Enhanced Learning

Enhanced-learning.org is an online resource devoted to educational and academic subjects. The site is devoted to intellectual pursuits. Trying to analysize information and trying to form theories that can be tested again and again for their veracity is at the heart of the drive to build intellectual models of the world and all that is in the world in order to better understand. I sometimes feel when I’m in the library or at home studying that the models we build are doubly removed from experience – once by the fact that they are models and secondly by the language we use to describe the models.

As well as being an academic by trade I am also an avid traveler. My schedule allows me considerable chunks of time to explore the world. My colleagues stay at home and research new papers tortured by the dictate to publish or perish. I find I get more done if I refresh my mind by immersing it in a new culture and a different type of challenge.

When I travel I take a beat up backpack and a few travellers checks. I don’t bring a guide book, only a phrase book. I never book in advance. I’m not drawn to resorts or ‘luxury destinations’. I have been to Africa, South East Asia, China and South America. I travel as cheaply as possible. I hunt out where the local people eat and I try to engage them in conversation. I make a continual effort to learn the local language. I take local transport and I do my best to not get herded into situations with dozens of others of tourists with their wheelie suitcases. I’ve stayed for free with Berber hilltribes people in Morocco. I’ve spent time in a shack in the Amazon basin in Bolivia. I trekked through the interior of Koh Phangan in Thailand, and found a coconut farmer who let me stay for free in exchange for helping him harvest his coconut crops. The anecdotes go on.

Not all of the stories have been good. I’ve been mugged twice in Brazil. I’ve caught malaria in Malawi. I’ve been threatened with a gun in Cambodia. None of these experiences were pleasant. But I’ve got back on the horse.

Traveling does more than just broaden the mind. It brings home the fact that most people in the world are poor. By that I mean poorer than Americans, Europeans, Australians etc. Their life expectations and their lifestyles are radically different to those people I encounter in the USA. The simple problems of getting food, shelter and clean water are ever looming. It is impossible to talk about the poor majority in the world without patronizing them or sterotyping them. The efforts of charity often do both.

Academic learning can only take us so far. We have to experience the real world outside of our rarefied white towers to gain a better perspective of what we are trying to achieve, to realize how we speak to and for only a minority. There are no words that can describe the injustice of a global system that keeps the mass of mankind at a level of existence not much more advanced than was common hundreds of years ago.

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food

― Hippocrates

We only need take a look at today’s modern diet to realize that the foods we are shoveling into our bodies are nowhere near good enough if we want to be able to prevent disease, let alone treat it. Diseases including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity have all be domonstratably linked to the quality (or otherwise) of our diet.

During the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States and rates remain high. In 2010, no state had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Thirty-six states had a prevalence of 25% or more; 12 of these states (Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia) had a prevalence of 30% or more.

– Center for Disease Control

Is it any wonder that as the amounts of animal products and processed foods that we consume have increased, so to has the rate of obesity across the entire country?

It has to be said that there are many doctors and researchers who are trying to spread the message that whole foods save lives. These include renowned names such as T. Colin Campbell, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Dr. John McDougall and Dr. Neal Barnard amongst many others.

Since their message is widely available, we have to ask ourselves why so few of us are taking it seriously? The answer perhaps has something to do with the might of the meat, dairy and processed foods manufacturers’ lobbies. We are being bombarded with information that seems to be conflicting which helps to keep us in a state of confusion. Therefore unless we take an active interest in finding out how to enjoy optimum health, it is very easy to live in a state of ignorance. This unfortunately may well be a recipe for disaster.

Simple things that we can do to look after ourselves are to always try to find the whole food option. This includes whole wheat pasta over regular pasta, brown rice instead of white rice, and so on. Consuming more foods in as close to their natural state as possible will also benefit our health. The best juicer for the task is one that will juice the produce that you like the best. The tastier good health becomes, the more enjoyable it will become.

Claudia J. Esslinger
Professor of Art
Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio

The Need for Interdependence

Increases in the use of Information Technology in the Liberal Arts College calls for a greater interdependence of the divisions of the college, specifically a further integration of the modes of inquiry taught in the Visual Arts. Training in studio art includes practice in visual perception and research, creative problem solving, personal expressions and physical manipulations of design elements and tools, all done in a community of learning. These are all methods that are increasingly useful for other disciplines because they enhance student ability to use electronic media which in turn is a perfect enhancement for an interdisciplinary model for teaching. The interdisciplinary approaches that are increasing on the college level would occur with or without information technology, but the capabilities of the information age allow a greater flowering of the product of these alliances.

Historically the visual arts were one of the last areas to be accepted as a course of study at Kenyon. They were deemed too practical, too vocational. Apparently the thinking was that painting and drawing were an interesting aside to a life of rigorous intellectual development, but the methods of inquiry in the visual arts were not essential to a liberal education. The reason for inclusion in the curriculum rests on the profound difference in the nature of visual inquiry. The visually educated individual is able to perceive more clearly their surroundings, develop creative approaches to problem solving, and express themselves visually. These are tools all students should have the opportunity to develop.

This argument is strengthened by research since that time in different modes of learning (kinesthetic/tactile, visual and auditory) and multiple intelligences (linguistic, logical/mathematical, spacial, musical, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, intra personal) (Gardner). The variety in human aptitude is also part of the argument for including technologies in our curriculum. (Twigg) It is also part of the educational philosophies advanced by Dewey and others that bring student centered learning into focus. (Brint) In the era of the information superhighway, multimedia processing and video production, the need for visual/kinesthetic modes of learning is clear. The practice of studio art addresses the needs of students previously unreached. Visual arts training makes minds more flexible and capable for other disciplines, and the skills to manipulate imagery are necessary for the full realization of the technological product.

Conversely, the visual arts need the interpretive discourse and research skills used in other disciplines to complete projects which are increasingly social and political in nature. In the field of Video Art, for example, many works approach social and political subjects through personal experience. Although the purpose and goals of this inquiry are different from sociology, some research skills remain the same. Artists choose whether or not to apply an interpretive -artistic filter, and may color the meanings of the research to serve their own goals. Ideas about objectivity, subjectivity, authorship and appropriation are all essential elements of the artists palette and are informed by the critical discourse of other disciplines.

Modes of Inquiry in the Visual Arts and Their Relationship to Interdisciplinary Information Technologies

One of the first attributes developed in studio classes is that of learning to see. Visual Perception involves seeing in a way that takes in details that are often overlooked; looking for similarities or differences in visual forms, looking for shapes between forms, seeing the whole image as interrelated. It allows one to be both specific and abstract, to fragment or synthesize or transform. It works in conjunction with the unconscious to encourage the imagination and awaken deep concentration. Drawing is a fundamental way to increase visual perceptiveness. “Drawing turns the creative mind to expose its workings. Drawing discloses the heart of visual thought, coalesces spirit and perception, conjures imagination; drawing is an act of meditation.” (Hill)

Perception skills increase ones ability to gather the most from research and access which visual information might be compelling for presentation. They help break down stereotypes and interpret unspoken information. People who are visually perceptive often have an ability to remember unusual details which might be pertinent to a subject. A visual style of research is similar to keeping a sketchbook, though it can be done with a video camera or even descriptive words. The compilation of images on tape or film can later be sorted and edited. It is a loose gathering of fragments in a style like weaving or quilting in that it is non-linear and web-like. It will be even more so as students use digital cameras.

The history of technology indicates causative changes in our collective perceptions. The creation of the linear perspective system in the Renaissance placed the viewer at the center of every painting’s universe. The invention of photography flattened space, presented us with visuals hailed as truth. Film gave us multiple viewpoints and fragmented time. Printing technology brought us reproductions of beautiful landscapes available as postcards, offering idyllic points of view and skewed, dotted colors. Television technology broke color into luminous lines. The image was flattened, idealized and somewhat fuzzy. Computers offer us the opportunity to interact and choose (within available choices) our next visual image. As these technologies have changed, the nature of our perceptions have changed with them. It is hard to really see that Caribbean beach scene in real life without conjuring the postcard image and conflating the two. Thus we must be trained to see. Learning first hand visual acuity from drawing will give us a standard by which to critique the media.

