August 2000

Volume 16
Number 5

The Ecology of Computing Services

Michael Roy, Wesleyan University

At a symposium called ATechnology in the Academic Mission@ the aim was to encourage a conversation about how technology might affect the tenure process. In the course of the discussions, one faculty member on the panel described her deeply ambivalent relationship with technology, likening it to an iceberg. According to her metaphor, the visible part of an iceberg (the part that sticks up) represents only a tiny fraction of its entire being, and the submerged mass remains mysterious in its proportions and dangers. After all, she extolled, witness the Titanic. She then proceeded to indict Atechnologists@ who take perverse pleasure in the need for constant upgrades and who stubbornly refuse to appreciate the costs these upgrades exact in time, data, and peace of mind to Aend users.@

This metaphor of the iceberg and the Titanic is of course somewhat exaggerated, but it does speak to both the perception of technology as a dangerous entity and the gulf that exists between academics and technologistsCthe former becoming the human victims of the disaster and the latter some hybridized creature that has emerged from the wreckage in some not-quite-human form. To this faculty member, maybe the technologist is part of the frozen berg; my own image is the technologist as BorgCpart human, part machine (a reference familiar to those of you who watch Star Trek Next Generation). At the very least, this metaphor underscores the gulf perceived between end-user and technologist, between faculty and technology; indeed, it suggests we don=t yet have a common language with which to even begin a conversation. Symptomatic of this troubling state of affairs was that at this particular symposium entitled >Technology in the Academic Mission,@ not a single technologist was invited to speak.

Sources of tension
What is it about technology and academic culture that produces such tension? If one assumes that technology has the potential to add value in the academic activities of teaching and research (perhaps a dangerous assumption!), what are some of the less-spoken-about obstacles to wide-spread adoption?

One of the most apparent obstacles is the difficulty academic culture has in incorporating technologists into their conversations. We are seen as Borg, as iceberg, and not on the same ship as the rest of the academic community. This, I suggest, has much to do with the relative newness of our profession. Unlike faculty, librarians, or university administratorsCthe types of jobs people who work at universities are most familiar withCthe roles that I and others like me play on our campuses are relatively new.

Until recently, there were no professional training programs or certifications to become a Atechnologist.@ Indeed, even the word sounds strange. The career path one follows to arrive in these positions tends to be meandering, serendipitous and unpredictable.

A second obstacle to having an informed conversation about instructional technology on campus has been the two dominant messages for higher ed, amplified by the media and delivered by keynote speakers at technology conferences and in op-ed pieces in the New York Times. The first of these messages describes the technological education of the next generationsCour children and grandchildren. Today=s child, the speaker will tell you, will grow up with a host of technologies: cell phones, Palm Pilots, web newspapers, DVD, and ubiquitous high-speed network connectivity. When that child arrives at college in a decade or two, faculty will have an entirely new kind of mind to engage in the classroomCa mind that was formed by the Internet. The message here is that we have a responsibility as educators to learn these new technologies since the population we serve is increasingly dependent on and unable to engage with anything other than digital technologies.

The for-profit lesson
The other message (part two of obstacle #2) on the higher ed cyberpunditry tour comes from the emerging field of for-profit distance education. These speakers, armed with graphs of enrollment numbers and profit margins snaking their way steadily skyward, suggest that we in the non-profit sector of education will all be driven out of business by the likes of the University of Phoenix and other mavens of distance education. The message from this camp is truly of the Borg (for those of you who watched Star Trek)C resistance is futile. Why even bother trying to develop instructional technologies if these guys will eat you for lunch?

The problem with these two messagesCboth in their own ways a call to armsCis that they present the future as a foregone conclusion, and leave no real space for the participants in this transformation to have any say in what that future might look like.

A third, and I think more challenging obstacle, has less to do with the incompatibility of these broad claims about technology in general than with the subtle intellectual practices that are embedded in all academic disciplines. Apart from the most obvious uses of technology to facilitate communication, imagining change in any given discipline=s approach to teaching, learning, and publishing requires an on-the-ground understanding of the details of the particular disciplinary questions and methodologies of any given field. Thus bulletin boards, email lists, course web pages, and on-line quizzing cut across all fields and are fairly easy to get people to integrate into their lives as professional academics and teachers.

To go further than that and imagine adopting technological approaches and to use primarily digital resources to transform a field=s way of doing business is largely contingent on the particular history and trajectory of any given discipline. For example, for a variety of reasons, Classical Studies has turned out to be way ahead of most other disciplines in the Humanities with respect to the number of electronic resources available to them. And therefore, it is relatively easy for faculty to join into this conversation and be productive and see the value of this new approach to teaching and publishing.

Other fields lag behind in terms of the size of the community involved in these digital endeavors, and lack a critical mass of digital resources and networks of the human kind. Faculty in these fields may be eager to get involved, but simply cannot get anywhere without having to either create all of the resources on their own, or spend their time creating the (human) networks necessary for this sort of community to grow.

