In
Miscelánea, 2
Cognition
and Technology in Education:
Knowledge
and Information — Language and Discourse
1.
The two expressions knowledge and information are at times used as
if they were interchangeable. But significant motivations might be found for
distinguishing the two concepts as complementary end-points on a scale. This
distinction may prove insightful when assessing the prospects for productive
applications of technology to education (cf. Gee 1992; Halliday 1994; Brown and
Duguid 1995).
2.
Knowledge is more dynamic and integrative. Its content is
characteristically practical, and naturally acquired from lived experiences and
directed intuitions among a cultural community (Toulmin 1972; Brown, Collins,
and Duguid 1988; Lave and Wenger 1991). The operations for storing, retrieving,
and using it are relatively effortless. When not in active use, it can undergo
spontaneous evolution and elaboration in mental storage and generate more of
itself. New knowledge being entered can reverberate through associated prior
knowledge and update its specifications. Or, old knowledge can be creatively
modified and adapted for unfamiliar or novel situations, often by relaxing
degrees of approximation and goodness of fit (cf. Norman and Shallice 1980).
3.
By contrast, information is more static and compartmentalised. Its
content is characteristically theoretical, and consciously acquired from
specialized activities. The operations for storing, retrieving, and using it are
relatively effortful. When not in active use, it can undergo spontaneous
conflation or degradation. New information being entered is unlikely to be
integrated with prior information unless the mutual associations are expressly
constructed. And old information can be rather difficult to modify or adapt to
unfamiliar or novel applications.
4.
I would advocate a parallel distinction between cognition and information
processing, another pair of terms that have at times been used
interchangeably. Cognition is centrally concerned with the natural acquisition
and application of knowledge. It is the freely accessible sustainer of communal
culture and social interaction. The sharing of knowledge increases not merely
the range of knowledgeable people but also the richness and applicability of the
knowledge itself (Calfee 1981; Bereiter and Scardamalia 1992).
5.
In contrast, information processing is centrally concerned with the deliberate
registration and regulation of information. It is the sustainer of specialized
or professional expertise, but also of technical data config-urations such as
computer-readable program codes. The access to information may be restricted to
particular circles of participants, such as owners of personal computers who are
registered visitors of websites. But since the value of information depends
precisely on its range of access, such restrictions are periodically lifted when
higher levels of information have been achieved (cf. ¶ 9, 12).
6.
We might broaden our account with another parallel distinction, this one between
two social classes, each one actually being a cluster of roughly
similar classes. The ‘lower class’ would comprise the ‘working class’
plus the large chronically poor or unemployed sectors at the bottom; and the
‘upper class’ would comprise the various groupings of the middle class (e.g.
‘upper middle’, ‘lower middle’) plus the small elite sectors at the top.
The ‘lower’ class is more adapted to acquiring and applying knowledge, as in
apprenticeship methods of learning on the job. The ‘upper’ class is more
adapted to processing and managing information, as in academic methods of
learning from textbooks. The borderline between the two classes could logically
be sustained by requiring that aspirants to secured status in the upper class
must perform strenuous information-processing tasks. Such could be noted in the
formidable examinations for obtaining credentials to practice prestigious
technical professions, such as medicine, law and engineering, where a fair
portion of the information solicited on the exam is not directly relevant to
performing on the job (cf. R. Collins 1979).
7.
The differentiation of the classes gets worked out in steadily greater detail as
a society becomes specialised and modernised. Cultural knowledge
and practical labour tend to decrease in value, while abstract information and
theoretical calculation increase. The speed and intensity of this process are
closely controlled and monitored by the evolution of labour-performing
technology in general and information-processing technology in particular.
8.
The industrial revolution kick-started and propelled the key phase in this
process by interposing multiple levels of technology. Whereas more practical
tools like hammers and anvils, or ploughs and sickles, apply energy and force
directly to labour, more theoretical tools like gears and pulleys, or
drive-belts and levers, multiply energy and force before applying them to labour.
Already, energy and force were partially becoming information, e.g., in being
quantified and defined by the relative sizes of gears and pulleys. In exchange,
the theoretical tools rendered labour itself more theoretical and abstract
without the workers being involved in constructing or even understanding the
theory. Their practical knowledge as builders or artisans lost its relevance and
value as their work was shaped by fitting the human to the machine and by
implementing out the theoretical information of the designers, engineers, and
managers. This process has been called ‘deskilling’ (Braverman 1974):
The
relative degradation of skill is the result of the fact that technological
change means for the most part, transferring skills to machines, [and] a
simultaneous process of employer-initiated re-organisation in which the
operator’s scope of responsibility is reduced by rationalisation, […] while
a much smaller number of highly trained technicians and managers enlarge their
responsibility. (Aronowitz and Giroux 1983: 188)
Deskilling
makes the workers easily manageable and replaceable and supplies a cynical
pretext for their penurious wages, whilst the profits from the dramatic rises in
production have been channelled to the ‘information-rich’ jobs of the
technicians.
9.
Still, advancing technology eventually requires some wider circulation of
selected information among the working class. The distinction between social
classes gets periodically recalibrated to adjust the distinction between
‘lower-level’ and ‘higher-level’ information. As technology keeps on
creating steadily higher levels, the working class is granted access to formerly
restricted lower levels, which are now obsolete in a sense too precise and
technical for workers to grasp. And this process etches an increasingly detailed
and exact scale of values for ranking the theoretical over the practical.
10.
The industrial revolution led to a giant leap in evolution by shifting
technology from converting energy into labour, as with a steam engine, over to
converting energy into information, as with a transducer. This shift was sharply
accelerated by the evolution from electric machines, e.g., a drill or a grinding
wheel, over to electronic machines, e.g., a vacuum tube or a transistor.
Electronic technology renders the practical construction of the device and its
consumption of energy more and more irrelevant to the theoretical quantity and
quality of information that can be processed.
11.
Logically enough, the next shift enlisted technology itself for converting
lower-level information into higher-level information, in cycle after cycle. If
each higher level might plausibly be regarded as a theory of the construction of
one or more lower levels, the proliferation of steadily higher levels would
intensify the already dominant theoretical quality of the total process. Yet as
the span between the higher and the lower levels keeps widening, this
‘theoreticalness’ grows more opaque and incomprehensible for the social
classes nearer to the bottom.
12.
When information is both the means of production and the commodity being
produced, the relation between theory and practice can become exquisitely
convoluted. Since the value of information rises by ‘globalising’ the
access, continual breakthroughs are needed to enhance the marketability of the
technology. Computers and their peripherals keep getting cheaper in proportion
to their storage capacities and computational power. Yet this cheap technology
is also just becoming obsolete. And however much consumers may save on an
individual purchase, they spend far more in the long run on upgrading or
replacing their technology at rising speeds.
13.