Hands on learning is the way in which artists process visual information. The kinesthetic/tactile approach is combined with visual perceptiveness to develop personal expressions. This involves the use of a variety of tools as intermediaries while manipulating the visual elements. Therefore the use of tools is common for the visual artist and in that way, using new technologies is just a variation on a theme. Often a new tool will influence the content of the work because of the new capabilities and problems it presents. Artists are used to trying new tools, gaining some mastery, but allowing the tool to have a voice in the process. They are used to allowing the integrity of the process to influence the content. The tools we are most familiar with, those we no longer need to think about how to use such as the pencil and paintbrush, the word processor and copier, are tools we would consider direct in their interpretation of what we intended of them. Tools that have more variables, partly because of complexity and partly because of our lack of familiarity become indirect in that we most often act upon the tool in one way and have it come out a different way in the product. I am comfortable with that process as a printmaker/ videographer. There are so many variables and steps in each of these processes that I count on the things that occur in the in-between land of intention and result. I can always make a choice to edit it out later, but often the voice of the machine in dialog with my own is more magical than my presuppositions.

A danger in this dialog may lurk in the programming options for some CAD systems. The similarity in options can lead to work that is visually redundant. Thus the visual art training which encourages one to take risks and push the limits of the process are even more important to extend to all of the liberal arts.

A problem for artists specifically related to use of computers is the nature of computer programs. Originated by linear, logical and sequential thinkers, the environment and methods can be alien to many users, including artists who need to see in order to manipulate rather than remember linguistic/numerical commands. Kinesthetic/ tactile learning styles should be taken into account in computer design in order to increase user friendliness. Ergonomics for people who learn with their bodily movement should be employed. Touch pads and screens, a variety of mouse styles, virtual gloves and sketchbook style pads that read handwriting are steps toward fulfilling this need.

Technological innovations have brought unimagined options to all disciplines. The electronic tools of today simulate brain functions in much the same way as the tools of the industrial revolution simulated muscle functions. There were worries then about the machine eclipsing our humanity, parallel to current concerns. The constant in all of this change is the need for us to be able to use the new tool and still maintain our humanity. The probability is that we will make a fair amount of art work about precisely the interaction of the two. Historically this happens while machines are not yet matured in society.

Hands on development of design skills taught in the visual arts are needed for the quality of product expected in multimedia productions, visually compelling Web pages, and unified video presentations. This includes a knowledge of the elements of visual language (line, shape, color, texture, value) and the principles used to organize them (unity, focal points, balance, scale, rhythm, illusion of space and motion, etc.) The visual and manual skills developed in learning these principles will enhance a student’s understanding of how to manipulate them on the computer. This is perhaps the most obvious need from the point of view of the other disciplines, but is modified and accomplished partly through the development of perception, problem solving and personal expression. Artists learn to break the rules as soon as they learn what they are.

Problem Solving in the visual arts is often non-linear and intuitive. Rather than reading the manual and following steps A-Z , the visual thinker often brainstorms many options, thinking simultaneously of possible solutions, and willingly tries them out even if they are not logical. They may rely on the leaps of insight that occur during the physical manipulation of the tool rather than the pre-thinking of a course of action. They may visualize a result and the way to get there without being able to verbalize it. To a visual thinker it is clear that “… you cannot replace intuition, judgement, imagination and creativity with logic, equations, formats and rules” (Munoz, p.48)

Taking risks in an attitude of playfulness is an overarching attitude in problem solving and in the development of the imagination that is too often overlooked in our drive to create a product. Playfulness is the core attitude that allows problem solving to occur, imagination to flourish and intuitive insights to succeed. It allows the association of two or three radically different elements to feed each other creating vibrant new implications. Playfulness is the mode of inquiry that keeps us in the studio late at night, or at least keeps us able to enjoy it. It is the part of visual inquiry that is easiest to lose, given the pressures we face, yet it is the element that we most need to keep our work fresh and exciting. Once basic technologies are conquered, playfulness is easier than ever as we are able to try out several design elements with the click of the mouse. We can change this color, or that texture, we have so much choice, at such speed that it increases our tendencies to try them all.

Personal expression is the process and product of the methods used in visual inquiry. Though artists may strive for a degree of objectivity and universality in some work to suit a purpose, there is no question about the fact that nothing can be objective, and the work must have personal resonance to have integrity. Though the romantic notions of artist as genius are no longer supportable, the honesty of choosing a subject one is personally familiar with allows for a passion to pursue the project to its end. Personal experience also affords insights and a “litmus test” for the arguments advanced by others. It allows dreams to influence the work and sees a full exploration of metaphors as equal in value to the original subject. This aspect is true of other arts including creative writing, music composition, improvisations, etc. Trusting this approach could be a gift of the arts to academia. Questioning it could be the gift of academia to the arts.

The influence of technological innovations on personal expression can be both liberating and constrictive. The liberation comes from the possibilities opened which were unapproachable before. An example of this is the increasing use of enveloping installations with moving images and sound. This provides the appropriate artist with a more saturated way to express their personal vision. This could become more intense with increasing use of virtual reality, holographic, and laser technologies that approximate the artist’s own experience/vision in a more complete way than ever before. The constriction comes from the learning curve needed to utilize these tools, the lack of training immediately accessible, and the cost of that training both in financial and personal terms. The profound dedication it takes to come in on the cutting edge of new technologies can blur an artist’s concept. Often the work must be at least in part about the technology used to create it. Sometimes the early work in a medium is dry or thin, though technically virtuous. One has to ask the question about how this work will fare in the long run. Will it be merely an example of “Early Laser Art”, or will it be significant on conceptual and aesthetic levels as well? Despite all of these detractions, it is the involvement of artists early in technology development that is crucial overcoming them.

Proximity learning is the only way to approach the teaching of visual art making. We may be technically able to present examples of previous work, exhibit technical skills, and present assignments to a group in remote ways, but the learning comes from doing and assessing and doing again in concert with these presentations. In addition, the nature of the presentation changes with the nature of the group, their questions and size, etc. The more complex the tools, the more one-on-one teaching needs to take place. The more abstract or difficult the concept, the more personal discussions need to take place. In fact working with students in the expressive arts can create an unusual intimacy between teacher and student and the class as a whole. Working in a group aids the education and development of the students, as they are willing to share information and ideas. The critical forum for the visual arts class is open “critique”. This is a place where students put their personal investment on the line in a very public way. The nature of the student/ teacher and inter-student relationship is important for the success of this style of learning. They must learn how to analyze and communicate verbally in a helpful way what they perceive from the visual product.

The speed of burgeoning new technologies and the fact that students have grown up with and are more familiar with some technologies than we are makes this clear: teachers are forever students and together we are partners in inquiry. This attitude toward learning helps students to be more willing to solve problems on their own, develop their confidence and be able to function without the structure of a class.

Some Specific Uses of Information Technology in Studio Art

The opportunities offered by information technology that the Kenyon Art Department has explored to varying degrees include: video processing, photographic manipulation, simple negative manipulations for photo-mechanical processes in printmaking, research on the WWW, E-mail, and early computer imaging techniques (1980s). The bulk of my time with technology has been spent investigating the options of video for the visual artist. I have used it in simple form with a beginning level class called “Thematic Studio” and in depth with an intermediate level class entitled “Video Art”.

Video Art on the Beginning and Intermediate Level

The projects we have explored help the students develop some of the abilities especially important in the visual arts, as mentioned in the first part of this paper: visual perception and research, creative problem solving, personal expressions, and physical manipulation of design elements and tools through proximity learning. In addition, there are special problems we address in these assignments that are relevant to other disciplines. These include in part elements of time progression, and the integration of audio, narrative sequencing and text. They also include critical analysis of our purpose with television and film and a comfort with themselves as performers. All of these are new elements for visual artists. The type of tools change, but the comfort of using the body in kinesthetic/ tactile learning remains familiar.

