APA Newsletters

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers

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Principled Educational Technology

Jon Dorbolo

Computer technology has come a long way in terms of acceptance. Most colleges, universities, and high school systems are using information technology to deliver distance education or enhance classroom-based courses. Educational technology, however, has not advanced proportionally in terms of performance. This is evident in the lack of creativity in developing new communication models and in the rise of the course management system (CMS) as the foundation of online education. We are currently in a phase of power shifting over how educational technology will be employed and who will control it. Faculty are conspicuously out of the loop in this struggle and stand to ultimately lose control of the curriculum because of it. Academics need to re-engage in the process of decision making about uses of educational technology. Most important, we need to clarify and press forward an agenda of values, objectives, and principles that make educational technology worth having at all. At the recent CAP@OSU meeting, a group of thinkers and teachers met to begin lay out that addenda. You are invited to help advance that process by participating online at osu.orst.edu/groups/cap.

Static Communication

In 1993 I started working with the new world wide web (we called it Mosaic then) to develop a fully web-based course.1 A crucial issue in designing a philosophy course in cyberspace was the mode of discourse between teacher and students (instruction) as well as among the students (discussion). The choices were limited to email, email lists, threaded web-boards, and synchronous chat. Eight years later I have worked with hundreds of faculty and have been directly involved in developing scores of distance education courses. From this vantage I find it astonishing that our communication tools have hardly changed at all; online course communications are limited to email, email lists, threaded web-boards, and synchronous chat.2 Moreover, the capabilities of those tools have changed hardly at all. Even more striking, there has been little development in pedagogical models of online discourse for even those tools. Worse yet, the CMS environments that are dominating new online course development provide no innovation or leadership in creating effective discourse paradigms for education.

The question is: how can so little change in communications capacities occur in a technological environment that is known primarily for constant and rapid change? Eight years has bourne fast forward developments in information delivery, animation, searching, e-commerce, database backends, and speech recognition. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) who pioneered the internet, even funds development of online odor transmission with help from major research universities.3 In a climate where anything and everything is being developed as fast as possible, the absence of advanced (or even improved) tools and models for educational discourse stands out as starkly conspicuous. I can only surmise that the lack of interest on the part of engineers is correlated with the lack of imaginative direction from educators. If thinking teachers were to brainstorm several dozen possible ways to communicate productively in an online course, enterprising engineers would surely build some of them.

The Ascent of the Course Management System

Course management systems (CMS) are environment for building and running online courses. The two leading systems, Blackboardtm and WebCTtm claim between them to serve about 5,000 institutions for online course development.4 Vendors such as e-college and Thompson Learning make up another major portion of online education development. These vendors act as out-sourcing agents for institutions, taking content (i.e. text and pictures) and putting it into their course templates. A puzzling observation about the CMS systems and the out-source vendors is the remarkable consensus among them on the course model. Indeed, it is hard to tell the top two dozen systems apart on the basis of their products. All have stipulated areas for different functions of the course (documents, assignments, assessments, discussion) and all have similar sets of tools available to instructors and students. None stand out as having any commitment to an identity of pedagogical style or approach. All stand out as having a core set of values that plainly guide software development: easy, fast, cheap. One study of 229 institutions found "the factors which most significantly influence the selection of these systems are ease of use (64 percent), flexibility (47 percept), and price (46 percent)."5 The marketing literature of these products and services express these same values. Absent in either the surveys or the corporate literature are claims (much less evidence) of the educational effectiveness of these methods. I am an advocate of online teaching and maintain that information technology can increase our educating powers. Yet, I find little language on the part of the CMS companies or out-source services that is directed to the improvement of education. Better learning is not even a talking point in the sales literature. Apparently that is not what the college and university decision makers are interested in at this point. That absence should speak volumes to teachers. At the least it is up to smart and concerned educators to frame and press the agenda of values, objectives, and principles by which educational technology should be designed, purchased, and employed.

The first step in framing an agenda for the responsible uses of educational technology is to build a consensus of among educators. This is not an easy task as the higher education community is divided on the issues as to whether technology-mediated learning should occur at all and whether face-to-face interaction is necessary to learning. These are important issues, but they are also a red-herring in the face of present realities. Institutional administrations and corporate vendors are already in agreement as to the desirability of technology-mediated education and for tools to facilitate it. The functional issue on the table right now in most colleges and universities is: how will this technology-mediated learning be implemented? That is the issue for meaningful involvement by faculty, be they concerned that this effort will ultimately do something wrong or be they concerned with getting it right. This is not a plea for acquiesce or mere acceptance of inevitable technological dominance. It is a warning that momentous decisions are being made right now that all concerned educators should have awareness of and participation in.

