially if Mars suddenly becomes the agreed-upon destination. In such an environment, the complicity of those who make spaceships is rather obvious, especially if they too are the cartographers. Such is the coercion behind the overdetermined hyperbole of the two speakers I heard: our lack becomes a determination of what they have in plenitude, an old salesman’s trick.
For my part, I am curious about the pedagogic potentials of technology and am making attempts to incorporate technology in my teaching and research.
I become wary, however, as I think others do, of the tyranny of non-academics and corporations in dictating the terms of education, for that which intervenes or enables (such as technology) also changes. I ask nothing less than to be a partner in this change, and I look forward to the reasoned discussion and “slow-zoned” implementation training that must now temper the hyperbole of the IBM/UNB salesforce.