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November 5, 2004
fear and loathing in the academy
Posted by Liz Lawley
Last month, I moderated a workshop on “social software in the academy” at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication. The attendees were primarily Annenberg faculty and graduate students, along with a few industry representatives and some academics from other institutions who had experience implementing social software tools (weblogs and wikis, primarily) in classroom contexts.
One of the topics that we didn’t have an opportunity to explore in as much details as I would have liked was the issue of power, control, and authority in higher education, and the destabilizing effect that social computing tools can have in these domains.
Then today, via Heather James, I found this disturbing post (and I really hope I’m not putting him at risk by drawing attention to it):
Anyway, the University I work for employs one of the two big ‘Courseware Management Systems’ as it’s central teaching and learning technology. It may surprise some people that I’m actually pretty cool with this. Over the last few weeks I’ve interviewed over 90 students and they love it, it’s great for lecture notes, talking to the lecturer / tutors and getting extra information & links.
However, there are lots of things I believe it doesn’t do so well, such as facilitate effective communication (see my paper of a bit back) . And several that it doesn’t do at all, such as allow people to collaboratively create documents, chat using IM, email etc. So, as part of my research interests, working entirely through 3rd party software & hosting providers and mostly on my own time I’ve been working with several academics investigating the uses of wikis, weblogs and other technologies in educational contexts. With this CMS as the main, focal, authenticated important area which leads to these.
Last Tuesday I received a memorandum from a manager cc’d by am exec. director instructing me to cease supporting and promoting weblogging, wikis or any other technology not officially supported by the University. The basic reason given being that I have, anecdotally, not used the CMS (this isn’t true, I always use it) and that ‘commentary’ on the issue of CMSs (quoted I think from this blog or another I set up for a course) is unacceptable. A set-up for disciplinary action should I not follow instructions.
So I’m gutted. I’m not going to go into the arguments here, I guess that’s not appropriate at the moment, but I am going to reply internally and in essence beg that as part of my academic research agenda and in the best interests of the University I be allowed to continue my work.
I’d like to say that I’m shocked, but I’m not. I am, however, surprised that we haven’t seen more stories like this.
At my institution, administration has not tried to shut down new technologies for pedagogy—in fact, we’ve just signed a site license for MovableType, and I know of several professors beginning to use wikis in the classroom. But at the same time, I had to fight my own senior colleagues last year on the issue of whether faculty should be allowed to bring their laptops to meetings—the sense was that the growing use of backchannel was “unfair” and/or “rude” and had to be stopped. (It wasn’t, but not for their lack of trying.)
We can’t pretend that these tools are neutral additions to the academic environment. Wikis, for example, have a powerfully destabilizing effect on voice and authority, two things that have traditionally been under the control of instructors in higher ed. Ubiquitous networking and portable devices provide a backchannel environment that changes discussion in the classroom in a profound way. I’m not preaching technological determinism here—simply saying that we need to be aware of the destabilizing power of the tools, and to begin to address those effects directly in our thinking and writing about educational technology.
Comments (5)
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1. Alex Halavais on November 5, 2004 2:21 PM writes...
I've brought up the issue of the big boys in courseware and how they will affect the software environment, but no one seems particularly interested. I think one of the reasons for this is that many of us come from campuses with very strong protections for intellectual freedom among the faculty. I know that when (not if) my campus goes to Blackboard for blogging, I can still, with my own money and time, teach using a tool not supported by the university. This clearly isn't true on many campuses.
I think we need to be serious about ensuring an environment in which these tools are available to teachers. I fear that we may have already lost this battle. Either that, or we all need to get behind very large, but largely free, alternatives.
Permalink to Comment2. Jason on November 5, 2004 5:24 PM writes...
I think the issue comes down to the culture of the institution. I've often been invited to speak against courseware (blackboard, WebCT, etc...) _by_ the university departments that are responsible for making these tools available. My main point is that courseware is about the institutional governance of the learning environment... and makes sense to them, but we as educators have a responsibility to make our own choices in terms of what learning technologies we need to bring into our classes, digital or otherwise. I promote university faculty who develop their own widgets (Knowledge Forum is one of our local ones) but not corporate all in one tools.
My university (U of Toronto) is very balkanized, and there is no central computing authority except for the folks who keep the backbone working. Accordingly, computing services has the opportunity to provide support and make tools like blackboard or webCT available, but they cannot dictate to faculty.
It is a question of faculty control of their own teaching and learning environment, a question of pedagogical freedom. And I'm shocked that faculty would put up with such imposition by a bunch of technology administrators into how they should teach.
But that's me.
The “social software in the academy” workshop was a wonderful experience. Thanks!
Permalink to Comment3. James Farmer on November 5, 2004 7:22 PM writes...
Hi Liz,
No worries, thanks for the perceptive thoughts, I think I'm probably guilty of a bit of wide-eyed-ness on the impact & implications of these technologies. Not any more!
There's an update at: http://incsub.org/blog/index.php?p=48
Things look like they're moving, possibly, in a half reasonable direction... but we shall see.
I'm pretty blown away to be linked to on M2M tho! Very cool, I've been an avid reader for a long time, keep it going :o)
Cheers, James
p.s. I am trying, privately, to offer some sort of alternative... if anyone's interested please visit my 0.2 site http://incsub.org which aims to offer free-for-teachers set-up, hosting & support for these technologies.
Permalink to Comment4. Brian Wiese on November 8, 2004 7:48 PM writes...
I'm studying abroad in Norway for the semester, and here at HiA the use this Classfronter system which works remarkably well! I've been using blackboard at my school back in the states, and I find this much better! Collaborating on documents/discussions, having shared file space and folders with permissions to group/class members (wish could assign 'group' ownership though, to delete old files), some chat builtin (don't think it works though) as long as people simulatenously logged into the system, as well as the lectures/assignments/turnin folders. Just having a shared file space together with course documents was quite useful, and easy for the non-techies.
I DO still have a reservation against these systems in schools though, and the _privatization_ of information. A couple semesters ago, in my digital computer structures class, I found the best slides and lectures on websites hosted by professors at other schools! I used THEIR slides to learn, as ours were quite lacking in quality. Now when all of this gets taken offline and hidden so that only students for that class can read and learn from it, its quite limiting.
Hopefully we can find ways to embrace these CMS/CollabLearning environments while still sharing some content Outside the system to the rest of the internet. MIT's OCW is exactly where I'd like to see more university lectures go, out to the public to learn from! Don't 'privatize' education so much, post to the Net and make it available to one and all for more than just a 'semester'!!
Permalink to Comment5. Don Park on November 9, 2004 4:43 AM writes...
Hmm. I don't see anything wrong with a university enforcing its policies as long as they are willing to live with the consequences of their policies. If they want to ban computers from the school, why not? If they want to paint themselves into a corner, I say let them.
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