The value of information is thus much enhanced by the current ‘globalising’
of information technology. The hierarchy of social levels may shift onto
parallel dimensions, with the ‘upper class’ at the centre (Europe,
North America, Japan) and the ‘lower class’ at the periphery
(generally Asia, Africa, South America) (cf. Galtung 1971). Theoretical
innovations are achieved mainly by technicians in the centre, whereas practical
assembly is performed mainly by workers in the periphery wherever wages are
lowest. The ‘technological revolution’ can thus afford to globalise
information by keeping down production costs and paying minimal wages. Indeed,
the same trends can render physical geography irrelevant to production when
technology enables management to recruit their workforce anywhere on the globe
by setting up steadily more sophisticated communication networks and by
subdividing and deskilling multiple sectors of the production process. The
distinction between the upper class and the lower class is constantly being
regrouped and redistributed, all the while getting significantly wider. By
inciting competition among workers everywhere, management can dictate conditions
and wages no less high-handedly than in the early industrial revolution (Martin
and Schumann 1996).
14.
Meanwhile, information technology, like the Tower of Babel, has created a
mega-scale hierarchy of levels that overloads human processing capacities. So
new upper levels are designed to operate the technology and to globalise
software and shareware for managing information about information; and the
consumer is again impelled to keep upgrading. The tower gets periodically
restabilised and reinforced until it once more outgrows itself.
15.
My brief overview in this section suggests that the distinction between
knowledge and information is most significant where information and information
processing serve to differentiate social groups with greater precision and at
wider distances, whether or not the overall hierarchical structure of a society
is radically altered. The working class is not excluded but rather consigned to
the currently lower (and technically obsolete) levels of information technology
and thus cannot resist deskilling nor achieve material advancement in real
economic terms.
16.
At the same time, the middle class is being acutely destabilized by successively
finer divisions among the levels of information to which respective groups are
entitled. The emergence of higher and higher levels colonised by the super-rich
elites who design and disseminate new technologies, automatically exerts
downward pressures upon those sectors of the middle class who, unable to upgrade
their technology and their processing capabilities, must stagnate in
obsolescence. If left to run its course, this process could eliminate the middle
class as defined by conventional economic indicators, even in centre countries.
Just such an ongoing trend has been documented, already in the November 1983 of Fortune
magazine and in extensive research since then (esp. Martin and Schumann 1996).
But so far, the close link between this trend and the hierarchical mechanisms of
information technology has not been widely understood. Nor, to my knowledge,
have serious initiatives been mounted by governments to control those mechanisms
and their impact upon democratic and economic institutions.
B.
‘Knowledge’ and ‘information’ in modern education
17.
Standard dictionary definitions of education read like this: ‘the
process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge and of developing the powers
of reason or judgement; the process of imparting or acquiring particular
knowledge, as for a profession’ (Random House Webster’s College
Dictionary, 425). Such definitions reflect an ideal theory of education
rather distinct from its real practices as described by Halliday:
Current
‘progressivist’ education in the United States derives from a body of the
doctrine which locates all learning in the mental makeup of the individual, sets
up a severe distinction between cognitive and affective processes, and
interprets cognition as a kind of information processing. (Halliday 1994: 78;
cf. Tyack 1974; Gee 1992)
Halliday
sees here an ‘extreme form of middle class ideology and its hidden curricula
of values and educational goals’ (cf. ¶ 19, 39) (see also Gramsci 1991).
18.
In the previous section, I suggested that specialising and modern-ising a
society tends to raise the value of abstract information and information
processing and to lower the value of cultural knowledge and practical cognition
(cf. ¶ 7ff). I would suggest a corresponding evolution for education, which has
been modernised chiefly by undergoing massive injections of information and a
correspondingly receding interest in broader cultural knowledge.
19.
Here too we might detect the impact of the industrial revolution, as when
‘schools’ are said to be ‘consciously modelled on that most pro-ductive of
all technologies, the factory’ (Hodas 1993; cf. Tyack 1974):
For
at least the last hundred years, schools have been elaborated as machines set up
to convert raw materials (new students) into finished products (graduates,
citizens, workers) through the application of certain processes (pedagogy,
discipline, curricular materials, gym). This view […] presumes that the limits
of education are essentially technological limits and that better technology
will remove them. It is the most generic and encompassing theory of
‘educational technology’, since it embraces all curricular, instructional,
and material aspects of the school experience. (Hodas 1993)
However,
this modelling would not apply equally to all social classes. The dominance of
middle class ideology noted by Halliday would logically be reflected in an
emphasis upon information processing as a preparation for acquiring theoretical
credentials more than for performing practical labour (R. Collins 1979) (cf. ¶
6). If so, most of those ‘finished products’ emerge out of ‘raw
materials’ from the middle class.
20.
I would go further and propose to model ‘modern education’ overall as a vast
technology for converting dynamic knowledge into static information (Tyack
1974; Hodas 1993). This conversion too has multiple levels. One level applies to
the learners. Rich knowledge about their individual personalities, talents,
family, and cultural background, gets converted by educational records into
sparse information about their ‘achievement’ or ‘performance’,
represented in standardised ‘facts’ and ‘figures’ as expressed by
numbers. The apparent objectivity of numbers masks the subjectivity entailed in
assigning a closed, simple quantity like ‘1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5’ —
interpreted as ‘excellent - good - fair - poor - fail’ — to an open
set of complex qualities. Officially, the numbers are the fair and final
measures of the educational outcome, explained from inherent ‘intelligence’
and ‘aptitude’, which learners cannot control; or else explained from
‘diligence’ and ‘obedience’, which learners can and jolly well ought to
control. Although these two explanations are logically incompatible, education
devoutly oscillates between them when affirming that each individual learner
bears full responsibility (cf. ¶ 31). Yet ironically, education also works to
marginalise the individuality of the learners on their social, temperamental,
and emotional dimensions, which would stand out clearly if the focus were
allotted to cultural knowledge rather than abstract information.
21.
Another level applies to the content of education. Once a field, such as history
or physics, has been selected to be a ‘subject’ in the standard
‘curriculum’, its knowledge is emblematically converted into neat batches of
stable, free-standing ‘facts and figures’ waiting be learned and reproduced
with the greatest accuracy (Freire 1970; Apple 1985). These in turn constitute
the ‘information’ for the information processing tasks deployed to assess
the learners’ performance.
22.
The preference for such tasks thus interlocks with the emphasis upon facts,
figures, and numbers. Each task is approached on the expedient assumption that
the learners command precisely the information they have acquired from recent
stages within the instructional process. Cognitive tasks, in contrast, would
entail some responsibility to take account of the comprehensive prior knowledge
stores of the learners, which would manifest substantial variation, and which
would oblige teachers to become genuinely knowledgeable about their learners.
23.
Quantitative assessment of each learner’s ‘achievement’ purports to
operate on a smooth and even playing field, yet entails a pungent paradox: all
learners supposedly approach the task with the same preconditions and the same
opportunities to perform it successfully; yet some significant and quantifiable
differences must result among actual performances. If, on the contrary, the
performances were uniformly successful, the validity or appropriateness of the
task would be called into question (‘too easy!’). The playing field must be
even, but the outcome of the game must not be. Sameness gets unsystematically
commuted into difference in the name of fairness (treating all learners as
equals) and objectivity (applying precise and uniform standards).