In the intermediate level class which focuses on video, students get to explore essentials of video more deeply and in some ways are even more interdisciplinary . All of the above issues are dealt with more throughly and more refinement is expected. More emphasis is placed on context, of understanding the concepts behind television, film and video art. Awareness and criticism of popular culture is addressed throughout the course as the students become informed producers, rather than consumers. They also have more sophisticated processing options on this level available through a computer controlled editing center. Here they can create special visual and aural effects that can layer art projects with more meaning. (Negatives, polarizations, color shifts, distortions, more text options, etc.)

One element of the video revolution is its affordability which places it in the hands of those who are normally voiceless. Students are encouraged to realize this power. Groups that have made use of this opportunity in the context of video art and cable TV options include gay and lesbian groups, those in a variety of racial groups, feminists, etc. In addition the proliferation of consumer grade camcorders has changed forever the nature of courtroom evidence and television entertainment.

Is there something inherently valuable about this mode of visual inquiry that we have been missing without it? First of all, the basic processes are quick, allowing instant image feedback. In addition students have appreciated the direct connections this creates between their visual work and the rest of their lives, both personal and academic. There is palpable excitement in this class partly because of these connections, partly due to the nature of a new technology, and probably initially due to the hype of Hollywood, which students soon realize is very far from what we are after.

One danger in using television technology is that an over use of special effects is tempting and can look shallow. This is due to familiarity by the student with popular culture use of these technologies such as MTV as well as the wealth of options available. Their intuition can be so saturated with the knowledge of these cultural icons that it takes a while to crawl into fresh territory.

There is also the issue of the learning curve, as with all new technologies. How much do you have to learn before you can produce something? How long does it take to work intuitively? How solid is the software? If it is unproven, students and faculty may spend an inordinate amount of time on something that may not work well in the end. A good deal of technical support from training and maintenance of equipment is essential for class and professional research use of these tools. This is difficult in any situation, but in a small liberal arts college, decisions must be made about what to support, how quickly to bring in new technology, and how broadly to disseminate it. Both faculty and administration must be part of this discussion.

Computer Imaging and Printmaking

Another area of information technology we are exploring is that of computer manipulation of still images for the purpose of printmaking, photography, etc. Our work in this area has been minimal, and we have been interested in having the output from these be prints and photographs rather than the image on the computer screen. The advantages for this application for printmaking, to which I can speak more directly, includes the ability to understand color separation by playing with layers of color in Photoshop. One can also create images or type, or video frames, output them onto acetate and use them to create a photo-silkscreen, litho or etching. Printmakers in the larger world are investigating techniques in output such as luminous IRIS prints, wax/ ink prints and color inkjet plotters. It is natural for printmakers to be involved in this type of technology, for the whole history of printmaking as a fine art is that of an alliance with commercial processes. Alois Senefelder, the father of Lithography was involved in finding a cheaper way to print music when he stumbled on the grease and water principles that still sustain the basis of our commercial printing industry.

The resurgence of printmaking in the United States in the 1960′s was related in part to the idea of democratizing art, making it available for those who previously could not afford it. The idea that multiples could be created by painters put less emphasis on the preciousness of the painting. Many painters and sculptors were guests at printing ateliers and made wonderful prints. This was synchronous with the rise of conceptual/ performance and video art as non- object oriented art. It was an anti “High Art ” stand.

However especially in printmaking, that idea was easy to corrupt. Some painters had printing technicians photographically reproduce a favorite painting rather than using the qualities unique to the print process and reveling in their capabilities. The approach of just reproducing a painting is repugnant to printmakers, who are inspired by the peculiarities of the process, who seek the same for computer manipulated imagery. To be true to its nature, the computer aided image should not try to look like something it is not, video should not try to be film, but use the unique properties available to each media as the basis for image making.

The complications about using these technologies in Printmaking include the pixelization of the image output for use in the print. In addition, the size and orientation of the computer screen is difficult to work with and movable monitors are too costly. The color qualities on a luminous screen are very different from that of ink on a white page, and therefore students must learn to make adjustments. Use of some of the computer options can appear “gimmicky” or “slick” since they are created for the commercial press and must be used very carefully. In addition the cost to the individual student for processing images in a way we can’t accommodate here can be quite high. The last but probably most important issue is technical support. Things can and do go wrong all the time. If they can’t be fixed quickly, projects will be delayed and plans for the class can collapse.

Research on the World Wide Web

One option which appears promising, though is full of problems at this point is the World Wide Web. For artists who are in a location where museums are not plentiful, seeing reproductions of artwork, even digitally reproduced, is better than nothing. Most major museums offer sites on the Web, and therefore access to some images in their collection and educational materials. Some of these are reproduced in printed form, and I prefer these when available, but the speed of publication on the Web allows for simultaneous viewing while a show is on exhibit. In addition, there are many on-line galleries, associations and independent artists who have pages on the Web, all with the most current work. It is hard to get reproductions of a wide range of current visual work, and therefore the potential for students of contemporary art is great. Portions of video work can even be accessed this way. There is simply no other source this current, multi-sensory and available.

There are problems with the Web for artistic research of course, related to problems everyone else has. The largest issue for me is the unedited nature of the work. One can spend vast amounts of time looking at junk and only finding a few gems. Of course this isn’t much different from a physical trip to Soho in my experience, and costs far less. Directories of proven sites published in trusted magazines are a partial relief from this problem. The flip side of this is the fact that even I or my students could publish on the Web without too much cost or trouble. We could have a class portfolio, under the Kenyon Home page to help prospective students understand the quality of the work done here.

The learning curve is another omnipresent issue. Until surfing the net is easier than programming one’s VCR, it won’t become a universal tool. User friendly interfaces are helping this, but in all technological areas, this needs to improve to the degree that most consumers are comfortable with.

The issue of copyright and the nature of protection of intellectual property will have to be dealt with more thoroughly. Some museums have small images of entire works that are highly pixilated and only sections in clear detail, to avoid piracy. Some artists won’t take the chance, and others would rather their work be seen than protected. This issue will only increase as laws are made, regulations applied.

Access is another issue. At this point, the difficulties of access keep me from a full use of this tool. When it is on every desk, and everyone is well versed in using it, it will be much easier to assign tasks on the Web. The issue of access can also be critiqued on a larger scale, where access and knowledge are still reserved for those who can afford it. This creates an even further division between rich and poor. Those with access will have an unfair advantage in classes. There are arguments for a less expensive education through the use of the Web for distance learning, for those who cannot afford to attend a residential school. I find this idea lacking because distance learning would preclude developing a culture of learning that includes some of the methods of visual inquiry. (Twigg, Brown)

Conclusion

Throughout the development of technologies, artists have been on the forefront of exploration. Joining with scientists and inventors, they have been willing to brave the learning curve, playing with new tools as a means of discovery and conceptual development. Teachers of art have long been facilitators within communities of learners who are willing to risk their personal expressions with each other in critical discourse. This student centered, hands-on learning style is now being embraced by other disciplines in the Liberal Arts. This change is in keeping with the new information technologies, and is an asset to learning in as much as it is reliable, approachable and accessible. In this way we are preparing students to be flexible, life long learners, a long standing goal of a Liberal Education.

Bibliography

Adams, James L. Conceptual Blockbusting, Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, 1986

Atkins, Robert “The Art World and I go on line” Art in America, Dec. 1995

Brint, Michael “Being Digitally Educated, Dewey, Technology, and Distance Learning” Return to text

Brown, J and Duguid, P “Universities in the Digital Age”, Change, July/Aug 1996 Return to text

Edwards, Betty Drawing of the Right Side of the Brain, J.P Tarcher, Inc. Los Angeles, 1979

Elkins, James, “Art History and the Criticisim of Computer – Generated Images,” Leonardo, Vol. 27, No. 4 pp. 335-342

Gardner, Howard, White, N, and Blythe, T. If Minds Matter:A Foreward to the Future, Vol.II Skylight Pub. 1992 Return to text

Hagen, Charles, “The Fabulous Chameleon Video Art,” Art News, Summer, 1989, p. 118

Hanhardt, John G., & Hall, Doug and Fifer, Sally Jo, Illuminating Video:An Essential Guide to Video Art, Aperture, BAVC

Hanhardt, John, ed. Video Culture A Critical Investigation, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986.

