Phone: +27 21 797 5101

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Dear friends,

Here is the latest collection of snippets from the world of the Internet.

Please also note that I have been requested to gather short descriptions of

what people do for electronic circulation. If you would like to share two to

three sentences on what you are doing, together with an e-mail contact

address, please forward this to me at neilshel@icon.co.za

Regards

Neil Butcher

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The evaluation of the Shoma Education Foundation pilot project is now

If you have any evaluation reports online that you think people may be

interested in reading, please forward them to neilshel@icon.co.za

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To add to the discussion on gender and telecommunications, the Women in

Global Science and Technology site has several links of interest, including:

* a paper written for the IDRC Acacia project on "Supporting Women's Use of

Information Technologies for Sustainable Development"

* information on a forthcoming Zed publication, _Women@Internet_, a

collection of essays on women's experience with ITs around the world,

including a chapter on "Shifting Agendas at GK97: Women and International

The site also includes links to reports, research and resources in gender,

science and technology policy and networking.

The URL is: www.wigsat.org/index.html

*************

WHO'S KILLING HIGHER EDUCATION? (OR IS IT SUICIDE?)

Steve Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com)

NOTES OF AN OUTSIDER

A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the end

of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its truth,

however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing

education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end -- the final

perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's shortcomings.

For a long while now we have slowly been reconceiving education as the

transfer of information from one database or brain to another. Access to

information is the universal slogan, and by "information" we demonstrate

with countless phrases every day that we mean something routinely

transferable between containers.

What we haven't realized is that this fact-shoveling model of education

renders both teachers and schools superfluous. It's true that many colleges

and universities have struggled mightily to convert themselves into more

efficient vehicles for information delivery. But they can hardly hope to

compete successfully with the computer in this game.

The old institutions, however, are not the only things placed at risk by the

computer's fulfillment of the reigning model of education. Eventually, we

will realize that students, too, are superfluous. It's much more efficient

to transfer information from one database to another than from a database to

a mind.

The logic of this has already been glimpsed in the workplace, where the

remarkable phrase, "just-in-time learning", is taking ferocious hold as only

the latest business jargon can. The idea is that you need no longer worry

about the general resources your employees bring to the job; all operations

are managed by sending exactly the right information to exactly the right

terminal at exactly the right time. Everything is taken care of

automatically, with the employee functioning smoothly as little more than an

assistive cog in the mechanisms of information transfer.

If you want a model for effective information delivery, here's where it is,

not in the classroom -- not even in the wired classroom.

Actually, some people are already explicitly urging this model as the basis

for an education of the future. Lewis Perelman, author of *School's Out*,

lauds those businesses that have replaced "preparation-oriented education"

with just-in-time learning:

They saw, correctly, that the systems they were constructing were doing to

knowledge what the just-in-time delivery processes the Japanese called

kanban had done to material resources and goods in manufacturing. /1/

Perelman's "kanbrain", the instrument for so-called hyperlearning, amounts

pretty much to an (unnecessarily biological) name for the technical networks

of information exchange. The network is what gets "educated", not people.

When Business Embraces the Academy

----------------------------------

Information delivery has always been intimately associated with

well-defined, effective procedures -- algorithms. That is, information is

designed more for manipulation and doing than for understanding, and this

helps to explain the convergence of business and education today. A spate of

recent news items illustrates the trend:

** A survey reported in *Computerworld* suggested that forty percent of

large corporations plan to negotiate training deals with colleges and

universities this year. The idea is to encourage the creation of academic

programs tailored for the needs of particular businesses. /2/

** High-tech companies such as Cisco Systems, 3Com, Oracle, and IBM are

going into the teacher-training business, helping teachers with the latest

technologies. But more than training is involved:

Rather than selling products and services to schools ... companies are now

developing curricula for schools and giving them the equipment to aid the

learning process. And while most four-year colleges are reluctant to offer

credit for vendor-developed courses, that may be changing -- students at the

University of San Francisco can take a Cisco course in networking and a

database course from Oracle, both for credit. /3/

** The number of corporate "universities" -- comprehensive training

institutions run by corporations -- has increased from 400 to 1600 in the

last ten years. A few of these have formal degree-granting powers, and many

have cooperative relationships with colleges and universities. But now these

corporate institutions, under growing pressure to become self-supporting,

are bringing their "branded" education into competition with mainline higher

education. /4/

** Los Angeles businessman Alfred Mann has donated $100 million each to the

University of Southern California and the University of California at Los

Angeles. His main objective, according to the *Economist*, is "to build

biomedical institutes that will act as bridges between industry and the

ivory tower". UCLA accepted the gift only after a decade of hesitation -- a

decade whose changes certainly did not make the acceptance *more* difficult.

As for Mr. Mann, he is a tough-minded fellow who has detailed plans for his

institutes. They will be large, each employing more than 100 people,

including graduate students. They will license their ideas to a range of

companies (not just Mr. Mann's) for commercial exploitation. And they will

use their patents to generate a steady stream of income for their host

universities. /5/

All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the

corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's

which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized

government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental

issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make

it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture

aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and

procedures, then business -- already attuned to such computationally

rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.

In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds

for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of education

implies -- universities are now finding that business is better situated to

train its own employees than schools are. At best the universities will

simply hire themselves out to corporations.

Buying an Education More Cheaply

--------------------------------

But I seriously wonder about the long-term survival of the university in any

form. How long before the students rebel? If someone handed me $25,000 a

year for four years and said "Go get yourself an education", could I

possibly choose to blow it all at a university? Unthinkable.

Why should I pay a school $100,000 for a vocational education when I can

almost certainly find a business or agency or laboratory or nonprofit

organization willing to hire me for nothing, assign me some useful chores,

and give me an opportunity to start learning my desired vocation? Even if I

had to pay something to the business at first, it would be well worth it.

Long before I would have graduated from school, I'd be earning an income in

my chosen field.

The options are unlimited. Nothing prevents me from obtaining the best

textbooks the world has to offer. Nothing prevents me from approaching a

first-class researcher or business manager or teacher with the proposition,

"Will you give me an hour per week for a year in exchange for a couple of

thousand dollars?" (In such a highly motivated context, the mentoring will

likely prove more valuable, more humane, and more intense than several

college courses put together.) And, in general, nothing prevents me from

going wherever the "action" is in my field and plunging in with the aid of

some of that $100,000.

The irrelevance of our educational institutions today has been summarized by

Albert Borgmann:

We assume that the increasing length of average education reflects rising

requirements of training for typical technological work. But this summary

view fails to inquire whether education in this country, for instance, is

also of increasing quality; nor, if that were the case, does it ask whether

typical labor allows for the exercise of greater knowledge and training. The

answer to both questions is probably negative. To avoid the consequent

embarrassment of finding that much of our education is irrelevant to labor,

length of education has been put to new purposes which are really foreign to

its nature.

Since desirable work is scarce, education is used as an obstacle course

which is lengthened as such work becomes scarcer. Educational requirements

are used as a device to screen applicants. And finally, educational

credentials serve to solidify the privileges of professions and the

stratification of society. /6/

The Credentialed Society

------------------------

The most damning testimony against higher education today may be that

students have not rebelled; they are evidently incapable of it. Two things

prevent such rebellion. One is the inability of high school graduates to

take their own education in hand. We do not teach them to become

self-learners. I am continually amazed at the number of adults who assume

that, if they are to learn anything new, they must "take a class".

The second obstacle, pointed out in Borgmann's analysis, is the fact that,

for extraneous social reasons, we insist on the academic degree. It is one

of the revealing facts about the Information Age that it is the supreme Age

of Credentials. Not just credentials as such (against which I have no

complaint), but *wooden* credentials -- degrees, certificates, diplomas, and

licenses based solely on "measurable outcomes", such as credit hours and

standardized test grades, with scarcely any reference whatever to the actual

inner accomplishment and capability of the certificate bearer.