24.
Information processing tasks are most suited to precluding uniform success,
since they can readily be designed to impose limitations. Such tasks can ensure
that the ‘average’ results will indeed constitute the average; and can
elicit a proportion of total failures as a cosmetic counter-balance on the
‘grade curve’ for the proportion of total successes. Knowledge-based tasks,
insofar as they are culturally appropriate and socially motivating, would yield
large proportions of high success and virtually no failures, and so be accused
in administrative discourse as flagrant ‘grade inflation’.
25.
Interestingly, the outcome labelled ‘average’ is itself regularly construed
as a symptom of disappointing limitations. Schooling seems to classify learners
as typical and ordinary yet to imply that being so is inadequate. This
ambivalence can hardly be accidental insofar as it serves the significant social
function (or dysfunction) of limiting the learners’ expectations and
aspirations for the rewards of society in later life (Bowles and Gintis 1976;
Apple 1985). This function in turn could be served by effective mechanisms for
actually constructing and imposing those limitations upon a human potential that
schooling purports to merely discover and reveal.
26.
And that function too favours information over knowledge, this time in order to
impose multiple bottlenecks. One bottleneck arises where schooling neglects to
endow information with significance, inter-est, or relevance. These factors are
largely bypassed when information processing tasks are programmatically
dissociated from the activities of everyday cognition:
Such
material in a world by itself, unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and
expression. […] Those which have not been carried over into the structure of
social life, but which remain largely matters of technical information expressed
in symbols, are made conspicuous in schools. (Dewey 1916)
The
teacher […] expounds on topics completely alien to the existential experience
of the students. His task is to fill the learner with contents that are detached
from reality, disconnected from the totality in which they were engendered and
which lent them significance. […] This vision minimises or annuls the creative
powers of learners and stimulates their ingenuity rather than their critical
thinking. (Freire 1985 [1970]: 45ff)
Under
such conditions, ‘education’ can hardly fit the brisk dictionary definitions
of being ‘the process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge and of
developing the powers of reason or judgement’ (¶ 17).
27.
When learners conclude that their practical knowledge of life is inferior and
irrelevant to the information transmitted by the discourses of schooling, they
might experience alienation, defined here in its etymo-logical and most
basic sense as the denial of one’s individual identity and potential.
Cognitive tasks enlisting the learners’ prior knowledge, in contrast, would
favour actualisation, defined as the affirmation of individual identity
and potential (Maslow 1954). Alienation sets the affective dimension alongside
the informational dimension of the bottleneck.
28.
A closely related bottleneck arises because the remoteness from cultural
experience renders static information substantially more difficult to learn and
retain than dynamic knowledge. This factor has been documented by robust
findings of experimental research in psychology: cognitive processing is poorly
adapted for isolated items and bits, and richly adapted for integrative patterns
and frameworks (surveys in Kintsch 1977, 1998; Bereiter and Scardamalia 1992).
By transmitting information in ‘facts and figures’, education interposes a
bottleneck upon the initial transfer and even more upon subsequent organisation,
storage, and retrieval. Compared to ordinary cognition, this transmission is
slow-paced, fragmented, and reductive. Long-term retention and productive
application are threatened by conflation and degradation, as strikingly attested
by the commonplace difficulties among adults of recalling or using what they
learned in school as children.
29.
The most damaging bottleneck, strongly abetted by these other two, is overload,
where the strain to increase the quantity of information being processed flips
over into a drastic decrease (Beaugrande 1984: 124f). Mental and physical
processing enter a state of catastrophic degradation, whilst ancillary symptoms
of stress and anxiety trigger a heavy drain on resources, which intensifies the
degradation, and so on in a reverberating cycle. This stage becomes most
conspicuous in breakdown and panic, when people become totally unable to access
the information they have in fact acquired.
30.
Taken together, such bottlenecks would materially reduce the learners’
potential and marginalise their knowledge. If so, the ‘grade curve’
represents differences not merely in one’s ‘achievement’ though
‘intelligence’ or ‘diligence’, but in one’s capacities to operate
through multiple bottlenecks and near the threshold of overload. From here we
might account for the traditional format of the formal examination. Learners are
deprived of operational support from even the more primitive educational
technologies, such as notebooks, textbooks, and reference works; and are
compelled to perform under physical and psychological pressure. Examination
tasks are often more demanding and extensive than many learners can manage
within the allotted time. Quality must be sacrificed by working rapidly and
superficially, and by omitting deeper reflection and creative evaluation of
alternative methods or solutions.
31.
The numerical scores of formal examinations thus tend to represent work
performed under signally artificial and adverse conditions. Yet these same
scores are accredited to be the best indicators — and in some institutions the
only ones — of the learners’ ‘achievement’, or indeed of their
‘potential’ for achievement. This accreditation once again places the full
responsibility onto the individual learner (cf. ¶ 20). Ironically, the
artificial quality of the formal examination as compared to most situations of
assessment in real life is believed to even out the playing field and to
minimize individual differences extrinsic to the educational process (cf. ¶
23).
32.
As modernisation and specialisation continue their massive injections of
information into education, the entire system eventually converges upon the
threshold of overload; technology periodically overhauls the ‘facts’ without
lessening societies faith in their value — quite the opposite (Veblen 1918).
At that stage, poor performance and alienation may assume debilitating or even
epidemic proportions. By a relentless inner logic, the system is propelled into
an ‘educational crisis’, such as has in fact been diagnosed in the United
States for over twenty years. The usual simplistic accusations that the schools
are ‘neglecting discipline’ and ‘lowering standards’ are badly
misleading; the crisis is the inexorable long-range outcome of the bias of
modern education toward information processing. The multiple bottlenecks I have
briefly described naturally render the system non-operational when the volume
and complexity of the information surpass an unsustainable threshold. This
threshold will be reached sooner in an alienating environment such as inner city
schools whose learners come from disadvantaged families. It will be reached
later in an actualising environment such as suburban schools whose learners come
from affluent families. But only the latter schools are taking serious steps to
shift their emphasis from information processing over to cognition (Anyon
1981).
33.
The indignant calls for a ‘return to higher standards’ are equally
misleading. Those standards could be sustained in former times only insofar as
the information load upon on the whole system was substantially lower. Equally
misleading are the current campaigns for ‘standardisation’, a notion also
descended from ‘the machine-age thinking of the industrial revolution of the
past century’ (Romberg 1992: 768) and from the trend of ‘modelling schools
on factories’ (Hodas 1993) (cf. ¶ 19). Standardisation paradoxically tries to
legislate sameness even though the misguided imposition of sameness has been
materially implicated in inciting the crisis. The hidden logic appears to be
that the negative consequences of overloading the system should be equally
distributed among all learners. Yet standardization itself increases
information, due to the fastidious mechanics of quantifying and measuring, and
so will deepen the crisis by intensifying the overload upon schools and their
staff.
C.
Discourses of information and discourses of knowledge
34.
