TAD Consortium May 1999 Information Update 4

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This TAD Consortium Information Service has been sponsored by Juta

Publishers - Web: www.juta.co.za - Phone: +27 +21 797 5101

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Dear TAD friends,

Attached please find the latest collection of snippets from the world of

Telematics and Development.

If a colleague has forwarded this message to you and you wish to receive it

directly, please send an e-mail to neilshel@icon.co.za with a request to be

added to the TAD Consortium list.

Regards,

Neil Butcher

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CONTENTS

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NEWS

--- European Federation for Open Distance Learning established

ONLINE RESOURCES

--- From collusion to dialogue - paper by Patricia Bryans
--- Training and Development ListServ Discussion groups
--- Indian boom in electronic media
--- "Our Voice" - "Namma Dhwani"

ARTICLES

--- Visible Colleges: Infrastructure and Institutional Change in the
Networked University - Philip E. Agre

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NEWS

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European Federation for Open Distance Learning

The European Federation for Open Distance Learning (EFODL) has been

established. The Constitution was signed by the country representatives in

October 1998 in Brussels. The eight members are NADE (Norway), FFODL,

(France), CI (Netherlands), INFPC (Luxenbourg), Associazone Campo (Italy),

VDAB (Belgium), BAOL (United Kingdom), Linha Verdha (Portugal).

Representatives of the Federation have agreed to establish the liaison

committee of all the European Open and Distance Learning networks to meet on

a regular basis to create a common platform that would be an added value for

the networks.

EFODL has developed an activity plan for 1999 where key areas of activity

are to be: The development of a website; newsletter; involvement in

innovative projects and building contacts and gaining recognition. Contact

details: Tel: +32 2 506 04 55, Fax: +32 2 506 05 28, email: ggoetsch@vdab.be

 ***Back to Contents***

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ONLINE RESOURCES

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Taken from The TrainingZONE LearningWIRE - Issue 47

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>From collusion to dialogue<

A paper by Patricia Bryans and other on the development of continuous

professional development practices in universities, and some of the problems

in making CPD work.

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Taken from The TrainingZONE LearningWIRE - Issue 47

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Training and Development ListServ Discussion groups

For a relatively comprehensive directory of Listserv discussion groups

covering the training and development field, you can search through the

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Taken from: The Drum Beat - 19 – edited by Warren Feek

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Beginning with the launch of satellite TV in the form of Star TV in the

early 1990s, India has seen a boom in electronic media. Millions continue to

have no access to clean water or basic education; however access to TV and

radio has increased dramatically. This, coupled with the transition to a

market economy, has fueled a consumerist, entertainment-driven media

culture. Development agencies, once dependent on state-controlled radio and

TV, now have to define their own space in a media environment that is

competitive and market-driven.

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Taken from: The Drum Beat - 19 – edited by Warren Feek

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"Our Voice" - "Namma Dhwani", a pilot community radio project, was conducted

in Chitradurga district, Karnataka, to assess the possibilities for local

participation and programme content. A monthly 30 min. programme was

produced and aired on the local FM station of All India Radio in 1998. The

project involved participation of local individuals and groups. Themes

included watershed management, girls' education, women's health, women's

self-help income-generation schemes and the impact of adult literacy

programmes on rural life. Experimental broadcasts using a portable

briefcase-size radio station from UNESCO will be starting June 1999. Contact

Sucharita Eashwar voices@vsnl.com

 ***Back to Contents***

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ARTICLES

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Visible Colleges: Infrastructure and Institutional Change in the Networked

University

Philip E. Agre

Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

University of California, Los Angeles

Los Angeles, California 90095-1520

USA

pagre@ucla.edu

Draft of 10 May 1999. 5000 words.

You are welcome to forward this draft electronically to anybody who might be

interested, but please don't quote from it, print more than one copy of it,

or use it for any commercial purposes without permission.