Being married to a registered nurse, I have been able to note the

unfortunate inferiority complex within that wonderfully humane profession.

(I think "doctor-envy" might be a good name for it, but my wife threatened

to protest in a scorching letter to the editor if I wrote that.) In order to

raise the standard of respectability for nurses, the governing bodies try to

define an ever more proprietary training that can be seen as the nursing

profession's own. They pile on credit-hour requirements in vacuous subjects

(you haven't seen gobblydegook until you've tried to read three consecutive

sentences in the typical "nursing theory" book). And they continually raise

the barrier for "outsiders" who might have traveled by a slightly

unconventional route.

So it is that a nurse who has worked in a particular field for fifteen years

and may be one of the best healers around, can find himself blocked from

advancement, while someone else whose sensibilities were sufficiently dulled

to endure endless hours of post-graduate make-work marches straight ahead.

And a nurse trained in Switzerland has no hope of practicing in this country

without going back to school for a couple of years to duplicate his

education.

Of course, the same syndrome afflicts virtually every profession. (Was it

Mencken who said, "Every profession is a conspiracy against the public"?)

Just think of the educational establishment, with its obstacles for

non-credentialed outsiders, and its protection of incompetent insiders. In

general, the closed professional circle, protecting itself through

artificial requirements, is one of the pressing social problems of our day.

The credential problem threatens quickly to become even more acute. The

European Commission is now trying to create a smartcard-based European

Accreditation System. According to Joe Cullen, who is working on the

project, the idea is to "set up permanent and accessible skill accreditation

mechanisms that wil allow individuals to validate their knowledge however it

has been acquired."

Central to this vision is the use of new technologies such as personal smart

cards that will allow citizens to record their training and experience on

portable, computer-readable curriculum vitae. Another set of applications

involve the use of remote, electronic assessment and testing systems that

can allow individuals to obtain qualifications and credentials that in turn

can be recorded on their personal skills card, perhaps via existing

frameworks such as the European network of chambers of commerce, or even at

home. /7/

The goal is admirable. But, as with so many cases of computer-enabled

"flexibility", the flexibility easily turns out to be a higher-order

rigidity with a vengeance. You can expect to see the final, irrevocable

triumph of the numerically scored, standardized test.

Toward Greater Standardization

------------------------------

An element of standardization is inescapable in all social interaction.

Lacking it, we would be helpless to connect with each other. Language itself

represents a kind of standardization. But so long as language and society

are healthy, there is a creative tension and balance between the standard

(lexical) meanings of words and the speaker's individualized meanings. (It

turns out that you can't say anything meaningful at all without this

individualized element, but that is a larger topic.) In this play of tension

and invention all change, all human growth, all new understanding, is

incubated.

In the business of establishing credentials today, where is the recognition

of a principle to set against standardization, to prevent its becoming

tyrannical? A one-sided pursuit of standardization (which, incidentally,

coheres wonderfully well with the pursuit of information as shovelable fact)

means neither more nor less than the obliteration of everything individual.

In a valuable set of reflections upon educational standardization, Phil Agre

casts the issue in terms of diversity:

We need to recognize ... that the ease of transferring courses between

schools -- effectively assembling one's college education a la carte from

among the offerings of a large number of potentially quite different

programs -- may come at a significant price in intellectual diversity. If

the internal modularity of degree programs must be coordinated centrally, or

at least negotiated among numerous independent universities, then the result

will be less flexibility and greater uniformity. Power over fine details of

the curriculum will inevitably shift in the direction of accrediting

organizations, university administrators, and other professional

coordinators. Faculty may effectively lose the ability to write their own

syllabi. /8/

Agre urges us to "preserve the institutional conditions for a diversity of

intellectual approaches". I will suggest what this might mean shortly.