The long-standing, popular notion of a language being a medium for the
‘transmission of information’ has passed on into science in general and into
‘linguistic science’ in particular. Predictably enough, one dominant model
was derived from an analogy to technology. The operations of ‘encoding
information’ in language by the ‘sender’ and its subsequent ‘decoding’
by the ‘receiver’ are briskly viewed as analogous to getting a message from
English into Morse code (or some comparable code) and back out again. Yet the
analogy could work only if information were static and compartmentalised, neatly
arrayed as ‘bits of information’ in the series of ‘meanings’ of the
individual words and phrases; and if the ‘encoder’ and the ‘decoder’,
like machines, worked with uniform operations and reliable results.
35.
This reassuring technological model is again deeply misleading. A message to be
put into Morse code has already been organized as language, and the encoding is
just a mechanical, predetermined substitution between two different systems of
symbols. No such conditions apply when the message has not yet been formulated
in language; indeed, the ‘message’ as such might not even exist at that
stage. Nor can a message in natural language consist of the serial addition of
isolated single meanings to be encoded one by one, which factor has posed
serious problems for technology to ‘understand’ such a message. Computers
are strong in handling information and weak in handling knowledge; humans are
just the reverse.
36.
All the same, the notion of language being a medium for the transmission of
information remains firmly entrenched in the discourses of education.
Conventional textbooks or lectures are signally preoccupied with the
presentation of facts and figures, along with technical terms and their literal
definitions (cf. ¶ 21f, 28, 59). Reciting, recording, and repro-ducing
discourses of information as literally as possible thus constitute the
commonplace information processing routines of ‘academic study’, and the
major medium for ‘good performance’ and ‘correct answers’ (Lemke 1990)
— a proliferation of sameness in language too (cf. ¶ 23, 32). The value
placed upon literalness in effect converts the wording of the text into a
strenuous mode of information in its own right rather than just a medium for
transmitting information. The task of learning the textual wording gets
superposed upon the task of learning the subject matter; and confounding these
two tasks acutely impedes the production of knowledge.
37.
The ‘good students’ are those who enlist their own discourses to ‘process
information’ in static and compartmentalised modes. By a pungent irony, the
human organism gets rated and rewarded in proportion to its mimicry of primitive
information technology. This analogy between human and technology is disturbing
insofar as information can be recorded and reproduced without ever becoming
knowledge, in fact without even being understood (Darling-Hammond and Snyder
1992; Lemke 1994). Education that merely ‘transmits information’ in literal
discourse and requires its literal reproduction is especially prone to foster
alienation and hinder actualisation as defined in ¶ 27. It might indeed be
described as ‘dis-education’, insofar as it induces an artificial incapacity
to organise, enrich, and apply knowledge (cf. ¶ 26). And methods for testing
information by means of machines, particularly in ‘multiple choice’ formats,
could justly be described as ‘deskilling’ the learners as readers and
writers of natural language (cf. ¶ 70, 74, 76).
38.
Paradoxically, discourses of theoretical information constitute a language
variety that is not taught in its own right, yet its mastery remains a key
requirement for educational success. Learners are left to their own devices for
acquiring it from repeated exposure and imitation. Among its ‘stylistic
norms’ observed by Lemke (1990: 133) in his classroom fieldwork were: ‘use
technical terms in place of colloquial synonyms and paraphrases’; and present
‘statements’ ‘in the form of propositions that seem to have universal
validity’ and ‘make no reference to here and now’ or to ‘human
action’. These norms ‘mainly serve to create a strong contrast between the
language of human experience and the language of science’ and ‘to exempt
science from social processes and real human activity’, much like the contrast
I have described between knowledge and information. And Lemke’s work confirmed
a bottleneck effect: ‘the stylistic norms’ ‘impede the communication of
the thematic content of science to students’; and ‘pitting science against
common sense undermines the students’ confidence in their own judgement’
(1990: 134). In contrast, his ‘systematic comparison’ found that the ‘less
alienating, more colloquial, more humanised ways of talking science’ rendered
the ‘students three to four times as likely to be highly attentive’ (1990:
135f). Yet he also observed classroom occasions of ‘students directly and
indirectly commenting on a teacher’s deviations from how they expect
scientific language to sound’ (1990: 132). Evidently, discourses of
information are considered proper or obligatory even by students who are thereby
subjected to a bottleneck.
39.
Lemke ascribed his findings to the ‘mystique of science’; it rests
upon an ‘ideology of objective truth’, of ‘established, permanent,
incontrovertible fact’ ‘taken out of the context of science as a human
social activity’ (1990: 137). It also rests upon an ‘ideology of special
truth’ ‘available only to experts’ possessing ‘special talents and
exceptional intellects which the average student does not and never will
have’. ‘No one points out that science is taught in very restricted ways
favouring people whose backgrounds have led them to already talk a bit more like
science books’ (1990: 138) — here too, distinctions are sus-tained among
social classes, with the usual middle-class bias toward information processing
(cf. ¶ 17, 19).
40.
Yet we might recognise a more general mystique of education which aspires
to apply these same two ideologies of ‘truth’ to the content of every
subject matter. Just when the information to be transmitted is remote from the
knowledge of practical life, an aura of ‘permanent fact’ and ‘special
truth’ offers the prime justification for teaching it at all (Gramsci 1991).
Science stands out because it suits this mystique best, but other subject areas
do their best to construct their own discourses of information.
41.
The effect of such discourses is a double-tracking between offering information
and withholding it. Learners are left to their own devices both when acquiring
discourses of information, and when actually extracting information from those
discourses and converting it into knowledge. Exactly how two these tasks can be
accomplished is arguably the greatest unknown factor in the whole of modern
education, which, I am claiming, works in the opposite direction — converting
knowledge into information for transmission in discourse (¶ 20ff).
42.
Under present conditions, the heavy reliance upon discourses of information will
continue to entrain ‘education’ in a maze of paradoxes. Massive
transmissions of information may overload the learners and leave them
uninformed. Insisting on literal statements of static ‘facts’ may weaken the
rather than strengthen the contact with the dynamic real world. Giving
‘correct answers’ may simulate rather than demonstrate understanding. Formal
examinations may give a false measure of the meaningful knowledge of individual
learners. And so on.
43.
I can briefly illustrate with some samples from the discourse of geography about
sand dunes (posted without authorship on the Internet in 1998). The
‘definition’ given for the ‘dune’ is shown in sample [1].
[1]
A dune is defined as a body of coarse sand shaped by ambient wind conditions and
the grain-by-grain deflation of sand.