Finding critical mass
If more than a superficial adoption of technology into the curriculum for any given department turns on the existence of a critical mass of colleagues and resources for the particular discipline, one of the vexing problems for those of us who work on college campuses is that it is very hard to imagine building up such a critical mass on our isolated campuses.

While the tendency towards interdisciplinarity has bolstered the membership of any given intellectual community on campus (and, in fact, one can look at areas such as American Studies for examples of interdisciplinary fields that have been hard at work re-thinking their pedagogy for the Internet), the tenure process, still primarily organized around departmental lines, has continued to push faculty to develop finer and finer specialties within smaller and smaller sub-fields, resulting in very small intellectual micro-communities whose members rarely reside in the same zip code or even area code. Many, if not most, faculty live out their intellectual lives not with their faculty colleagues on campus. Their primary scholarly identities are organized not by the colleges in which they teach, but by the journals, professional societies, and disciplinary organizations in which they participate, all of which are primarily intercollegiate.

The good news in this is that if a college more or less keeps up with its infrastructure (desktop and network), the various disciplines will continue to innovate and you can count on simply riding these waves of innovation without having to do all or even most of the work yourself.

For every Greg Crane who commits so much of his scholarly life to creating the Perseus Project, there are hundreds of Classics professors who can now use these resources to re-invent their pedagogy. Lagging slightly behind these major research initiatives might be not only necessary, but perhaps even desirable. At the level of software, it also seems to be the case that it is safer to simply ride the wave of commercial or consortial innovation and to resist the considerable temptation to Aroll your own@ applications, a lesson that administrative computing learned ten years ago, and that academic computing is only now beginning to come to terms with.

The changing culture
Despite the fact that there exists a gulf between technologists and the faculty, despite the claim that these cyberpundits don=t really understand higher ed and the nature of the academic enterprise, despite the fact that real changes in scholarly practices within any discipline are largely driven by forces internal to that discipline, clearly there are very powerful changes taking place in our culture at large, and in academic culture in particular. Many of these changes involve technology. Some are even driven by technology.

Students are and will continue to be arriving on campus increasingly familiar with and expecting to be taught with and present their work using digital technologies. Given the potential market for educational services growing as a result in our shift to an information economy, there will be increased pressure on existing institutions of higher ed from new players in this marketspace, including both small start-up operations and large multi-national behemoths.

If, as I have suggested, real change in the higher education academic profession is driven not by individual schools, but by the individual fields of study and their allied professional societies, journals, and communications channels, where does that leave us?

The ecology metaphor
If all of these forces, new technologies, and different roles are considered as a whole, I argue that the most useful way to consider the problem of what to do next is to frame the question not in terms of technology but in terms of ecology.

None of the systems and people that are involved in these transformations exist independently of one another. While there is a certain amount of cross-fertilization with the outside world, the daily work of trying to optimize the technical and social environment so that the use of technology in teaching and learning can take placeCsometimes in classrooms, sometimes in computer labs, sometimes in cyberspaceCprimarily takes place within the confines of a single campus. Every change that we make has effects within this system.

The work of creating a culture receptive to this approach is in fact far more complex and challenging than the development or installation of any given piece of hardware or software. To switch metaphors ever so slightly, moving from icebergs to oceans, one plausible approach to technology is the approach surfers take to waves. You paddle out on your surfboard and look at the waves coming in. You find a wave that looks like it might be a good wave, and you get yourself into position and if you are lucky you get a good ride. But the ride always ends and you then have to paddle back out and pick another wave. I suspect that this metaphor is more productive than the iceberg metaphor, since it at least suggests that the interaction between the person and the environment (faculty and technology) has the potential to be positive. When ship meets iceberg, we know who always loses.

As part of an academic planning process that took place three years ago at Wesleyan, some of our faculty were asked to write essays that spoke to the future of liberal arts education. Two of our Arts faculty, Jeffrey Schiff and Ron Kuivila, chose to write about arts education in an age dominated by mass media. While they were not speaking exclusively about teaching the Internet Generation (this was slightly before URLs were appearing in every TV and magazine advertisement), they chose as the title for their paper ASurfing the Tsunami,@ which to me sounds just right.

Thinking about change
The surf is up. It certainly wouldn=t hurt to buy a bigger board. But at some point the waves will get to be too big and will be coming in too fast. We can for the time being enjoy the ride. But the reason we are all slightly worried is that we recognize that it will be otherwise and we need to be prepared for this. Thinking of change in an ecological rather than a technological sense may be a first step in those preparations.

Editor=s Note: Information Technology Services at Wesleyan University surveyed the faculty about the services and facilities they plan to use in the near future, to help ITS prioritize future projects. Leading the list of those technologies was a course web page, followed closely by Webboard, and quizzing software.

Michael Roy is the director of academic computing services at Wesleyan University.

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