The twentieth century has taught us to be skeptical of revolutions.

Proposals for revolutionary social change have invariably rested on

superficial ideas about the world, and as a result they have changed both

too much and too little, with tragic results. What, then, are we to make of

the revolution that is supposedly being brought by networked information

technology? After all, the case for an information revolution would seem

straightforward. Information is everywhere, and every interface in the

social world is defined in large measure by the ways in which people

exchange information. Information technology liberates the content of these

exchanges -- the bits, in contemporary shorthand -- from the physical

media -- the atoms -- through which the exchanges have formerly taken place.

This contrast between atoms and bits sounds like something out of

Presocratic philosophy, with its attempts to reduce the universe two one or

two or four fundamental constituents, and yet somehow it is precisely the

archaic character of the atoms-and-bits metaphysics that gives it such a

hold over our myth-starved imaginations. This is it: the one secret, the one

key that turns the lock. Separate the bits from the atoms, the story goes,

and we will be freed from the encumbrances of the physical world.

The promise and danger of this story is that it offers a straightforward

blueprint for the reinvention of every institution of social life. And in

perhaps no other case are the revolutionary prescriptions so profound as

they are for the university. After all, the university is in some

fundamental sense about information, the life of the mind, for which the

physical world is beside the point. Dissolve the campus, dissolve the

classroom, dissolve the library, and the information-exchanges of teaching

and research will transcend the artificial constraints of geography.

Students will be matched with the best teachers, scholarly communities will

achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment in real time, and the

rigidities of the bricks-and-mortar, pencil-and-paper, chalk-and-talk age

will be discredited once and for all. That is the promise, and the vast

millennialist traditions of the West make such a promise easy to say, easy

to understand, and easy to want.

The question, of course, is whether it is true. Much of it can be granted.

Networked information technology certainly provides the university with both

the opportunity and the necessity of renegotiating its linkages with every

other institution in society: with secondary education, with industry, with

government, with the media, and with the political system, among others. And

the renegotiation of these linkages certainly holds the potential for

pulling the university apart, as its many components become more closely

connected with the great diversity of other social institutions with which

they interact. All of this is possible. Before we can judge whether it is

inevitable, and whether it is desirable, it will be necessary to consider

the question in much greater depth: what, after all, is the university, how

is it related to everything else in the world, and what is really at stake

in the many attempts to reinvent it for a networked world?

I will take as my point of departure a single phenomenon: that information

and communications technologies create incentives to standardize the world.

These incentives need not be overwhelming, but they can be considerable.

When participants in a market, for example, can communicate data over long

distances, it becomes useful to standardize the goods that are bought and

sold. That way, goods that might be available for sale at widely dispersed

locations can readily be compared for their properties and prices. In a

sense these kinds of standards are necessary for the very existence of a

market; otherwise it would make no sense to refer to a given commodity --

that is, a given standardized type of commodity -- as having a price that

emerges through the equilibrium of supply and demand. Likewise, information

and communications technologies reward organizations that standardize their

processes: the very distinction between line and staff emerges when staff

work, which is overwhelmingly information work, can be applied to the

administration of large amounts of standardized line work. Finally,

political systems can deliberate more rationally when prospective rules

apply in a uniform way to a society that is standardized in the relevant

respects. Technological societies have not been unanimous about the virtues

of this kind of standardization -- far from it. Yet at the same time, the

processes of standardization that technology encourages have been largely

invisible to most ordinary people. After all, nothing is more esoteric or

low-key than a standards organization, and hardly anyone is in a position to

see the rising tide of standards as anything except an accumulation of small

changes in their own local circumstances.