Some
stylistic norms along the lines observed by Lemke can be readily confirmed: (a)
overly specialised terms like ‘ambient’ meaning ‘in the environment’,
and ‘deflation’ meaning ‘erosion’; (b) gratuitous specifi-cations like
‘ambient conditions’ (where else could the winds do the ‘shaping’?) and
‘grain-by-grain’ (sand normally occurs in grains); (c) remoteness from
ordinary knowledge, which would interpret ‘deflate’ as ‘remove the air
from inside’ — nonsense in this context. Besides, ‘grain by grain’
misleadingly suggests that sand might also be eroded in some other formation
such as blocks or conglomerates; ‘body’ is an oddly organic term for an
object that frequently changes or disintegrates; and ‘coarse sand’ is plain
wrong — I have encountered dune, near my home at the edge of the Empty Quarter
in Arabia, formed from sand so fine it gets in around the edges of firmly closed
windows. All these features illustrate the dangers of a discursive bottleneck
upon the transmission of information. I would propose a counter-strategy of critical
rewriting, as shown in [1a]. Such a version should be more readily
understood and integrated into the learners’ store of environmental knowledge,
especially non-native speakers of English.
[1a]
A dune is defined as a mound of sand shaped by the motion and erosion of wind
and sand grains.
I
would draw the same contrast between samples [2-4] and my critical rewritings in
[2a-4a].
[2]
Mesoscale dune wavelength is strongly correlated with sand grain size.
[2a]
On medium-sized dunes, the waves get longer when the sand grains are bigger.
[3]
Transverse dunes are characterized by low length:width ratios and marked
asymmetry, where windward slopes are much gentler than the slip faces associated
with lee slopes.
[3a]
Dunes formed at a right angle to the wind are very short but very wide. They
rise gently on the side facing the wind and drop sharply on the other side.
[4]
Barchans are crescentic dunes confined to directionally-constant annual wind
regimes; […] where sand is sparse, barchans become the expressed dune
morphology.
[4a]
Barchans are crescent-shaped dunes appearing where the wind blows in one
direction all year and especially where sand is sparse.
In
the same strenuous discourse, rainfall is a ‘precipitation event’; extreme
dryness in a small area is ‘localized hyperaridity’; and sand grains that
blow away again from their dune ‘become wind re-entrained’.
44.
A special motive for this gratuitous informativity might be inferred from these
stilted admissions in the same discourse:
[5]
How dunes first form and then replicate are issues that remain unclear.
[6]
the formation mechanism of dune characteristics remains hypothetical
Such
limits are uncomfortable if science is expected to present ‘established,
permanent facts’ and ‘truths’ (cf. ¶ 39f). So a strenuous discourse of
information can de deployed to camouflage a lack of deeper knowledge.
45.
Compare now this passage from Wilfred Thesiger’s (1994 [1959]: 130-133) Arabian
Sands about the lived communal experience of crossing an immense dune in the
Empty Quarter:
[7]
It seemed fantastic that this great rampart which shut out half the sky could be
made of wind-blown sand. […] It was now that Al Auf [the Bedouin guide] really
showed his skill. He picked his way unerringly, choosing the inclines up which
the camels could climb. Here on the lee side of this range a succession of great
faces flowed down in unruffled sheets of sand, from the top to the very bottom
of the dune. They were unscalable, for the sand was poised always on the verge
of avalanching, but they were flanked by ridges where sand was firmer and the
inclines easier. It was possible to force a circuitous way up these slopes, but
not all were practicable for our camels, and from below it was difficult to
judge their steepness. Very slowly, a foot at a time, we coaxed the unwilling
beasts upward. Each time we stopped I looked up at the crests where the rising
wind was blowing streamers of sand into the void, and wondered how we should
ever reach the top. […] In that infinity of space I could see no living thing,
not even a withered plant to give me hope. ‘There is nowhere to go’, I
thought. ‘We really are finished.’
Although
Thesiger possessed extensive experience with the deserts and sand dunes, he
sensed his abject ignorance alongside his Bedouin com-panions whose home was the
desert. In his lack of knowledge, he desperately scanned the environment for
information and, not finding any, relapsed into panic.
46.
His Bedouin guide, in contrast, had the practical knowledge for getting the
caravan across a dune that must seem impassable to a less knowledgeable person.
He did not command the sort of information presented in a discourse like [1-6],
which he could hardly have recognised to be a description of the dunes he knew.
D.
‘Knowledge’ and ‘information’ in discourses of ‘technology’
47.
I was intrigued to find the term technology defined by recent
dictionaries in close association with the term knowledge, viz.: ‘the
application of knowledge for practical ends’; or ‘a particular area of
activity that requires scientific method and knowledge’ (Random House
Webster’s College Dictionary, 1371); or again, ‘the branch of knowledge
that deals with applied science, engineering, the industrial arts’ (Collins
COBUILD English Language Dictionary, 1501) But when I queried my corpora of
authentic discourses about ‘technology’, I found relatively few collocations
linking knowledge and technology. The collocation ‘knowledge
technology’ did not occur at all. At most, a few data suggested that the one
might produce the other, as if the direction of the causality is reversible:
[8]
Investments in science and technology drive economic growth, generate new
knowledge, create new jobs, build new industries, ensure sustained
national security, and improve our quality of life.
[9]
technology has become a major engine of economic growth, a significant
contributor to our national security, a generator of new knowledge, and a
critical tool in protecting our health and environment.
[10]
These partnerships enable the private sector to translate new knowledge
into novel technologies that benefit society at large.
[11]
Integrative research is needed to combine fundamental discoveries and thus gain
the comprehensive knowledge required to develop more targeted technologies
We
can notice a pervasive optimism that technology will ‘benefit society’ and
‘improve our quality of life’ in every way (cf. Cohen 1987).
48.
In contrast, I found a high rate of collocation with information. Information
technology figured as a favoured collocation in bureaucratic, commercial,
and academic discourses, viz.:
[12]
The revolution in information technology has
increased productivity by helping people work faster and smarter. It has created
jobs, rewarded entrepreneurs and investors
[13]
The Administration has used advances in information
technology to serve customers faster, more
accurately, and more reliably.
[14]
Congress reformed the way Government acquires information
technology as part of the Information
Technology Management Reform Act
[15]
the Administration would work with 75 of the Nation’s most congested
metropolitan areas to develop modern information
technology for highway and transit systems
[16]
Establishing Information Dominance: Information is power. U.S. pre-eminence in information
technology helps us to field the world’s
premier military force
‘Information
technology’ can also be noticed showering modern society with myriad benefits.
The commitment of the US ‘Administration’ is correspondingly intense
[13-15], especially in aspiring to ‘field the world’s premier military
force’ [16] — though projects like ‘Star Wars’ signal a dangerous
misunderstanding of such technology.
49.
The collocation information technology was also pungently prominent in my data
corpus from the discourses of education, whose limitations are to be ‘removed
by better technology’ (Hodas, ¶ 19).
[17]
Information technology
has a role to play in delivering higher education in flexible ways […] to
promote curriculum innovation, and to help raise the profile of teaching in
higher education.
[18]
Information technologies
now present colleges and universities with opportunities to transform the
teaching and learning processes that are at the heart of their educational
missions, and their business processes and decision-making capabilities.
[19]
On the issue of students acquiring information
technology skills, there is a widespread
sense that such skills are becoming a necessary condition both of employment in
many sectors of the economy and of improving international competitiveness
Undeniably,
high hopes are pinned upon Exploiting the Full Potential of Information
Technology in Higher Education (the title of one report). The university is
to be changed, perhaps radically transformed:
[20]
Our analysis has uncovered continuing technology training and retraining
requirements for this University’s information technology community.
