Week 17 Administering Knowledge

Week 17 Administering Knowledge

 ‘Internet teaching and the administration of knowledge’, is by Tara Brabazon 2001

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/867/776

In this article Brabazon laments the 'bullet point' culture of learning which changes to the educational system seem to be leading to. Writing in Australia during a conservative led premiership, higher education was promoted as a commodity and a cure to all the countries economic and political woes where the emphasis is placed on productivity and competition. Universities were to be changed under commericialized auspices with the student as their customers.

This lead to Brabazon's first issue. This commodification of education is problematic in that it means students are treated as customers- yet customer satisfaction is not in the remit of academic discipline which requires hard work and dedication (hmmmm not sure I agree with this- here she is camparing student to consumers of cars, a more suitable analogy would be to compare with students with Karate students, etc).

Another change in corrolary to this is a shift towards student centred education. Yet as Brabazon states the tutor and the student are an unequal partnership and has diminished the role of the tutor. A dictomy occurs- tutors expect students to help themselves in there study and on the other hand student (as customers) blame their tutors if they fail their courses.

'I would be far more open to student–centred learning if there was an acknowledgment that teachers — at the very least — are rapporteurs, rather than facilitators. Ironically at the moment when student–centred learning has become the cliche of the age, students are (overtly) evaluating teacher’s abilities [16]. While staff may state that students must be responsible for their own learning, students are blaming staff for their results.'

Brabazon states 'technology is framed as a cheaper, more efficient replacement for university teachers.' She points to the fact that technology has led to an increased workload for tutors, who have increased management administration to undertake. However I can think of numerous cases whereby learning can benefit. Why should a lecturer repeat over and over the same story when he can just do it once and record it for future students?

A final point Brabazon considers is that technology has made students intellectually lazy and well as curtailing the opportunities for individually inspiration by tutors. Any 'Radical ideas and expansive research are crushed into modules, criteria and bullet points, being rendered consistent and predictable'. Students only have to remember the key points and do not have to critical think about her lecture (eg the Powerpoint presentation). This shift has meant tutors only job is to administer marking criteria, rather than promote life long learning.

Week 17: Activity 2. Students’ frustrations

Week 17: Activity 2. Students’ frustrations


Hara and Kling (1999), ‘Students’ frustrations with a web-based distance education course’
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/710/620

Main points

• feelings of isolation
• technical problems
• lack of effective advising from instructors
• The expectations for technology to transform higher education are disproportionately high
• absence of physical cues
• frustration with technological problems and the absence of personnel to provide technical support

Interesting points

Most of what we read or hear about computers in education emphasizes only one aspect, usually the good points, but occasionally the bad, to the exclusion of other points of view. This is at least partly due to the screening effect of the popular press, who favor the excitement of extremism over the calm of rationality, preferring in the name of "reader interest" to create what Monosky (1984) calls an artificial dichotomy (Ragsdale, 1988, p. 50). Also see Charlie Brooker.

Various criticisms of traditional classrooms appear frequently, such as lack of personal attention, boredom, outdated knowledge, lack of appropriate skills for workplaces and inappropriateness for a diverse population (Diamond, 1997; Gardiner, 1997; Handy, 1998; Roueche, 1998; Wingspread Group on Higher Education, 1993).


Week 17:Activity 4 Oversold and Underused

http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=502670

Using the recent history of Stanford, Cuban proves how new technology adds little value. The figures are in some cases astronomical. In 1994 Anerican Colleges and Universities spent $6 billion for IT techonologies including support- thats $400 for every student. This model was first promoted by the ivy league universities and filtered down. These universities grew in reputation based on the credibility of their research. Tenured staff wanted more time for research and IT was the answer to this teaching vacuum,.

Universities were told they had to adopt these new techologies or get left behind. Either distance learning institutes would take their place or students would seek less formal educational institutes.

Yet in his study, Cuban proved the predominance of the traditional lecture in teaching. While IT technologies were increasingly incorporated by the teaching staff, this was only for the preparation of lessons, lectures, etc; not in conducting the lesson itself

Week 17: Activity 1 Digital Diploma Mills.