Not everything can or should be standardized, of course, and the practical

work of building an information infrastructure consists in large part of

separating the things to be standardized from the things that will remain

diverse, and to reconcile the inevitable tensions that arise at the border

between the two. Although these tensions will be part of any infrastructure

project, they are especially acute in the case of the emerging generation of

networked tools for supporting in fine detail the activities of research and

teaching in higher education. One measure of these tensions is the

conceptual complexity of the boundary between the network and the

applications that the network supports. To say that the network's job is to

move bits from point A to point B is simple enough, and research on that

type of network can proceed without detailed knowledge of the uses to which

it will be put. Things become more complicated, however, when the network is

supposed to offer services with specified quality or other such guarantees.

Then it becomes necessary to survey prospective applications for the

guarantees they require, and to reckon the utility of those applications

against the difficulty of supporting them. More complicated still are those

service layers, also standardized as part of a ubiquitous infrastructure,

that embody some model of the interactions and relationships that they are

supposed to support, or of the worldly subject matters to which those

interactions and relationships pertain. That kind of information

infrastructure is easy to get wrong, given that nobody is likely to possess

an adequate substantive model of the activities that the infrastructure is

supposed to support. And an infrastructure that gets such things wrong can

foreclose the very possibilities that it was supposed to open up.

For this reason, a style of research has begun to mature that works

systematically back and forth between network architecture and the

technology and sociology of network applications. This back-and-forth

movement is a way of learning in its own right, and it deserves to be

spelled out and systematized to the degree that it can be. I want to draw

out and develop its consequences in a particular area: its role in the

evolution of the places in which university research and teaching are done.

By "places" here I mean more than geographic coordinates; I want to identify

places in terms of the patterns of activity that happen within them, and the

social and conceptual systems within which those activities are organized. A

theater class, for example, is a place not simply on account of the room

number, or even simply because of the architectural features that make it

well-suited to theater work. Rather, a theater class is a place because of

the social practices that routinely go on there: ways of talking, thinking,

interacting, learning, changing, and so on. A physics lab is likewise a

place for reasons beyond its equipment, and a mathematician's office is a

place because of what mathematicians *do* with a chalkboard.

Viewed in this light, a university campus is an extraordinarily diverse

assemblage of places -- it is really a sort of meta-place that provides all

of those places with a common administrative apparatus and physical plant.

Now turn this picture on its side, and sort the university world in terms of

the various sorts of places that it contains: put all of the theater classes

in one bin, all of the physics labs in another bin, and likewise the

mathematicians' offices, and registrars' offices, and parking offices, and

scheduling offices, and network administration offices, and so on. Networked

information technology creates incentives, or more accurately it amplifies

existing incentives, to do two things: first, to standardize all of the

places in the university world in which the same activities occur, and

second, to interconnect those places so that eventually they merge, in some

useful sense, into a single site of social practice. None of this will

happen overnight, of course, and countervailing forces may guarantee that it

will not happen at all, or not completely. But the effect is surely real,

and it will be useful to draw out its consequences in the areas of research

and teaching.

In the area of research the process is further along, and for a familiar

reason: the institutions of research create powerful incentives for

researchers to network themselves both professionally and technically with

their peers in other universities and research organizations. These

so-called invisible colleges are in many ways more visible to the

researchers than the physical campuses where they organize their places of

work. The research world thus has a matrix structure: on one axis are the

campuses and on the other axis are the research communities. For all its

efficiency, this system incorporates some tremendous tensions: the

interconnections within the invisible colleges are subserved in large

measure by an expensive infrastructure that must be paid for by the campus.