[21]
the leadership must quickly develop a ‘human-centred’ information technology
infrastructure to respond to the changing needs of faculty, administrators,
professionals, clerical staff, and technical staff
[22]
there might be founded a new kind of university which exploited fully the
potential of multi-media information technology with all its interactive
capacities and opportunities for global networking: the names televersity or
virtual university are offered. [...] This could be a university for the
twenty-first century, which places learning much more under the control of the
individual student but which also involves a new and exciting realisation of the
learning community.
Yet
the integration of steadily more information technology might only reinforce the
prevailing dominance of information, and drive knowledge even further toward the
margins of the educational experience (cf. Hodas 1993; Lemke 1994). Merely
enlisting technology to intensify the trans-mission of facts and figures could
tighten the bottlenecks and increase the perils of overload.
50.
I would argue that significant progress can be achieved only if technology gets
strategically enlisted for knowledge management (Brown and Duguid 1995; Bobrow
1998). Specifically, the goal of education would be expressly reconceived in an
expanded scope as the development of skilful and creative strategies of
discourse for converting information into knowledge, as well as knowledge into
information. Confronted by the flood of information in education and
electronic media, ‘educated persons’ would be those who can integrate and
elaborate it into a productive unity that is relevant and applicable to
significant human issues, such as ecological modes of progress. Also, they can
communicate their knowledge to a wide range of audiences, especially to ones who
need it for achieving a better life. In return, they can provide information at
any appropriate degree of specialisation, e.g., to perform in a skilled
profession.
51.
Such an ‘education’ would mediate powerfully against the sameness that
currently predominates (cf. ¶ 23, 33) (cf. Lemke 1994). Instead of being
mechanically recited and reproduced, information gets dynamically expanded and
transformed, leading into a range of personalised constellations of knowledge.
These would not be identical with the knowledge that originally got converted
into information for educational purposes, as described in ¶ 20ff. And if such
a constellation were used to generate information, the product would not be
identical with the information previously presented in the educational setting.
The learners’ performance would accordingly not be assessed by their literal
accuracy in reproducing discourses of information, but rather by their skills in
relating a specific issue or problem to its cognitive and social context and
proposing effective and useful means of dealing with it (Lemke 1993). The more
difficult or novel the issue, the greater the skills that can be demonstrated.
52.
Here is a vital assignment for a genuinely ‘human-centred infor-mation
technology’ (to quote sample [21]): to support human processes for mediating
between information and knowledge, and to provide opportunities for managing
information in the production of knowledge. A key condition is to unblock the
multiple bottlenecks and open up free access and application of information.
Learners can then perform at their best in dynamic episodes of actualisation.
E.
Technology in education 1: Blackboard, notebook, textbook
53.
Looking back over history, our three oldest technologies in education are so
familiar and commonplace that most people would not even call them
‘technology’ — the blackboard, the notebook, and the textbook (Cohen 1987;
Hodas 1993). And they served the ‘transmission of information’ long before
any such term was invented. Quite plausibly, these simple graphic media were
introduced just when the content of education was starting its long-term move
from knowledge toward information by becoming more ‘technical’ — more
abstract, formal, and theoretical — than the content of ordinary life.
54.
When the ‘lecture’ was adopted for presenting such information, the
blackboard handily served as the teacher’s visual display and the notebook as
the learner’s memory bank. The information could be studied, memorised, and
reproduced on a test, and then forgotten until some later need arose. These
basic technologies may owe their long life-span to their instrumental role for
direct and centralised control of the teacher over the discourse of education (Hodas
1993) (cf. ¶ 74).
55.
Today, they might be described as bona-fide technological fossils that entail
their own informational bottlenecks. Class time gets retarded by the brute-force
operations of writing down words at whatever rate can be accommodated by the
mechanics of the bodily movements of recognition and inscription. Legibility and
orthography assume a vastly exaggerated importance, as if clear and regular
handwriting were by themselves valid proof of good performance (cf. ¶ 83).
56.
The textbook (or, in earlier manifestations, the scroll and the manuscript)
offers an alternative technology for extending inscription and recognition
beyond the classroom. This technology can control classroom procedures not just
by setting the pace when read aloud, recited, or discussed, but, on a larger
scale, by determining the content and design of lesson plans — what must be
‘covered’ in which sequence. The textbook reinforces the authority of
education, and complements the teacher in sustaining centralised control — and
so is rarely questioned or challenged. The textbook can also incorporate at
least some new technologies for information transfer, such as colour graphics
and complex charts and tables.
57.
The bottlenecks here are of a different nature, this time reducing the flow of
information that arrives in the classroom at all. The textbook typically
mediates a view of the field that is at least five years out of date, due to the
phlegmatic pace of production, review, publication, and adoption, especially if,
as is common practice, the textbook gets reprinted or cosmetically ‘revised’
for continued re-use. Moreover, the aspiring producer of a new textbook is
usually pressured by publishers and their reviewers to include materials which
were featured in earlier textbooks and to exclude conflicting or unfamiliar
materials (cf. Beaugrande 1985; Lemke 1990).
58.
A further bottleneck arises from the static, compartmentalised layout of most
textbooks, which impedes a conversion into dynamic, integrative knowledge (cf.
Venezky 1992). The subject-matter is arranged in conventional chapters and
sections, as when textbooks on ‘linguistics’ conform to the standard
sequence ‘phonology – morphology – syntax – semantics’, and offer no
chapters on such humanly relevant knowledge as discourse and communication in
cultural life, or language variation as a key factor in educational success or
failure.
59.
Moreover, textbooks intensify the drive to convert the knowledge of a community
(e.g. historians or lawyers) into information in the form of ‘facts’,
‘figures’, and ‘correct answers’ (cf. ¶ 21f, 28, 36). Consider this
sample passage from a lower-division English-medium textbook used as part of the
curriculum in Islamic law (Shari’ah) in the United Arab Emirates:
[23]
The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi is the most complete collection of ancient laws
yet discovered, and is one of the most important ancient codes of law. A stone
slab with the code written on it was discovered in Susa, Iran, in 1901.
Hammurabi was king of Babylon around 3750 years ago (from 1792 BC to 1750 BC).
He reorganised the administration of justice and established an orderly
arrangement of written laws. The Code of Hammurabi consisted of 282 laws. These
laws were systematically arranged under such headings as family, labour,
personal property, real estate, trade, and business.
The
quiz on this passage contains these questions:
[23a]
1. When and where was the stone slab with the Code of Hammurabi on it
discovered?
2. How long ago was Hammurabi ruler of Babylon?
3. For how many years was he king?
4. How many laws were there in the Code of Hammurabi?
These
questions pick out specific bits of information which are patently irrelevant to
a knowledge of legal tradition, but which enable a quick and easy division
between right and wrong answers. Besides, the dates of Hammurabi’s reign
(given in Western, not Islamic, reckoning!) aren’t facts at all, but pure
conjectures.
60.