Hill, Edward, The Language of Drawing, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1966 Return to text

Judson, William D.,”Bill Viola Allegories in Subjective Perception,” Art Journal, Winter, 1995

Kanter, B “Finding Art on the Internet” High Performance Vol. 18, Num. ½, 1995 p.84

Kelly, Kevin, “Eno, Gossip is Philosophy,” Wired, May, 1995, pp. 148f

Lauer, David Design Basics, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Chicago, 1990

Lovejoy, Margot, Postmodern Currents, Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, UMI Research Press, 1989

Lurins, Sandra, “Common . Dreams / Unique . Visions,” HOW, August, 1996, p. 94f

Madoff, Steven Henry, “Art in Cyberspace: Can it Live Without a Body,” The New York Times, Jan. 21, 1996, p34

McCorduck, Pamela, “America’s Multi-mediatrix,” WIRED, March 1994, pp 84f

Mellencamp, Patricia, “The Old and the New Nam June Paik,” Art Journal, Winter, 1995

Mensing, Margo, “Electronic Textiles: New Possibilities,” Fiberarts, Summer, 1996, p 42 – 45

Popper, Frank, “The Artist and Advanced Technology,” Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 1 pp. 27-33, 1995

Seipel, Joe,”Reshaping Education,” Sculpture, September, 1996, p. 22f

Sieling, Neil, ed. The Techno/logical Imagination: Machines in the Garden of Art Intermedia Arts Association, 1989

Truckenbrod, Joan Creative Computer Imaging, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1988

Twigg, Carol “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure” Educom Review, Vol. 29, No. 4,5,6, 1994 Return to text

Villasenor, Maria C., “Video/Media Culture of the Late Twentieth Century,” Art Journal, Winter, 1995

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Michael Brint
Associate Professor and Director, Integrated Program in Humane Studies
Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio

I. The Experience of Education in Digital Life

In his 1995 book, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte signals what many believe to be a paradigm shift from “atoms” to “bits”–from an “atomic” orientation to the world consumed by material interactions to an orientation unburdened by such impediments as space, time and atomic weight. Racing unfettered at blinding speed over vast distances of space, the bit, the smallest unit in the “DNA of information,” [1] has done more than help usher in the post-industrial age of information. According to Negroponte, it has become the basic commodity of interaction in the post-information age–an age in which the possibility of digital living has become increasingly viable:

The industrial age, very much an age of atoms, gave us the concept of mass production, with the economies that come from manufacturing with uniform and repetitious methods in any one given space and time. The information age, the age of computers, showed us the same economies of scale, but with less regard for space and time… [By contrast,] in the post-information age, we often have an audience the size of one. Everything is made to order and information is extremely personalized… The post-information age is about machines’ understanding individuals with the same degree of subtlety (or more than) we can expect from other human beings.Such customized digital living entails more asynchronistic communications (like e-mail), billions of bits of information on demand (in such forms as TV programs, videos, music, and news), and less and less dependence on being in a specific place at a specific time. [2]

In examining the educational implications of living digitally, Negroponte captures many of the central pedagogical points now being advanced by prominent policy analysts urging the development of distance learning opportunities. [3] In most instances, such approaches consist in the creation of highly individualized asynchronistic learning programs accessible on demand. This form of delivery is said to particularly aid the growing numbers of non-traditional students whose lives require that learning be less and less dependent on one’s ability to be in a specific place at a specific time.

Whether delivered to a classroom, laboratory, workplace or home, learning digitally as an experience is said to be one of individual exploration, experimentation, and expression. Emphasizing the benefits of computers as learning tools, Negroponte notes that

While a significant part of learning certainly comes from teaching–but good teaching and by good teachers–a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself. Until the computer the technology for teaching was limited to audiovisual devices and distance learning by television, which simply amplified the activity of teachers and the passivity of children. The computer changed this balance radically. All of a sudden, learning by doing became the rule rather than the exception. Since computer simulation of just about anything is now possible, one need not learn about a frog by dissecting it. Instead, children can be asked to design frogs, to build an animal with frog-like behavior, to modify that behavior, to simulate the muscles, to play with the frog. By playing with information, especially abstract subjects, the material assumes more meaning. [...] Anecdotal evidence and careful testing results reveal that this constructivist approach is an extraordinarily rich means of learning, across a wide range of cognitive and behavioral styles.[4]

“Learning by doing,” “finding out for oneself,” “playing with information,”–Negroponte’s orientation sounds a lot like an updated version of John Dewey’s educational approach. Stressing similar ideas, Carol Twigg, a senior analyst for EDUCOM and one of the leading advocates of distance learning, claims that “what we know about high-quality learning, cooperative learning, and discovery learning-implies a learning-by-doing model rather than the passive, classroom-based model that typifies the teaching infrastructure.”[5] Against such passive learning, Dewey notoriously stressed the importance of experience as an active process. “To ‘learn from experience’ is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequences. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction–discovery of the connection of things.” [6]

In a similar vein, discovery labs for physics and other natural sciences (like the CUPLE program developed at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) stress the experience of discovery through exploration and experimentation. By using a studio approach to learning, computer simulations allow students to discover scientific principles through their own active engagement. Jack M. Wilson, Director of the Anderson Center for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, explains the basic premise underlying such initiatives: “The focus is on student problem solving and projects,” he tells us, “and not on presentation of materials. The emphasis is on learning rather than teaching.” [7]

While the CUPLE program uses multimedia tools authored by experts for student use in the discovery, experimentation and exploration of science, multimedia offers new domains of student expression as well. “We are entering an era when expression can be more participatory and alive,” Negroponte tells us. “We have the opportunity to distribute and experience rich sensory signals in ways that are different from looking at the page of a book and more accessible than traveling to the Louvre.” [8] Rather than simply interacting with a designed exercise, students can become their own authors–designing and architecting multimedia projects that integrate both different disciplines and media.

CITYSCAPES at Kenyon College is just one example of a course developed to focus on the student as the creative agent of learning.[9]From a literary walk through the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to an analysis of the role of women in the agricultural economy of Nairobi, students in this course become authors of multimedia projects that focus on specific themes related to particular cities or regions of the world. In addition to the Internet and library resources, these projects, currently produced as a CD-ROM, combine videos, photographs, recordings, interviews, and journals made by the students themselves. As authors guided by both local scholars and distant experts in various fields related to their study, students become increasingly fluid in coherently drawing together and creatively comingling function and form, method and subject, narrative and design.

Along with their expressive and experiential potentials, many see the greatest advantage of computer learning environments in terms of their potential for customization. Course materials can be delivered to fit the different learning styles of students and developed to help students realize their unique potentials and capacities. According to Massy and Zemsky, the two most fundamental advantages of information technology are the new “economies of scale” it offers and its ability to provide what they term, “mass customization.” “Technology allows faculty to accommodate individual differences in student goals, learning styles, and abilities, while providing improved convenience for both students and faculty on an ‘any time, any place’ basis.”[10]

In the post-information age, most surmise, the advent of sophisticated and customized simulations across the curriculum will increasingly provide the basis of experience for engaged learning. Many who are helping to lay the foundation for the future of information technology and education advocate the creation of a National Learning Infrastructure that could deliver these sophisticated simulations “anytime, anywhere, to anyone.”[11] If these trends continue, the experience of education in digital life may well be one of more convenient asynchronistic communication, customized educational services on demand, and less and less dependence on being at a specific place at a specific time. Yet, for all of the Deweyean-sounding practices that are supposed to accompany these educational delivery services–learning by doing, exploration and experimentation, play and discovery–I doubt it is time to begin celebrating the realization of Dewey’s educational philosophy in the post-information age.