When the invisible colleges are loosely interconnected, the accounting is

simple enough. But now the invisible colleges are becoming more and more

real. This reality can be measured crudely through the bandwidth of data

connection between labs in a given field, but more importantly it can be

measured in institutional terms. Physicists have for some time organized

long-term experimental projects that include hundreds of researchers at

scores of universities, but not it is possible to speak without irony of a

"center" that is located on several different campuses. On a technical

level, research communities have begun to develop their own distinctive

network services that encode their own methods and practices and conceptual

categories, and as broadband services become available this trend is

accelerating. Some groups speak of these networked infrastructures as

"collaboratories", thereby formalizing, at least rhetorically, that the

various places of research have been gathered into single functioning sites,

and in some cases the interconnection is so detailed that globally

distributed research groups must routinely negotiate the minutiae of their

differing work schedules and interactional styles. The scientific value of

this development is not, so far as I am aware, in serious doubt. The harder

scientific question is what it means for the university. It sounds like a

centrifugal force, binding each community's participants more closely to

each other while enabling each community to evolve ever more rapidly from

the others. The effect is surely real. But the dynamics of information

technology are more complicated, and more promising. Observe, first of all,

that research communities themselves are not entirely discrete. They too

have something of a matrix structure, whose axes are the subject matter

being studied and the methods being employed to study it. Researchers who

study the weather obviously have something in common, and they are

accordingly grouped within the profession of meteorology. But researchers

who engage in large-scale computer simulations also have something in

common, regardless of what they are simulating, and these researchers, too,

have an incentive to be networked with one another. Mathematical structures

have long provided deep and unexpected points of contact for researchers

from seemingly distant fields, as have the important theoretical writers in

the humanities and social sciences, and now computational structures play

this role as well. Information technology standards provide substantial

economies of scale, and for this reason and others computers now provide

otherwise very different researchers with something to talk about. Each

field can set out to develop its own infrastructure in its own independent

direction, but in the long run the economics of standards, including the

need for compatibility in a matrix-organized research world, will create

incentives to abstract out one generalizable service layer after another. In

many cases, such as teleconferencing, the generalizable functionality will

seem obvious, but even then a great deal can turn on fine details, as well

as on the ability to integrate one service with a whole environment of

others. And to the extent that a given field's collaboratory embodies that

field's distinctive theoretical categories or epistemological commitments,

painful negotiation may be required to abstract a common platform.

There follows an important lesson about the nature of standardization. In

common language standardization suggests the imposition of an arbitrary

uniformity. But the concept is more complex. Standards can be a force for

uniformity or diversity, depending on whether they are done right. If

information, as Bateson says, consists of the differences that make a

difference, the key is to preserve information by standardizing everything

that does not make a difference. The point seems obvious enough when stated

in this abstract form, but its consequences are pervasive. Thousands of

universities have arisen and evolved independently of one another. They do

experience many pressures toward (what the sociologists call, not quite

inaccurately) isomorphism, but their practices diverge in innumerable ways

as well. The great opportunity here lies in the vast efficiencies that are

to be gained by standardizing and networking all of the different practices,

in accounting systems for example, that make no important difference to the

local circumstances of a given campus. And the dangers are equally great.

One danger is that we will standardize the wrong things, as can happen if

particular standards achieve critical mass on a particular type of campus

and then spread through economic pressures to campuses where they do not

belong. Another danger pertains to governance: standardization usually

implies centralization of one sort or another, and ill-governed standards

can become points of leverage for other agendas.

Let us apply these lessons to the institutional problems of university

teaching. By now everyone is familiar with a certain simple story: that

classes will be conducted over the Internet, that students will pick and

choose the classes that best suit them, that the resulting competition will

improve the prevailing quality of instruction, and that the methods and

resources that are employed in teaching will be determined not by ancient

tradition but by the value that students place on the various course

offerings as evidenced by their willingness to pay for them. For example,

the long-standing question of the relative value of lectures and discussions

will be definitively answered, and the answers may well surprise us, given

the much greater opportunities for technology-supported economies of scale

that lectures provide. Networked software can be interactive and finely

modularized, can incorporate its own assessment mechanisms, and so on.