Textbooks are also signally prone to impose the bottleneck of ‘stylistic
norms’ deemed appropriate for discourses of information in educational
settings (cf. ¶ 38, 43). Such is all the more pronounced when the field itself
consists mainly in managing discourses of information, as is true of accounting.
This field is defined by one widely used textbook as shown in sample [24].
Highly conspicuous here is the long, repetitious, and pedantic style, as in the
sequences ‘information - informed - information’ and ‘judgements and
decisions’, and in the gratuitous mention of ‘users’: who else could be
meant, and what else should they be but ‘informed’ after getting all that
‘information’? Perhaps the author wanted the style to suggest the great
extent and importance of the ‘information’ as motives for hiring
accountants.
[24]
Accounting is most widely defined as the process of identifying, measuring, and
communicating economic information to permit informed judgements and decisions
by users of the information.
As
in sample [1], the style masks some inaccuracy in the information itself.
Accountants do ‘communicate information’, but they can hardly be said to
‘identify’ and ‘measure’ it. And the ‘information’ is not just about
‘economics’ but about quite specific economic concerns, such as assets and
losses. The definition would be more likely to generate knowledge in a rewriting
like this:
[24a]
Accounting consists of gathering, organising, and communicating economic
information to users who need it for making sound decisions about their
financial concerns.
To
appreciate how far the academic discourses of information in textbooks can
misrepresent information, consider this example from the same textbook:
[25]
Net realisable value means the estimated amount that would be received from the
sale of the asset less the estimated costs on its disposal. The term ‘exit
value’ is often used as it is the amount receivable when an asset leaves the
business. A very important factor affecting such a valuation is the conditions
under which the assets are to be sold. To realise in a hurry would often mean
accepting a very low price. Look at the sale prices received from stock in
bankruptcies — usually very low figures. The standard way of approaching this
problem is to value as though the realisation were ‘in the normal course of
business’. This is not capable of an absolutely precise meaning, as economic
conditions change and the firm might never sell such an asset ‘in the normal
course of business’.
The
difficulties of establishing an asset’s net realisable value are similar to
those of the replacement value method when similar assets are not being bought
and sold in the marketplace. However, the problems are more severe as the units
of service approach cannot be used, since that takes the seller’s rather than
the buyer’s viewpoint. (194 words)
This
passage purports to inform you of the ‘meaning’ of ‘net realisable
value’, but leaves you uninformed. You are counselled to ‘valuate’ by
assuming you are selling the asset ‘in the normal course of business’ and
are not in any ‘hurry’, even though the asset might in fact ‘never be
sold’ or else only under highly non-normal conditions such as
‘bankruptcies’. Such a ‘valuation’ is purely hypothetical.
61 . Moreover, you are restricted from following the buying price you would pay to ‘replace’ the asset, because you are in the role of a hypothetical seller, not a buyer, and you obviously cannot sell a used asset for the same price paid for a new one. This restriction gets oddly obscured in the final paragraph, which compares ‘net realisable value’ with ‘replacement value’. Since the first of these two ‘valuations’ is the theme of the whole passage, the proximate reading would be that ‘net realisable value’ creates ‘more severe problems’. But that reading would work only if the terms ‘buyer’ and ‘seller’ have been accidentally interchanged. The whole passage has prominently adopted the seller’s viewpoint, whereas now the text says ‘the seller’s viewpoint’ ‘cannot be used
62.
Sample [25] trenchantly illustrates how discourses of information get in their
own way, even without a substantial proportion of technical terms. I also would
point out the casual interchanging of terms for the same practical transaction:
‘sale - disposal - exit - amount receivable - leaves the business - sold -
realise - prices received - realisation – sell’. Several of these are
unintentionally ironic, since the asset may never really ‘leave the
business.’
63.
A counter-strategy for producing knowledge against the grain of such discourse
would be critical rewriting, which I have demonstrated before (cf. ¶
43). We might obtain:
[25a]
Estimating the net realisable value or exit value is done
by calculating the sum that would be left after selling an asset and subtracting
the costs of the sale process. Because the conditions for selling can affect the
price in unpredictable ways, as when stock gets quickly sold off after a
bankruptcy, you can base your estimate on the value you would presumably receive
selling the asset at a time when the business is operating normally.
Estimating
the replacement value is done by calculating the sum that would be
spent to actually buy the asset again. Problems naturally arise if the asset is
currently not on the market. Also, you cannot calculate by units of service,
which would be adopting the seller’s viewpoint rather than the buyer’s.
This
streamlined rewriting (down from 194 to 127 words) introduces the distinct terms
in italics and in parallel topic sentences of two paragraphs; and eliminates the
redundant series of partial synonyms for ‘selling’ noted in [25]. We also
dispense with the repetitions of ‘net realisable value’, ‘estimated’,
‘low price/low figures’, ‘in the normal course of business’; and replace
‘not being bought and sold in the marketplace’ with ‘currently not on the
market.’ Finally, we associate the ‘problems’ with the term where they
seem more virulent.
64.
That college-age learners can, with suitable training, do their own critical
rewriting, was shown by my pilot course in Business English at the University of
Botswana in 1997, where English is a second language after Setswana. During the
initial training, I acted as a model critic and rewriter, presenting the
samples, explaining the problems, and displaying my solutions. The learners soon
understood the process, and some of their products were quite impressive. My
student Modibedi chose sample [26] from the same textbook:
[26]
We have seen that every transaction affects two items. If we want to show the
effect of every transaction when we are doing our bookkeeping, we will have to
show the effect of a transaction on each of the two items. For each transaction
that means that a bookkeeping entry will have to be made to show an increase or
decrease of that item. From there you will probably be able to see that the term
‘double entry’ bookkeeping is a good one, as each entry is made twice
(double entry).
The
original text leads up to the main concept of the ‘double entry bookkeeping’
in a verbose and patronising manner, e.g., repeating ‘item’ three times,
‘entry’ four times, and ‘transaction’ five times. Modibedi produced a
radical revision, reducing 91 words to a mere 32:
[26a]
The ‘Double Entry System’ is the basic system of modern bookkeeping by which
each account has two sides, a debit side and a credit side, and each business
deal is entered twice.
He
adroitly moved the key term up into the strategic topic position of his sentence
and highlighted it in upper case, so that the reader knows at once what is to be
explained. He invested his own knowledge by replacing the terms ‘increase’
and ‘decrease’ with the correct bookkeeping terms ‘credit’ and
‘debit’.
65.
My student N!ko!ko chose a more global and challenging discourse on ‘bad
debts’, again from the same textbook:
[27]
With many businesses a large proportion, if not all, of the sales are on a
credit basis. The business is therefore taking the risk that some of the
customers may never pay for the goods sold to them on credit. This is a normal
business risk and therefore bad debts as they are called are a normal business
expense and must be charged as such when calculating the profit or loss account
for the period.