II. Learning as a Social Environment

If many proponents of distance learning follow Dewey’s lead in emphasizing experiential and constructivist models of education, few follow his views regarding the inexorably social and relational nature of learning. Most of their accounts portray distance learning (at least at the level of higher education) as a highly individualized process of self-development, driven by the student’s own initiative toward the successful acquisition of specifiable skills.[12]

For Dewey, no matter how individualized or customized the material that is being explored, learning is not an isolated enterprise that takes place within the self or between the individual’s mind and the material it confronts, but a social activity that takes place within the context of a social environment. “As matter of fact,” Dewey tells us,

every individual has grown up, and always must grow up, in a social medium. His responses grow intelligent, or gain meaning, simply because he lives and acts in a medium of accepted meanings and values. Through social intercourse, through sharing in the activities embodying beliefs, individuals gradually acquires a mind of their own. The conception of mind as a purely isolated possession of the self is at the very antipodes of the truth. The self achieves mind in the degree in which knowledge of things is incarnate in the life about him; the self is not a separate mind building up knowledge anew on its own account. [13]

From Dewey’s point of view, even the ideal of education as self-development must be understood as a social process achieved through interaction and relation with others. Rather than fostering this ideal, advocates of distance learning, particularly those who stress self-paced, independent study, tend to reinforce individual isolation. “The effort at isolated intellectual learning contradicts it own aim,” Dewey claimed, for it “precludes the social sense which comes from sharing in an activity of common concern and value.” [14] In examining the economic efficiencies gained by computer innovations, Massy and Zemsky tellingly report that without a supportive social environment, “the students who would most benefit from self-paced learning have the least motivation to do so.”[15]

The prevailing attitude toward teaching is also particularly telling on this point. In Twigg’s words: “Because of the widespread availability of self-paced learning materials, direct faculty intervention throughout the learning process will lessen.”[16] Like a small country being invaded by a foreign power, the idea of faculty interaction is not said to be condemned simply because of the enormous costs of the labor involved (although one suspects that this is the most significant issue). Rather advocates of information technology assume a notion of independent learners at the center of the enterprise who simply do not depend on faculty as the primary source of their learning. While Dewey was among those to argue against a teaching-centered model of education, he would certainly reject the radically asocial dimension of distance learning as it is currently being discussed. [17]

Once again, Dewey’s position is that the social environment–the interdependence and engagement of individuals in the performative acts of learning–is a necessary condition for developing the unique capacities of individuals. Even if such a model as the National Learning Infrastructure could develop an individual’s dispositions for distance learning; in its current direction toward individualization, it would be difficult to account for the experience of sharing in a common activity that is central to Dewey’s understanding of both the social environment of learning and the social aims of democracy.

In contrast to Dewey’s concentration on the social functions of education, the individual ends of distance learning are most frequently described in terms of the acquisition of definable skills. “It seems to me,” Carol Twigg writes,

that our definition of learning is changing in a number of ways… Increasingly, viewing a college education as mastery of a body of knowledge is becoming outmoded. Instead we recognize that graduates need to have acquired skills… along with such abilities as finding needed information and working well with others.[18]

With this emphasis on acquired skills, we are also beginning to see more stress placed on educational outcomes. “Because of its capacity to focus on individual assessment,” Massy and Zemsky note, information technology “will make the teaching and learning enterprise much more outcome-oriented.”[19] In large measure this growing emphasis on skills and outcomes is related to a greater consumer orientation to education. Increasingly students are looking “for increased competition between higher education providers to work to their advantage as consumers.”[20]

While Dewey too understood the importance of acquiring skills, he would no doubt be disturbed by the instrumental and pecuniary ends of distance learning. In his essay, Individualism, Old and New, he claimed that “the development of a civilization that is outwardly corporate–or rapidly becoming so–has been accompanied by the prevailing mentality of the ‘business mind’” and the prevailing standards of value derived from pecuniary success alone.[21] On the educational front, the ability to buy economic success is understood in terms of the acquisition of skills of technical mastery sold at the best price. Yet paradoxically, Dewey argued, even if these skills are quite broad and fluid, such narrowly conceived individualist attempts to find economic security in an increasingly insecure economic world produces the conditions under which individuals become increasingly lost, unable to “find support and contentment in the fact that they are sustaining and sustained members of a social whole.”[22]

For Dewey, a highly individualistic or libertarian model of learning severely narrows and restricts the meaning and practical effects of education’s social function. In his view, the purposes of education in a democracy are necessarily both individual and collective in nature. They consist in developing individuals’ natural capacities and acquisition of skills in concert with their preparation for the activities of engaged citizenship and reflective thought. Indeed, without pathological effect, the growth of the individual–the unique development of the individual’s talents and skills– cannot be separated from the social environment of shared activities, values and common interests within which the individual is sustained and grows.

Although information technology has the potential “to increase learning productivity in the areas of codified knowledge and algorithmic skills,”[23] it may not serve these larger social purposes. Indeed, even if one could argue that sharing in common activities that are primarily non-algorithmic can take place within the social environment of distance learning, Dewey would strongly criticize the disembodied nature of such a “social” environment.

For Dewey, learning digitally may well push Cartesian dualism to new heights as minds connect over vast distances without the inconveniences of time, place and body. In his view, the separation of body and mind culminates “in a sharp demarcation of individual minds from the world, and hence from one another… [This] dualistic philosophy of mind and the world implies an erroneous conception of the relationship between knowledge and social interests, and between individuality or freedom and social control and authority.”[24] In educational practice, it often assumes the form of a body of knowledge distinct from its social purposes and a mind free from its social context and physical constraints. As Sidney Hook explains, a dualistic theory of mind and body, according to Dewey, “converts functional distinctions in the ‘moving unities of experience’ into separations of existence. Thus mind is considered separate from the body, whose activity is viewed as an alien influence on how the mind learns and the self is divided from its environing physical and social world.”[25]

Even as a real time-interactive-talking heads-model, being digitally educated decontextualizes the experience of learning and realizes in practice what Descartes only separated philosophically: Minds communicate through bits, bodies move through atoms. The most elemental dualism of the post-information age is thoroughly Cartesian. Detached from the motion of our bodies and disengaged from our local physical and social surroundings, education in the post-information age does not connect, but separates the self from the world, and thus from others. Rather than fulfilling its promise, learning digitally seems only to compromise the most significant elements of Dewey’s educational philosophy.

III. Learn Locally, Think Globally

Although information technology, like the printing press, opens up radically new options for education, Dewey would remind us that computers are, after all, tools. And, like all other tools, they provide ways of getting around and fulfilling one’s purposes in one’s environment. The question is how can we best use the tools of information technology for our educational purposes and aims?

In terms of delivery, advocates of digital learning often argue that information technology provides a better option than the traditional university. With its relatively fixed economy of scale and centralized location, the university has become a legacy of the industrial age. In Twigg’s words: “Our institutions of higher education are reminiscent of other kinds of industrial age organizations such as the factory and the department store–characterized by size and centralization–in contrast to the distributed, networked organization and mail-order shopping services of the 1990s.”[26] Twigg predicts that the ability to transmit through networked organization high quality learning tools customized for the individual student will begin to replace the traditional (teacher-centered) functions of the university. While there will still be a role for faculty and institutions of higher education in terms of certification, student services, and some collaborative experiences, she suggests, its centrality in the process of learning will significantly change as students become more independent and self-reliant and as physical contact becomes “less important to them.”[27]

Although Twigg may well be correct in arguing that the industrial designed university no longer provides the best option for educational delivery, her vision of the future predicated on independent learning, as we have seen, is not without its serious defects. In analyzing the profound implications of the printing press in America, Dewey noted that localism with its infinite variations and specific contexts tends to become stronger as the world (or at least information about it and our connection to it) grows closer.[28] And just as industry and politics are witnessing a tendency toward both decentralization and globalization, the best option for educational delivery may well be the more local community and small college system with new neighborhood and workplace learning centers further developed to meet the educational needs of both traditional and non-traditional students. Within these small colleges and decentralized institutions, the physical proximity of students and faculty would help to embody learning and knowledge as a social process.