Pursuing Consensus

Fifteen concerned thinkers and educators met at the closing session of the Computing and Philosophy conference (cap@osu), January 2001. The session was titled "Principled Educational Technology" and was designed as a guided discussion and group decision process. Participants indicated a broad range of views on educational technology: one participant stated that face-to-face interaction is necessary to all higher education learning, another held that much of the current lower-division education could (and should) be automated. Even with such strong differences, the guided discuss process was effective enough to result in a list of values, objectives, and principles that everyone present agreed upon. Remarkably, the small group and large group discussions grew so engaging that the company remained in session more than two hours past the 3:00 pm official closing. The topics an process plainly resonated with this group.

The process involved making individual determinations about the appropriateness of the use of educational technology in four briefly described scenarios. Participants listed the values and reasons guiding their judgements, then worked in small groups to determine common ground elements in their responses. Each group was asked to provide the shared values and reasons as well as the areas of major conflict. These responses were listed on whiteboards and discussed generally to produce propositions that best expressed the consensus of the entire group. These scenarios, the process, and discussion forums are available at osu.orst.edu/groups/cap. Your participation in this discourse will be valued.

The guided consultation process resulted in eleven propositions and one practical measure that all of the participants agreed upon in principle. They are:

Principles
* Pedagogical needs should drive educational technology design.
* Active discourse is required for critical learning.
* Research should inform instruction.
* Instructor autonomy in determining the material and objectives must be appropriate to the delivery methods.
* No single method of instruction is sufficient for a whole education.

Values
* Social development is important
* Peer-peer relationships are important to education
* Face- to-face relationships are unique and important in education.
* The individualization/customization of learning to particular learner's needs is important.
* Education should seek to instill critical-thinking and higher-order learning skills.

Goals
* The advancement of educational effectiveness and quality should be the primary goal in uses of educational technology.

Practical Measure
* When making choices about educational technology, educational systems and institutions should produce an educational environment impact statement that requires investigation into the effects the choice will have on teachers and learners and provide a period of public review and comment within the system or institutional community.

These results are a start to an agenda that should spread throughout the entire educational community (U.S. and Worldwide). The more numbers and varieties of educators who are involved in such a process, the closer we may come to establishing a basis for collective responses to the administrative interests, the business interests, and the engineering practitioners who are currently determining the nature of our technological learning environments. Academics will get informed and organized, or be left out of the decision making about educational technology.

Educational Environment Impact Statement

The key practical idea to arise from the guided consultation held at cap@osu is the notion of treating uses of educational technology as socially and politically similar to other technologies. For many technological developments, it is mandatory that their proponents provide evidence to back up their claims that the development will not unduly harm the environment. Nuclear powerplants, hydroelectric dams, toxic chemical plants, and even parking lots must produce a certified analysis of the effects that their activities will have on the physical environment in that locale. These analyses are open to public review and comment. If such investigative and explanatory work were provided by educational institutions implementing technology purporting "new educational environments" and "enterprise-wide solutions", we would build an opportunity for awareness and comment from faculty, students, and other relevant stake holders. Educators should work to make such a process standard.

The International Association for Impact Assessment explains the assessment process thus; "Impact assessment, simply defined, is the process of identifying the future consequences of a current or proposed action."6 This definition is general enough to extend to uses of information technology as well as industrial technology. In doing so a key problem arises: how do we characterize the information environment and assess affects upon it? That is a problem worth serious philosophical investigation. We should start with the educational environment and the impact of educational technology upon it.

Notes

1. InterQuest: osu.orst.edu/instruct/phl201
2. I am aware that there are other tools and approaches for communication available, such as video conferencing, web phones, streaming media, instant messaging, and so on. But these are neither mainstream tools nor are they major elements in online courses. A cursory review of the major CMS products will show this.
3. Advanced data Analysis Methods for Olfactory Classification using Optical Sensor Arrays,
DARPA, http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cowen/nose/nosepage.html; Digiscents, http://www.digiscents.com, retrieved from the world wide web January 15, 2001.
4. http://www.blackboard..com; www.webct.com, retrieved from the world wide web January 22, 2001.
5. CMS Users Still Waiting for the Killer App, Eduventures.com, February 2001, retrieved from the world wide web January 22, 2001. http://www.eduventures.com.
6. International Association for Impact Assessment, http://www.iaia.org, retrieved from the world wide web January 30, 2001.

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APA Newsletters

Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2