When
a debt is found to be bad, the debt as shown by the debtor’s amount is
worthless and must accordingly be eliminated as an asset account. This is done
by crediting the debtor’s account to cancel the asset and increasing the
expenses account of bad debts by debiting it there. Sometimes, the debtor will
have paid part of the debt, leaving the remainder to be written off as a bad
debt. The total of the bad debts account is later transferred to the profit and
loss account. (163 words)
N!ko!ko’s
rewriting, going from 163 words down to 106, read like this:
[27a]
Many businesses sell a large proportion of their goods on credit, although
it’s a risk because some of the customers may never pay. The amount which is
not paid at the end of a year is called bad debts. They are an expense and
therefore must be charged to the Profit and Loss for the period.
When
a debt is found to be bad, it must be removed as an asset. To do this, the
debtor’s account is credited and the bad debts account is debited. If the
debtor has paid off part of the debt, the remainder will be written off as a bad
debt. (106 words).
She
vigorously trimmed away the patronising excess verbiage from [18]: ‘for the
goods sold to them on credit’ (what else would they not ‘pay for’?); ‘as
shown by the debtor’s amount’ (where else?); a ‘bad debt’ is
‘worthless’ (obviously); plus the entire last sentence about ‘the profit
and loss account’, which just repeated what had been stated already. She also
saw no point in including ‘if not all’, or in designating ‘bad debts’
twice over as a part of ‘normal business’. Finally, the repetitions have
been dramatically reduced: ‘business’ from 5 times to 1, and ‘debt’ from
7 times to 4.
66.
If the conventional textbook is indeed a faulty technology, users need skilled
in adjusting and repairing it. And if authors resist adopting new strategies on
the production side, then readers require counter-strategies for converting
information into knowledge on the reception side. Critical rewriting, though not
a new technology, is an innovative new use of an old technology to offset its
bottleneck tendencies. The practice compels an integrative understanding of the
content and thus supports knowledge, although the original author may have
written carelessly or misleadingly. Far from treating the wording of the text as
a mode of information in its own right (cf. ¶ 36), learners approach the
wording as a potentially inefficient reflection of knowledge, and they take the
initiative in improving it.
F.
Technology in education
2: The ‘teaching machines’
67.
For most people, ‘technology in education’ is associated with the use of
machines. The provision of this technology has been chiefly sporadic or
adventitious, e.g., leaving geometry and literary studies with their notebooks
and textbooks whilst giving physics and chemistry their ‘laboratories’. And
those ‘labs’ have been almost exclusively utilised for proving or disproving
information whose status has long been decided in the field (Papert 1980: 139).
Consistent, detailed policies for technology all across the curriculum were not
even envisioned until recently, and in most places are still in their
rudimentary stages. Meanwhile, some institutions evidently believe that just
introducing technology will automatically solve their problems (cf. Hodas 1993;
McKenzie 1994).
68.
Back when prevailing theories of education were conceived in terms of highly
general learning processes, as in orthodox behaviourism, technology was expected
to support or perform the basic operations of teaching and learning,
independently of content. ‘Teaching machines’ were predicted to kick-start
an ‘industrial revolution in education’, beginning with an ‘apparatus
which gives tests and scores and teaches’ (Pressey 1926: 373; long-range
surveys in Cuban 1986; Benjamin 1988). Pressey’s machine, demonstrated at the
Ohio State University, presented one from a set of multiple-choice questions
inscribed on a rotating cylinder. If the learner chose the correct answer by
depressing one of four keys, the drum would rotate to the next question. If all
‘answers’ were ‘correct’, the student would be rewarded with a piece of
candy.
69.
Though Pressey’s primitive ‘apparatus’ did not become popular in ordinary
schools, it pungently illustrated the most literal mode of an ‘industrial
revolution in education’. Just as in the early factories, the dominant
strategy was to fit the human to the machine, rather than vice-versa (cf. ¶ 8).
Yet this time the human and the machine were interacting not to produce a
tangible product, but to rehearse a behavioural pattern. In terms of sheer
behaviour, the pattern was hardly one the learner would need to perform in real
life, except to operate the ubiquitous vending machines that sell candy.
70.
In terms of information transfer, the machine was far more primitive and
restricted than the blackboard and notebook and imposed a far tighter
informational bottleneck. Whereas those older technologies easily allow for
multiple sets of information to be entered, altered, or revised, the machine
could only handle a single set of brief questions and answers in any one
session. The learner’s performance was far more rudimentary than copying from
blackboard into notebook, and no long-term record of the information was
preserved. Nor could learners get any broader information about why a given
answer is or is not ‘correct’. The session could easily be conducted by
simple trial and error — you press keys randomly until you get the right one
— and without bothering to read or understand the questions and answers. Such
technology fostered the ‘deskilling’ of learners, much as it had previously
done for workers in industries (cf. ¶ 8, 37).
71.
The concept of ‘teaching machines’ became a life-long advocacy of the
doctrinaire behaviourist B.F. Skinner (e.g. 1958, 1961, 1963), who boldly
foresaw them ‘supplanting lectures, demonstrations, and textbooks’ (1958:
69). Through an unconscious irony, when actually hired by Harcourt Brace
Publishing Company to design such a machine, he drew its information from a
printed textbook, thus reverting to an ancient technology he vowed to
‘supplant’. In this case, it was a high school grammar textbook (published
by Harcourt). Its contents were industriously rewritten into 2600 steps whose
formats would be suitable for the clumsy technology of the time, namely for
transferral to punched paper tape. But Skinner withdrew from the project in
1959, and — again through an unconscious irony — Harcourt just published the
‘programmed’ materials in a textbook entitled English
2600, which sold over a million copies.
72.
Radical behaviourism should find attractive analogies in the operation of
machines. The basic model of the ‘organism receiving a stimulus’ and
‘emitting a response’ had originally been inspired by laboratory experiments
on animal conditioning (cf. Skinner 1935, 1938), which neatly matched the
mechanics of seeing a display and pushing a key. The animal was not explicitly
‘taught’ how to behave, e.g., how to run a maze and find the ‘food
reward’; the ‘learning’ was ‘conditioned’ and ‘reinforced’ through
brute-force trial and error (cf. Thorndike 1911). When the same model was
transferred from animals to humans (e.g. in Thorndike 1931), the resulting
approach actively discouraged explicit teaching, such as giving information in
discursive explanations. Instead, the whole process got broken down into minimal
steps, each one centred on a brief, immediate event where stimulus and response
were realised as question and answer. Again, information was transmitted largely
by trial and error — another ‘deskilled’ operation imposed by the
technology.
73. One mechanism unmistakably inspired a dominant model in behaviourist theory. The ‘black box’ was an electric circuit whose sole function was to receive an ‘input’ signal and to transmit a modified ‘output’ signal. The internal construction and operation were not specified for the user, who could not regulate or alter them anyway. By analogy, the behaviourist model envisioned an organism, whether an animal or a human, getting ‘conditioned’ by receiving a ‘stimulus’ and emitting a ‘response’ which gets either ‘reinforced’ or ‘extinguished’ as required by the ‘learning objective’ of ‘habit formation’. This model made no reference to the inner operations; it merely addressed the link between input and output. The model implied a radical isolation both of the indi