This picture has much to recommend it. But as it stands, it is far too

simple. Consider for example the questions of governance that it passes

over. It claims to address such questions squarely through the market

mechanism. But this is half of the story. The market in courses will be a

complicated place because the courses themselves will be complicated;

institutions and standards will be required to advertise the courses, to

exchange money, to perform accreditation, to record credentials and grades,

to exchange and store the many kinds of data, to represent which courses

provide prerequisites for which others and which can be assembled into large

degree programs, to clear copyrights, and so on. Each of these standards

represents a possible point of leverage, whether for a software vendor, an

accrediting organization, a regulatory agency, or a university monopoly that

might survive the same kind of shake-out that is producing monopolies in

other areas of networked services. The revolutionary picture of a market in

higher education, in other words, is quite capable of being true on the

surface and false underneath.

The revolutionary picture also provides an inadequate account of the

diversity of university education. On the surface, of course, that diversity

would seem to be its whole point. University classes today are constrained

to uniform spaces and times, and uniform staffing arrangements, that the

market picture would surely explode as each course sought its own

economically optimal combination of arrangements. But universities fit

together in more ways than the purely artificial. Teachers who also engage

in research have incentives to remain up-to-date in their subject matter

areas. Uniformity of courses enables students to combine different topics in

a reasonably convenient way. And students must be able to follow

trajectories through different kinds of courses, from freshman lecture

courses, whose potential for considerable economies of scale is hardly in

dispute, to advanced graduate education that is integrated with the

institutions of research and ought to be much more so.

Perhaps, as the revolutionaries envision, competitors will come along that

organize themselves to address one particular teaching model, so that the

market becomes segmented by field, by level of instruction, or by other

factors. Will it still be possible to get a coherent education in that

world? Will all of those markets behave as they ought to, or will some of

them collapse into monopoly through their economies of scale? Will the

universities lose their vast abilities to cross-subsidize various fields and

services, and will this necessarily be a good thing? In short, what do we

really know about that world? We do not know very much, I would suggest,

because the simple market story does not incorporate any substantive

understanding of what education really is beyond the industrial distribution

metaphor in phrases such as "instructional delivery". And this is where much

more analysis is needed.

Much could be accomplished by developing an analysis similar to that of the

interconnected places of research activity. But for education, another

relationship between places is even more important: the relationship between

the place in the university where teaching happens and the place in the

world where that material being taught will be put into practice. This

relationship varies a great deal, and it is a matter of great conflict. The

general idea is that effective teaching requires that the place of learning

and the place of doing be homologous. Perhaps they cannot be identical, but

the practiced patterns of activity, and not just the mental contents, must

somehow carry over.

The various styles of teaching can be analyzed in terms of their particular

method of approximating this homology. In apprenticeship, as in advanced

graduate education, the two places are the same, except for the role of the

student's advisor. In an internship they are the same as well, ideally with

some additional concurrent forms of supervision and instruction back in the

places of the university. A teaching laboratory is a stylized and sanitized

analog of the working laboratory, and the scientific and mathematical story

problem is somewhat homologous to the narrative practices by which problems

are framed in real scientific and technical work, even if a great deal is

different about the social relations, the equipment, and the information

that is available. The liberal arts classroom is held to be homologous with

the public sphere with its demands on one's spoken and written voice, and

more abstractly to the critical-thinking dimension of any real-world place.

Students are frequently skeptical of these claimed homologies, and they

frequently call for greater reality, relevance, usefulness, and connection

between the university's places and the places to which they aspire. It is a

reasonable demand, even if opinions will differ about its most essential

features. The core of the students' complaint, of course, is that faculty

learned the subject matter in graduate school, so that their undergraduate

classrooms are more closely homologous to the places of graduate school than

to the places where the students themselves are headed.