To learn locally and think globally, students must have access to the tools of technology. Information retrieval, communication systems, and independent and collaborative learning tools are now necessary and even elemental parts of learning. But they are not sufficient. They must be contextualized within a learning environment. As most agree, learning tools can “stand in” for a physical and social environment, but they cannot replace it. One simply cannot replace the direct and palpable gravity of social interaction that is intrinsic to the atomic weight of learning with weightless bits traveling at blinding speed through thin fine fibers of glass.

As global communication systems eviscerate time and space, digital learning may transform the mode of educational production and delivery. It may even make the traditional university and large state institution obsolete. But as our access to the tools of technology become less dependent on space and time, as distance learning increases, the proximity of social interaction in the process of learning should increase proportionally: The more distant the means of delivery, the more proximate the learning experience should be in terms of the intensity, relation, and quality (if not quantity) of interactions between faculty and students. Rather than becoming less so, the physical and social environment may become more important as distant learning tools become more available. As in the case of localism and globalism, physical proximity and intensive social interaction may both compliment and counterbalance distance in learning. Although learning digitally may promise to make us less dependent on time and space, it is only within a social environment of learning that we can begin to celebrate the experimentation, exploration, and expression–the idea of learning by doing–central to the spirit of John Dewey.

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Endnotes

[1] Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, (New York: Borzoi-Knopf, 1995), 14.

[2] Ibid., 163-65.

[3] For example, see William F. Massy and Robert Zemsky, “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity” 4.

[4] Ibid., 199f. Return to text

[5] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure” 5.

[6] Dewey, Democracy and Education, in John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 147.

[7] Jack M. Wilson, “The CUPLE Physics Studio,” The Physics Teacher.

[8] Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 224.

[9] A description of CITYSCAPES can be found in “Strengthening Teaching and Learning in the First Two Years,” PEW Charitable Trusts (Number 9, January 1996), 4.

[10] Massy and Zemsky, Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity,” 2. (www.educause.edu/ir/library/abstracts/nli0004.html)

[11] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure.”

[12] Although one of these skills may involve collaboration, it is nevertheless described as a kind of “pull yourself up by your own boot straps” social environment of independent learning.

[13] Hook, “Introduction to Democracy and Education,” 304.

[14] Hook, “Introduction to Democracy and Education,” 44.

[15] Massy and Zemsky, “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity,” 4.

[16] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure,” 8.

[17] On the role of the teacher and the social purposes of education, see Dewey’s The School and Society in The Middle Works, vol. 1.

[18] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Infrastructure,” 1. See also, Jeremy Shapiro and Shelley Hughes, “Information Technology as a Liberal Art,” Educom Review (March/April):31-35.

[19] Massy and Zemsky, “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity,” 3.

[20] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Infrastructure,” 4. Return to text

[21] Individualism, Old and New in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol 5, p. 67f. Return to text

[22] Ibid. Return to text

[23] Massy and Zemsky, “Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity,” 2.

[24] Hook, “Introduction to Democracy and Education,” 300.

[25] Hook, “Introduction to Democracy and Education,” x.

[26] Carol Twigg, “The Need for a National Learning Infrastructure,” 5.

[27] Ibid., 8.

[28] See “Americanism and Localism” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, vol. 12, p.12-16.

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Laurie Finke
Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio
Date of publication: 1997

The Culture of Virtual Communities

In one passage from A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s fictional narrator finds herself walking across the grounds of an Oxbridge college deep in thought, contemplating an essay by Charles Lamb on Milton’s “Lycidas.” She remembers that the manuscript of that famous poem that Lamb cites in his essay is housed in the library of the very college whose grounds she walks. She imagines herself literally retracing Lamb’s footsteps “across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept.” Finding herself at the door of the library,

I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel, barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction. (Woolf 7-8; emphasis in original)

The narrator’s response shows how quickly alienation follows from exclusion, how quickly intellectual curiosity can become indifference: “Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe and locked within its breast, it [the library] sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep forever” (Woolf 8).

I found myself returning to this scene again and again when I was asked to think about the consequences of emerging information technologies for the teaching that I do in a Women’s and Gender Studies program, particularly in relation to the kind of student-centered pedagogy that we, for the purposes of this project, are calling “proximity learning,” and opposing to the “distance learning” so often extolled as information technology’s future (Twigg, Alley). Surely such scenes of exclusion as Woolf describes in 1928 could not be repeated in an American university at the end of the twentieth century? No student of ours–female or male– would be turned away at the doors of our colleges’ libraries by kindly silver-haired librarians guarding the doors and rebuffing the unwelcome. Yet the refrain heard constantly among cyber-touts these days is that the locus of the library is rapidly changing. Soon the “treasures” about which Woolf writes so eloquently will reside not in atoms–in weighty volumes stored on scores of shelves in monumental stone buildings–but in ethereal bits, floating around in a non-place we’ve come to call “cyberspace,” capable of being disassembled and reassembled at our merest whim in any format we desire (Negroponte). Knowledge–or at least information– will no longer be “locked away” and apportioned out by the gatekeepers of culture, but will be available anywhere, anytime at the press of a button or the click of a mouse.

This enthusiastic assessment of the democratizing potential of information technologies, however, merits closer scrutiny. What will the effects of this dematerialization–this transformation of information from atoms to bits–be? In particular, we ought to pay close attention to the rhetoric of the sales pitch through which the benefits of cyberspace are being promoted. While the term is often used rather loosely to refer to everything from computer games to the World Wide Web, “as though each computer screen were a portal to a shadow universe of infinite, electronically accessible space” (Markley 2), it is worth noting how the experts talk about the concept. Michael Benedikt defines cyberspace as “a globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multidimensional, artificial, or virtual’ reality” (Benedikt 122). Marcos Novak characterizes it as “a completely spatialized visualization of all information in global information processing systems, along pathways provided by present and future communication networks, enabling full copresence and interaction of multiple users, allowing input and output from and to the full human sensorium, permitting simulations of real and virtual realities, remote data collection and control through telepresence, and total integration and intercommunication with a full range of intelligent products and environments in real space” (Novak 225,226). What both definitions have in common is their thorough erasure of human agency in the transition from a material to a virtual reality ^[1]. In both definitions machines are remarkably lively and intelligent. They “network,” “sustain,” and “generate.” They provide access; they “enable”interaction, “allow” input and output to circulate, and “permit” simulations. Humans, on the other hand, have almost entirely disappeared or are completely passive. Indeed we no longer have people attached to computers at all, but “human sensorium.” People have become little more than inert receptacles for “input” and “output.” As Donna Haraway writes, “Our machines are disturbingly lively and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (Haraway 152). This way of talking about computer technology is not limited only to VR visionaries. Most educators writing about the benefits of information technology use the very same rhetoric:

• IT will change teaching and learning profoundly, no matter what the response of traditional higher education institutions. (Massy and Zemsky 2)
• IT enables students to work at their own pace with continuous assessment, in contrast to the traditional post-secondary education method which can be described as batch-processing with episodic assessment. (Massy and Zemsky 4).
• For not only will information technology accelerate the move toward a process focus and collaborative learning, it may change the fundamental relationships and understandings we’ve developed during the era when most information was stored on paper. (Batson and Bass 44)

In the first sentence, information technology is characterized as having the power to transform higher education in spite of whatever paltry resistance its institutions might mount (notice it isn’t educators, but only institutions that resist). Human agency can amount to little more than a pallid and ineffective imitation of computer efficacy (“batch-processing with episodic assessment”). In fact, in the technological determinism that marks most writing of this kind, human actors appear only as obstacles to the electronic transformation of higher education. Faculty and administrators who resist the inevitable digitalization of the university are seen as the problem to be solved: “faculty will have little interest in IT’s capacities to boost academic productivity to the extent that they lack an appropriate vision of learning productivity” (Massy and Zemsky 6). Sentiments like this are so common nowadays that they fly by unnoticed. But their consequences for how we think about information technologies and for the problems we gloss over are profound.