Activity 1a What kind of vision of students?

Mike Wesch’s video ‘A vision of students today’ (on youTube).

The biggest theme for me was that of the disconnection between the students and the tutors. One student hold a sign which says only 18% of her tutor knows her name, while another says there are on average 140 students in each class. It is interesting to contrast this with the  ECAR  which report 90% of students using social networking sites yet only 8% use this medium to contact their tutors (Smith and Caruso, 2010) http://www.educause.edu/Resources/ECARStudyofUndergraduateStuden/217333



 Activity 1b: ‘Digital diploma mills: the automation of higher education’. Noble (1998),

Key points

• 'technological changes in universities..(the distribution of digitized course material online, without the participation of professors who develop such material)...is rapidly drawing the halls of academe into the age of automation'. This is similar to the 19th century vision of school/university envisioned by Wesch, however it means the automation of materials with little input by professors and indicates a divide between administrators and companies that sell educational products on the one side (eg Educom); and teachers and tutors on the other. 
• 'Or the classroom versus the boardroom'. Examples include theUCLA administration launching its historic “Instructional Enhancement Initiative” and Canada's York University unilateral  initiatives in the implementation of instructional technology (which was overturned by strike action). This initiative were taken without faculty oversight.
• Reason for change: 'A short answer might be the fear of getting left behind, the incessant pressures of “progress”. But there is more to it. For the universities are not simply undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education.' involving 'systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property'.
• This happened in two phases.  in first phase: In 70s... in wake of the oil crisis and intensifying international competition...major industrialized countries recognised they were losing their monopoly over the world’s heavy industries and that, in the future, their supremacy would depend upon their monopoly “knowledge–based” industries (space, electronics, computers, materials, telecommunications, and bioengineering). Universities were their chief source especially research departments. This led to 'proliferation of industrial partnerships and new proprietary arrangements' and a' wholesale reallocation of university resources toward its research function at the expense of its educational function'. At the same time, tuition soared to subsidize the creation and maintenance of the commercial infrastructure (and correspondingly bloated administration) that has never really paid off. In the end students were paying more for their education and getting less, and the campuses were in crisis
• 'The second phase of the commercialization of academia, the commoditization of instruction, is touted as the solution to the crisis engendered by the first'. This led to 'transforming courses into courseware, the activity of instruction itself into commercially viable proprietary products that can be owned and bought and sold in the market'. The foremost promoters of this transformation are (a) the vendors of the network hardware, software, and “content”; (b) the trainers;   (c) the University Administration,(who view view computer–based instruction as a means of reducing their direct labor and plant maintenance costs),  and (d) technozealots who think technology is the answer to everything 
• There was also a movement towards nationally connected universities (eg Canada's “Virtual U” network), and completely virtual universities (University of Phoenix) 'market orientation behind these initiatives is explicit'
• 'The implications of the commoditization of university instruction are two–fold in nature, those relating to the university as a site of the production of the commodities and those relating to the university as a market for them. The first raises for the faculty traditional labor issues about the introduction of new technologies of production. The second raises for students major questions about costs, coercion, privacy, equity, and the quality of education'.
• As in other industries, the technology is being deployed by management primarily to discipline, de–skill, and displace labor.  once the faculty converts its courses to courseware, their services are in the long run no longer required. They become redundant, and when they leave, their work remains behind.
• for all the democratic rhetoric about extending educational access to those unable to get to the campus, the campus remains the real market for these products, where students outnumber their distance learning counterparts six–to–one.

Week 17: Technology – imagined negative futures Course content

Week 17 Overview

This week is looking at disutopian view of the education and technology. By using papers which are now quite dated we will review if this pessimism was a well founded. It starts with a quote:

'a warm and dark space for people with too much time and too few ideas’ (Brabazon, 2008, p.50). reviewing 'Here Comes Everyone' by Clay Shirky. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=401300&c=2

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