The great opportunity, then, is to use networked information technology to

connect the places of university teaching with other places in the world. We

can imagine many such connections. Classes can open video links to those

other places, or they can be conducted remotely while the students literally

occupy those places. Working professionals can visit classes and jury the

students' projects. More fundamentally, the same kinds of field-specific

technologies that allow research disciplines to coalesce into real-time

online collaboratories could support the creation of hybrid sites of

teaching and working, the details of which would depend on the

particularities of the field: necessary equipment, forms of interaction,

genres of documents written and read, the relationship between explicit and

tacit learning, the role of embodied skills, the various forms of legitimate

peripheral participation that both the classroom and workplace might afford,

the relative role of verbal interaction and formal notation, the cooperative

or solitary nature of the various activities, the degree of standardization

of the subject matter itself, the degree of connection between teaching and

research, and so on. The great danger is that these many potential

dimensions of diversity would be artificially homogenized by the uniform

application, within a uniform technical and administrative framework, of a

simplistic metaphor such as "instructional delivery". If "instruction" is

conceived as a homogenous data-stuff to be delivered to couch potatoes then

the central pedagogical opportunity of the technology will be altogether

missed. On the other hand, another danger is that teaching, like research,

will be pulled in a hundred different directions as technologies are

developed that respond to the diverse inherent properties of the various

subject matters, and that the university will be pulled to pieces as a

result.

To reconcile these tensions, we need to make visible to aspects of the

university that are too often neglected. The first of these might be called

the informational substrate of the university: the wide range of generally

uncoordinated services that provide informational support of one kind or

another to the university's teaching mission. These include the library,

instructional networking and computing, the telephone system, media

services, the campus bookstore and course reader service, the course catalog

and schedule and many other paperwork-handling offices, and so on. Faculty

pay little attention to these services because their relationship to

teaching is quite uniform and changes only very slowly. With the rise of

networked computing, however, and particularly with digital convergence, it

will be possible for these services to support teaching in a much greater

variety of ways, and for teachers therefore to adopt a much wider range of

pedagogical models. Doing so will require that the informational substrate

be coordinated, ideally under the auspices of the university librarian, and

for representatives of this substrate organization to negotiate class by

class what package of support they will provide, what pedagogical problems

this support will actually solve, and what it will take to staff and

administer the result. The key here is that actual pedagogical problems will

be solved, and that instructors will have a clear contract that guards

against literature classes turning into computer repair classes or physics

classes from being disrupted by telecommunications breakdowns.

The second area of the university that needs to be made visible pertains to

professional skills. Universities have been amazingly unsystematic about

teaching the non-substantive, process-oriented skills that both classes and

employers increasingly require: teamwork, consensus-building, professional

networking, library searching, event organizing, online conferencing, basic

Web site construction, brainstorming and innovation processes, study skills,

citation skills, and so on. When these skills are taught at all, they are

rarely made into required courses and usually fragmented among a variety of

marginalized units such as the library and the career center. In order for

faculty to conduct classes according to a greater diversity of

technology-enabled methods that connect the places of learning and work,

however, they are going to need clear contracts about the relevant

professional skills that students will bring with them.

Once these two dimensions of the university are made visible, of course, it

will be possible to ask how they should be organized. Once again

considerable economies can probably be achieved by merging some functions

across campus boundaries, and once again a leading principle will be to

standardize only the indifferences -- the differences between universities

that do not make a difference. But which differences are these? One strength

of the current system is that each campus can develop its own distinctive

philosophy and culture, and it is most important that we do not standardize

these differences away by accident by standardizing the details of the

informational substrate and professional skills training where those

distinctive approaches live. We know very little about these matters, for

the simple reason that we have never been compelled to find out. Now that we

*are* compelled to find out, we are probably going to discover that we have

not been supporting our educational philosophies to anything like the degree

that we would want, and the shock effect of new technology will be salutary

if we decide to do something about this.