The effect of this discursive logic that endows machines with agency while erasing human actors is to write out of existence a whole host of material and cultural institutions and practices that create and sustain information technology, but which also determine who is allowed access to this information. Gone from the analysis are the programmers, designers, factory workers, sales workers, service technicians, patent and copyright lawyers, policymakers, executives, college faculty and administrators, as well as the hardware, software, electricity, and raw materials necessary to keep the production line moving. A whole host of technoscientific, economic, social, and cultural practices that regulate both knowledge of and access to information technology simply become invisible. Those who extol the democratizing potential of new information technologies rarely talk, for instance, about the complexities of copyright law, the economic costs of access to this information, or the inevitable pattern of breakdown, repair, and obsolescence involved in maintaining electronic equipment, all material practices that involve human actors who serve as gatekeepers, determining who will have access and who will be denied.

Even the most superficial examination of the material practices that sustain the illusion of “cyberspace” reveal that far from being a cultureless and egalitarian meeting place in which “status, power, and prestige are communicated neither contextually. . .nor dynamically,” in which “charismatic and high-status people may have less influence and group members may participate more equally” (Taylor et al. 18), emergent information technologies, because they are situated in networks of material and cultural practices, institutions, and economies, replicate all of the inequities and hierarchies that currently plague academia and the larger world of which it is a part. As colleges and universities celebrate the
promise of brave new technologies that will fundamentally change the ways in which faculty and students interact, it is important to keep in mind the very real danger that some of our students, because of where they are situated in these networks, may, like Virginia Woolf, find themselves locked out of the technological campuses of the future.

I believe that both faculty and students can use computer mediated communication (CMC) and IT to teach and learn in new ways that are more collaborative, interactive, and ultimately more effective, but I am also wary of the very real possibility that gender, race, and class hierarchies will (and have) all to easily become part of the “circuitry” of the new information technology on our campuses. I worry that these technologies could have unforseen and undesirable consequences for the politics of gender, race, and class in academia. The question I want to pose is, as teachers, how do we responsibly integrate new information technologies into our classrooms without excluding or alienating the very students we want to empower? My answer is that we can do so only when we pay attention to the material and cultural practices that accompany the adoption of new technologies.

The cultural practices that have sprung up around computer mediated communication (CMC) and information technology (IT), far from being gender-neutral, are, if anything, more male than the culture they mirrors. By almost any measure we might choose, men dominate the computer world through sheer numbers. 87% of all doctorates in computer science go to men (and two-thirds of all bachelors degrees); 92% of all computer science faculties are male (and 97% of all tenured faculty) [Shade, Simmons]. These numbers suggest that those who are designing hardware, software, and networks, supporting and servicing them, and teaching about them are most likely to be men. This is not to suggest, however, that women have nothing to do with computers. Women figure heavily in the global production lines of the computer industry (Taylor et al., 15), in data entry, and in secretarial positions. In other words, they cluster disproportionately in those areas of computer technology that are low-paying, repetitive, and routinized, those areas that are least likely to influence decisions about how CMC and IT will be used and who will have access.

On the internet, the heart of the revolution in information technology, depending on how you count, men outnumber women in proportions that range from 2 to 1 to 9 to 1. If you measure access men outnumber women only by two to one. If you measure actual use the disparity can be as high as 10 to 1. A survey conducted in 1994 by the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center (GVU) at Georgia Tech showed that male internet users outnumbered female by a ratio of 9 to 1. A year later, the same survey showed that , at least in the U.S, the disparity had begun to shrink; women accounted for 29.3% of users in the 4th Annual GVU Survey. However, to be counted in a survey of this kind a user would have to find the GVU web site and complete the questionnaire. To avoid the potential biases that might result from self-reporting, Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS) and Texas Internet Consulting sent electronic surveys to the domains representing organizations on the internet. These surveys counted the numbers of men and women who could send e-mail outside the domain. In 1994, this survey showed only a two to one discrepancy between men and women who had active email accounts (64% to 36%, MIDS Survey). John Quarterman and Smoot Carl-Mitchell suggest that the proliferation of email on college campuses explains the smaller gap between male and female users in this survey. Students have become the largest proportion of internet users and the average university student population is pretty evenly divided between men and women. But the MIDS survey still leaves a 2 to 1 “gender gap” even for relatively simple electronic technology like email. Collectively what these studies suggest is that while men and women are becoming more equal in opportunities for accessing the internet, there are still wide disparities in how men and women use electronic media.

The reasons for this disparity, I believe, are not all that well understood. Much of the research on women and computing, even the feminist research, begins with the assumption that women are disadvantaged and even deficient users of computer technology. Such analyses locate the problem in the resistance of users rather than in the technology they are being asked to use, or better in the network of material and cultural practices that sustain the technology. Women, in this view, are intimidated by the technology and the communicative style of the internet because they communicate differently from men: men are comfortable with the kind of adversarial exchange characteristic of the internet, while women prefer a more supportive communicative style (Herring). Indeed, women’s and men’s communicative strategies are
so different that they inhabit different cultures (Mulvaney). Such views, however, are based as much on stereotype as on any empirical evidence. Michele Evard’s research on fourth and fifth grade children using a netnews-like forum in a classroom setting suggests that, before they encounter the culture of the net, boys and girls act in CMC in almost identical ways: girls speak as often as boys, they give instruction in equal numbers, and they flame just as often as boys (Evard). This study suggests that what ever discrepancies exist between men’s and women’s use of CMC and IT result less from profound psychological differences between men and women than from the practices, values, and institutions that
constitute and are constituted by the virtual communities that have sprung up on the internet.

To understand the discrepancies between male and female computer use and their implications for classroom use of CMC and IT, we must investigate the material practices that discourage women from participating. These include:

• Economic barriers. Access to information technology requires hardware, software, and, increasingly, internet access, all of which require a significant financial output. Since women on average make less than men, they may be more disadvantaged as buyers of computer services (Shade, Simmons). Cost may have less impact on college students as the cost of some (though certainly not all) of these services are borne by colleges and universities. Nevertheless, as educators we must constantly remember that the increasing dependence of higher education on electronic technology will always work to the benefit of more advantaged students who can afford the cost of cutting edge technologies.
• Lack of familiarity with computer technology. As children, girls are often have less access to computers than boys. When they do, their use of the computer is almost exactly the same as boys (Evard). The computer game industry, however, is notoriously male-oriented, producing few titles that would appeal to girls.
• Learning styles. While the literature on infotech frequently promotes the potential of technology to appeal to a variety of learning styles (Negroponte, Batson and Bass, Alley), it is not always clear that training in the use of infotech accommodates a variety of learning styles, especially when the learner in question is resistant to technology or anxious about it. For some users (and here I would include myself), the rapid obsolescence of technologies once learned can be quite daunting and a disincentive to investing the time required to learn still newer technologies every six months.
• Harassment and pornography. Information resources like the internet are not always friendly places for women. The kind of harassment that often plagues women in face to face communication  has, not surprisingly, become perhaps too frequently a fact of life in CMC (Anderson, Brail, Kendall). The libertarian, anything goes culture of the Web has made it an attractive place to sell and disseminate pornography. Without advocating censorship or indeed any reigning in of the Web’s decentralized (non) organization, I would point out that the climate for women on the web can be chilling; one need not actively look for pornography to find it. Recently I logged onto a popular search engine, looking for information on “women and the internet” for this piece. My query
  yielded some fifty entries, half of which advertised “the hottest women on the internet,” “lingerie lounge,” “Asian playmates,” and “SEX PORN XXX FUCK ADULT GAY WOMEN VIDEO.XXX.COM” repeated over and over in capital letters (the electronic version of shouting). My students have reported similar experiences. Women on the internet are both subjects and sexual objects.
• Discursive inequalities. Although CMC was supposed to eliminate status markers like race, age, physical appearance and physical abilities, empowering those in low status positions,(Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, Taylor et al. 54, Stone), gender seems to be a status marker that persists even in  electronically mediated situations^[2]. Recent studies of usenet groups show that, even when the subject matter focused on women’s issues, in mixed sex groups men contributed significantly more posts and that when women’s participation rose above 30%, they were perceived as dominating the discussion (Taylor et al. 17, 55, We). In a study of the relative participation of men and women in usenet groups devoted to women’s issues (where we might expect women’s interest, and hence their participation to be higher than elsewhere), Gladys We reported the following discrepancies between men’s and women’s contributions:

Newsgroup	#responses	%female	%male	%unknown
Alt.feminism	303	11%	83%	6%
Soc.women	292	13%	78%	9%
Soc.feminism	47	53%	40%	7%

These findings validate the experiences many women have had in internet discussion groups and raise questions about the consequences of their use in a classroom setting.