Meanwhile, to summarize:

The central focus of information technology upon the reliable, precise, and

quantifiable transmission of well-defined bits from one place to another,

and the emphasis upon algorithmic procedures for manipulating this

information, accord perfectly with

* the "shoveling facts" style of education;

* the increasingly cosy relationship between education and businesses, whose

primary concern has more to do with operational effectiveness than with

depth of understanding; and

* the rigid "credentialization" and standardization of society, which, in

turn, amount to a denial of the life of the individual.

But, in the end, this model of education leaves little room for schools or,

ultimately, students. *Everyone* disowns fact-shoveling education. And yet

the computer and its databases, into which we pour information, have emerged

utterly triumphant as the reigning metaphors for learning. The metaphors

that powerfully grip us are more indicative of what's going on than our much

too frequent protesting.

Becoming Qualified

------------------

I know of a school in Europe -- it happens to be a seminary -- where there

is no fixed term of study. The sense of calling is high, the demands upon

students are remarkably heavy, and students graduate whenever they are

"ready". This averages out to something like three or four years, but,

depending on prior experience and qualification, may be as little as two

years -- or, not infrequently, never at all. I have heard, perhaps

apocryphally, of one student who was still trying after seven years.

I do not understand how a human-centered institution of higher education --

one not conceived as an assembly-line or information-transfer system --

could operate without at least some of this flexible, individual-centered

character. If, as I indicated above, standardization tends to obliterate

everything individual, the principle we need to set against standardization

in order to hold the balance is *recognition of the individual*. Every

individual follows a unique path through this world, and the teacher's

failure to enter upon that path with the student is a failure to teach. This

failure also makes any profound assessment of the student's performance

impossible.

Inevitably, though, the objection is voiced that an individual, qualitative

assessment of students is not even desirable, since it eventuates in merely

subjective and often biased judgments. After all, who has not heard of

doctoral students suffering irremediable loss at the hands of willfully

antagonistic thesis advisers?

Nothing is more symptomatic of our age than this objection, with its

implicit argument for unmitigated standardization. It would eliminate from

consideration everything not measurable, which is to say, everything

qualitative, which is to say, everything giving individual character to the

human being.

Certainly educators *can* lose their objectivity; they can yield to biases

of one sort or another. But in no domain do we solve this by denaturing

human relationships so that the opportunity for bias and subjective error

does not arise. We can overcome our subjective limitations only by ...

overcoming them, only by seeing more truly, more deeply.

We can, and should, try to build some checks and balances into the

arrangement (there *is* a place for standardization) but to eliminate the

decisive role of profound and healing insight because it may fall short is

like eliminating the institution of the family because there will inevitably

be instances of child abuse. It is to say, in effect, "Let's cease our

striving toward higher things, since to be human is to err". And it is to

lose sight of the fact that an unduly zealous drive toward "objectivity" and

standardization is a drive to erase ourselves. We are not, after all,

objects.

A teacher can genuinely assess a student's achievement -- but only by

meeting the student, by traveling along the path with him. This is likely to

prove wrenching, and there is great risk: the experience may transform the

teacher fully as much as the student. The difficulty in it is the difficulty

in confronting another human spirit, and it's all too easy to pull back in

fear. Without a doubt, it's simpler to disengage from the individual and

resort to the comfortingly definitive testimony of the standardized test.

All this bears on the transfer of credits between institutions. We do not

*have* to impose diversity-killing standardization to enable student

movement between institutions. If teachers know what it means to have a

grasp of their own subject matter, and if they must eventually determine

their students' adequacy before conferring a credit or a degree, why can't

they just determine their students' adequacy? Why do they need the

reassurance of a certain number of standardized credit hours on a

transcript? Is it that, like convicts putting in prison time, students must

"pay their dues"?