In the end, one of the most important outcomes of the process will pertain

to the students' own personal and professional development. College has long

been understood, in the United States anyway, as a place for students to

discover themselves. This notion is widely mocked, but it is terribly

important. The crucial insight is that we do not automatically know who we

are, and that we find out who we are by moving back and forth between trying

to explain it to ourselves and others -- a professional skill that should be

taught from high school if not before -- and joining into the activities of

one professional community after another through the relatively safe and

convenient proxy places of the classroom. Students who have some idea what

they want to do with their lives will make better choices, they will know

what they want from a given class, and the instructor can work backward from

the students' life plans to what the course could usefully be. The newly

reinvented university should be able to facilitate this kind of

self-discovery, and should not undermine it by fragmenting itself in a

hundred incompatible directions. Managing this tension will be a central

challenge.

Let us draw some conclusions about governance in the putatively new world of

the networked university. First, there is no simple thing called

decentralization. Decentralization requires a framework of standards, and

standards require a center. Centralization can thus happen by surprise, and

decisions about such esoteric matters as desktop software can erupt into

controversies about control over the future development of the places of

teaching and learning.

Second, it is crucial to design technology and governance at the same time.

For example, the rise of multimedia courseware has led many university

administrations to propose diluting instructors' traditional copyrights in

their own teaching materials: if universities make substantial investments

in multimedia courseware production, they figure, then universities should

own the results. But these high costs may simply reflect an early,

transitional phase. It would be disastrous to change copyright rules if

multimedia courseware development tools are going to become as routine and

as relatively cheap as the desktop computers and library tools that faculty

employ in designing their courses now. If any elements of multimedia

production are *not* likely to become cheaper with time, then analysis

should identify them now, so that they are not institutionalized without

adequate reflection.

And third, whatever endpoint we imagine for the networked university, the

university community will experience major problems of both technology and

governance in getting from here to there. Some of the dangers derive from

network effects: many potential innovations will be impractical until a

critical mass of campuses are using them, and once a critical mass is

achieved, the benefits of joining the club are likely to overwhelm any

reasons to pioneer an alternative direction. As a result of this dynamic,

the choices made by early adopters can be fateful for everyone else. The

first universities and research communities to adopt new technologies and

institutional forms will therefore have a great responsibility to everyone

else. For example, if new technologies of research coordination are first

developed by experimental physicists, then those technologies will probably

be adapted to the unusual attributes of research in that field: very large

projects with the attendant bureaucracy, high funding levels and the

attendant politics, high levels of social cohesion, a deeply developed

consensus about theoretical vocabulary and research assessment, and so on.

Most fields do not fit this pattern, and yet network effects may cause

technical and process standards from experimental physics to spread to other

fields whether they are appropriate or not.

Will we have a revolution in the university? I hope not. Revolutions are

destructive. By caricaturing the old and idealizing the new, they falsely

posit an absolute discontinuity between the past and the future. The

twentieth century has seen enough of that, and even an elementary analysis

has demonstrated that things are more complicated. In fact, information

technology creates little that is new. It can amplify existing forces, it

can increase efficiency by collapsing meaningless differences, it can

decentralize some things, and it can centralize others. It does not

automatically dissolve power, and it does not eliminate the need for

governance. Indeed, if issues of power and governance are neglected then it

can lead to catastrophe. It is both a product and an instrument of human

choice, and it leaves the burdens and dangers of choice squarely in human

hands. If universities are to remain a foundation of a democratic society,

then it will be necessary to make those choices wisely.

//* References

Geoffrey Bowker, Information mythology: The world of/as information, in Lisa

Bud-Frierman, ed, Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge

in Modern Business, Routledge, 1994.

Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific

Communities, University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Michael R. Curry, The Work in the World: Geographical Practice and the

Written Word, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday

Life, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral

Participation, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, MIT

Press, 1995.

Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the

Network Economy, Harvard Business School Press, 1998.

Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, Steps toward an ecology of

infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces, Information

Systems Research 7(1), 1996, pages 111-134.

end

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Telematics for African Development Consortium

P.O. Box 31822

Braamfontein

2017

Johannesburg

South Africa

Tel: +27 +11 403-2813

Fax: +27 +11 403-2814

neilshel@icon.co.za

www.saide.org.za

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