The Pedagogies of Virtual Communities

As colleges and universities invest more heavily in information technology and as IT becomes more integral to our teaching, educators need to think about those we may be leaving behind. And yet such discussions seem to me to be precisely what is missing from the literature on information technology’s pedagogical potential. Although much of this literature discusses forms of faculty resistance to classroom uses of IT (Twigg, Massey and Zemsky, Gilbert), rarely does it acknowledge that student resistance will also be a barrier to the successful integration of electronic media into our teaching. In fact, students will show the same diffusion curve in adopting IT that experts predict of faculty; there will be a small group of early users, the majority will only follow once a critical mass is reached, and the resistors are in real danger of being left behind altogether (Green 29). It would be useful to have some information on, for instance, how gender, race, and socioeconomic class affect these categories. Are men really more likely to be among the early adopters of IT? Are economically privileged students with access to the resources required to access cutting edge technology more likely to be represented among early adopters? Are women more likely to resist the change to electronically mediated classrooms? Are there students or even entire institutions who lack the economic resources to participate in the IT revolution? It would be preferable to rely on some empirical data to answer these questions rather than on stereotype. Once patterns of student use have been established, educators have the more difficult task of determining the causes of resistance. As I have tried to suggest above, resistance to IT among women students (and faculty) may result less from deficiencies in the individuals than from their resistance to the culture they are being asked to enter. Overcoming this resistance will require paying attention to the developing cultures of virtual communities.

We must also pay attention to the pedagogies we adopt within these virtual communities, and the assumptions that underlie those pedagogies. Enthusiasts of IT will often point to the shift electronically mediated learning requires from a teacher-centered classroom to a student-centered one (Twigg, Alley). As Carol A. Twigg quotes Alan H. Leader, dean of the School of Business at Southern Connecticut State University:

The purpose and outcome of our educational enterprise is learning, not teaching.
Teaching is what we do. Colleges do not exist in order for us to teach but so that
students can learn. . . .The focus must be on the student, not the instructor (Twigg 13).

The pedagogical writing about IT and distance learning extols the advantage of student-centered learning, but what is its vision of student-centered learning? Critiques like Twigg’ s of the traditional teacher-centered classroom, in which the scholarly expert, having distilled the truth from the best minds in the field, transmits it to students, identify real problems in traditional teaching methods. But what do they offer in place of what Paolo Freire has described as the “banking method” of teaching in which teachers
make deposits of knowledge in their students’ minds (Freire 1968)?

Even the most sophisticated writing on distance learning and the pedagogical applications of IT, as, for instance, Twigg’s call for a national learning infrastructure, views the primary goal of education as the delivery of information transplanted from the teacher’s brain into the student’s (Freire’s “banking method” of teaching under a slightly different guise–the scholarly expert has been replaced by a
computer). Such transfers, educational analysts like Massey and Zemsky or Twigg claim, may be more efficiently accomplished with greater convenience to students (who may even be able to learn in the comfort of their own homes) by computers in an individualized, asynchronous learning environment, which is an elaborate way of describing a student sitting in front of a computer terminal. (see “Being Digitally Educated: Dewey, Technology, and Distance Learning“) And if this is all education is about, they are undoubtedly correct. Computers can more efficiently convey information than human instructors. They can store, search, sort, transfer, transport, organize, replicate, and compute information much faster than any human can.

But do these enthusiastic claims about information technology confuse knowledge and information, transmitting with educating? Does student-centered learning refer only to students’ passive assimilation of data or does it require more active participation from them, more interaction both with their teachers and with their peers? Perhaps we cannot substitute a computer for the social interactions we claim occur in
proximity learning anymore than we can create a computer program to parent or an electronic therapist. Like parenting or therapy, teaching (and learning) does not involve a simple exchange of information. Information gathering is not the central activity. Like parenting or therapy, education integrates students into particular social networks–in the case of education we call these social networks disciplines. These social networks have customs, rules, procedures, and specialized languages. Some
of these are explicit, but many are unstated, taken for granted by those who have already been integrated into the social network. These rules, procedures, customs, and languages dictate what questions can be asked, what counts as an answer, what counts as evidence or explanation, who may speak at any given time, whose answers count, and how information is gathered. Students learn the customs, rules, and procedures of their chosen social networks or disciplines by acting as participant-observers, by learning the “culture” of their discipline, and not simply by acquiring the discipline’s content. A students become a member of the social network as she learns to create new knowledge, not as she learns to regurgitate information ( Brown and Duguid). The goal of higher education then only partly the transmission of knowledge; it also requires the creation of new knowledge.

Missing, then, from discussions of the technological classroom is a sophisticated analysis of pedagogy that unpacks the social networks students must learn to navigate during their college years. Those pedagogical discussions are, however, available in many other places. Feminist scholars, for instance, have explored these issues and their impact on women for nearly two decades. For two decades they have mounted a challenge to teacher- and information-centered models of education which has been remarkably successful at many institutions. That challenge has gone unnoticed in the literature on classroom uses of IT, this despite a virtual explosion of information on the subject. In the 1970s, feminist teachers, convinced that a female-friendly education required not only a transformation of the content of higher education but of its method of delivery as well, began to explore new teaching approaches. They found useful strategies in many different sources: the consciousness-raising practices of the early women’s movement, the progressive tradition in American education created by John Dewey (see “Being Digitally Educated: Dewey, Technology, and Distance Learning“), and the liberatory teaching promoted by Paulo Freire and others. What makes feminist pedagogy unique, however, has been its attention to the particular needs of women and its grounding in feminist theory as the basis for its multidimensional view of how classroom knowledge is constructed through the formation and maintenance of social networks (Tetreault and Maher). This information is voluminous and readily accessible ^[3].

Yet, despite this wealth of information, discussions of both feminist pedagogy and information technology’s impact on the women who constitute upwards of 50% of our students are notably missing in most mainstream discussions of the IT revolution, which tend to treat students as largely featureless and interchangeable cogs.

Obviously I believe that IT and CMC can and utlimately must have a place in a feminist classroom. I have use these tools–e-mail, electronic discussion groups, the internet, multimedia programs– on a daily basis in my own classes. And my experience has taught me that these tools, along with the networks of social, cultural, and material practices in which they are imbricated, will change how we teach. But finally it is up to us as teachers (and as members of our own social networks) –and not the technology–to determine the nature and extent of these changes. It is my hope that by understanding the particularities of our students, the nature of the social networks to which they seek access, and the nexus of material and cultural practices that IT both embodies and sustains, that we will not, to paraphrase Anne Fausto-Sterling, create an electronic academy in which cyberspace seems an illegitimate place for women and gender issues seem an inappropriate enterprise for the gatekeepers of infotech.

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Endnotes

[1] I am indebted to Richard Grusin for this point (see Grusin 1996, 40-41).

[2] Though “computer crossdressing” in CMC is by no means unheard of and given the lack of bodily cues, relatively easy to achieve, it is not at all clear whether such behavior has challenged or simply reinforced traditional gender stereotypes, see Stone, 82-85, Kendrick 155-159, and Kendall.

[3] A gopher site maintained by the Women’s Studies librarian at the University of Wisconsin contains a searchable bibliography on women and information technology with seven hundred entries. (gopher://silo.adp.wisc.edu:70/00/.uwlibs/.womenstudies/.infotech/.infofull)

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