Obviously, a record of "dues" paid will prove helpful. For one thing, a

teacher's knowledge of a student can fully develop only over the entire

course of study, so on what basis does the student get admitted in the first

place? But the point is that personal knowledge, as well as standard

measures, must be applied so far as possible from the very beginning. This

introduces a balancing principle of flexibility, preventing a standardized

system from simply crushing students.

Nothing to Teach

----------------

But there is one final piece of the puzzle of higher education. If the

university is sinking into irrelevance, and if the student is disappearing

from view, so, too, the *subject matter* of education is evaporating,

leaving only the informational dregs of what once were living subjects. If,

as I said above, we've been reconceiving education as the transfer of

information from one database or brain to another, this is because what

passes for knowledge has more and more been reduced to the kind of

decontextualized fact fit for such transfer.

The world we ought to be engaging has disappeared behind a tissue of

brittle, yes-or-no abstractions. Just as we have ignored the student in

favor of an array of measurements, so also we have turned our faces away

from the world itself, as qualitatively given -- the world that might,

unnervingly, *speak* to us. From the scientist's instrumentation to the

sociologist's surveys, we have perfected the means for ignoring the

immediate, expressive presence of the people and the natural phenomena

around us, and therefore we have no meaningful context in which to anchor

our swelling cascades of data.

This, of course, is a huge assertion -- as huge as the entire range of

academic subjects. I can hardly justify it here -- although much of the

ongoing content of NETFUTURE (the electronic newsletter from which this

article is taken) bears on it and I will have much more to say in the

future. All I have room for in conclusion is the barest sketch of one

observer's crazy dream about the higher education of the future.

I envision an education where students gather around a teacher because they

find his life to be a pathway to new understanding. The teacher in turn will

take responsibility for helping the students along their own paths to the

realization of their deepest capacities.

Teachers may come together, along with their students, to form institutions

of learning, but the curriculum of these institutions will be determined by

the teachers themselves, out of their direct experience with students,

rather than by remote administrators. From kindergarten to graduate school,

the state will have no authority over the curriculum at all; this will

eliminate the absurdity whereby the state says, "We will defend to the death

your freedom of speech, but we will control, through education, your ability

to speak".

Neither will the state directly fund schools. It will only guarantee a

system that gives students access and choice.

Accrediting and certifying agencies will be as diverse as the extant

educational movements. Just as the teacher cannot be spared responsibility

for reasonable assessment of the student, neither can the student and parent

be spared responsibility for inquiring into the character of any movement

whose schools they are considering. As a parallel, our society is finding it

increasingly necessary to allow competing forms of medicine -- each with its

own accrediting bodies – to flourish side by side, while giving every

informed citizen the right to seek his own health as he chooses.

Actually, there are a few encouraging signs. Alternative educational

arrangements are thriving on all sides, from the internship program at the

organic farm in my community, to the various institutes offering self-help

seminars, to traveling troubadour-like teachers who move between groups of

students around the country, to more traditional schools where the meeting

between teacher and student remains the throbbing heart of the educational

transaction.

The diversity of these undertakings, from fringe to mainstream, is exactly

what you would expect of a truly free educational landscape. The need is for

the traditional educational establishment to take on more of this character.

As to the computer, I imagine it will find its genuine, supportive role only

to the degree we gain deliverance from the silly notion that it is

educationally decisive.

(Thanks to Jack Keith for a relevant news item.)

NOTES

1. "Interview with Lewis J. Perelman", *Technos Quarterly*, vol. 6, no. 3,

2. *Computerworld*, Apr. 13, 1998.

3. *Investor's Business Daily*, May 12, 1998, as reported in *Edupage*.

4. *Financial Times*, June 18, 1998, as reported in *Edupage*.

5. *Economist*, July 11, 1998.

6. Albert Borgmann, *Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A

Philosophical Inquiry* (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984), p. 119.

8. Red Rock Eater News Service, June 25, 1998.

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