Academic Technology: Let Us Cheer For It!
I cannot be the only person who was distressed and alarmed at David Noble's article. I came to his peroration:
[O]nce the faculty converts its courses to courseware... [t]hey become redundant.... [T]he new technology of education... robs faculty of their knowledge and skills, their control over their working lives, the product of their labor, and, ultimately, their means of livelihood. None of this is speculation.... At York University, untenured faculty have been required to put their courses on video, CD- ROM or the Internet or lose their job... [and] been hired to teach their own now automated course at a fraction of their former compensation. The New School in New York now routinely hires... unemployed PhDs... paid a modest flat fee and are required to surrender to the university all rights to their course. The New School then offers the course without having to employ anyone. And this is just the beginning."
I thought: this would apply just as well to the fifteenth-century invention of printing as to the twentieth century invention of computers and telecommunications. Simply replace every reference to "courseware" with a reference to "book." Like courseware, books make faculty redundant: why listen to lectures or attend meetings when you can read the book? Books are sold by multinational conglomerates for a fraction of the price that a student would have to pay for personal lessons from the author. Publishers routinely hire hacks for a modest flat fee to write books that disseminate knowledge that before the fifteenth century one would have had to pay an accomplished professor a fortune to have the chance to learn.
Yet we today view books as complements to and not substitutes for the personal engagement, lecture-discussion-and-office-hours part of higher education. We do not speak of how assigned readings rob students of the "genuine face-to-face education they paid for" and replace it with a "biblo-counterfeit." We do not speak of how it is unfair that professors who assign readings are "compelling students... to become users and hence consumers of the hardware, software, and content products of the publishing industry as a condition of getting an education," or drop dire hints about how many students will be unable to afford the crushing book bills associated with a "book-capital-intensive education."
Few would think that the transformation of the university from a place of manuscripts and lectures to a place of printed books, xeroxed reading assignments, and massive libraries has been a regression. Professors today live better, know more, and--I think--are vastly more effective teachers than their predecessors of six centuries ago.
I think that it is a safe bet that two centuries from now professors will be extremely happy that they have access to computer-and-telecommunication tools that will also be complements to and not substitutes for personal engagement with their students.
I think that at the bottom of Noble's concerns is a very different set of issues.
For the past generation in the humanities and in many of the social sciences the tenured professors of American higher education have been betraying their graduate students. They have expanded graduate Ph.D. programs well beyond the size for which there would be sufficient entry-level academic jobs available. They have played a shell game: making false implicit promises to their graduate students that they will have a good chance at getting an academic job and following an academic career. They have then used the social structure of higher education to insulate themselves and their favorites from the consequences of their shell game: dividing the community of Ph.D.s into the good sheep who have secure academic jobs and the bad goats who cannot gain entry into the tenure-track hierarchy, and justifying this division on the basis of "merit" (never mind that we all can think of ten thirty-five year old humanities Ph.D.s without tenure-track academic jobs who can outthink and outteach each of the sixty-year old tenured Ph.D.s.).
Different aspects of new technology have different flaws and advantages. For example, e-mail is very good for gossip, and very good for bureaucratic routine. It allows you to avoid a lot of short phone calls and a lot of meetings that are held largely to keep everyone informed of what everyone else is doing. e-mail is a blessing-- as long as the people you are dealing with read their e-mail.
But e-mail appears to be less good for seminars: less good for longer run and more engaging intellectual conversations. In part this is because of the flame problem: people say rude things to others via e-mail that they would never dare say in person, and the absence of smiles, self-deprecating body language, and other forms of non-verbal communication means that people take rude things said to be much more offensive in e-mail than in person. (Videoconferencing may change this; or it may not.)
Mike Godwin has a law: as time passes the likelihood of someone in an e-mail conversation or newsgroup being compared to Adolf Hitler approaches one, and no useful conversation or exchange of views can take place after the first such comparison is made.
On the other hand, the Diplomatic History reading list taught me a lot. And the Economic History reading lists that I subscribe too are sometimes very interesting as well. Take a look at http://www.eh.net and look up the archives for the virtual seminar on David Landes's Wealth and Poverty of Nations book that took place over an extended period of a month or so. In the end that virtual seminar ran out of steam: Andre Gunder Frank proved incapable of brevity, and too many people (including myself) were doing nothing more interesting than repeating themselves. But while it lasted it was very interesting to see...
If you ask me why I decided to engage in a serious effort to make a website, I will give you four reasons:
I was sick of having to deal with letters from people who wanted me to make and mail them out reprints of works that I had previously published.
My cousin Tom Kalil had (still has in fact) the technology desk at the National Economic Council during the Clinton Administration. When I was leaving the government in early 1995, he said that he thought that the WWW truly was going to be the Next Big Thing, and that any time I spent learning what it was, how it worked, and how it could be used was time well spent.
One of my former roommates, Paul Mende, is a physicist. Because the WWW was created at CERN, physicists have taken to it like ducks to water. Even at the start of 1995 Paul was telling me that in a decade I would be out-of-touch with the intellectual conversation that was my discipline (economics) unless I rapidly learned how to put things up on and pull things off of the WWW.
I had been very interested in technology and economic growth in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But my interest had been interrupted by the election of 1992. My friend, patron, and former dissertation committee chair Lawrence Summers went to work for the Clinton Administration as Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs. I went to work for the Clinton Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, reporting to Assistant Secretary Alicia Munnell (the best of all bosses). As a result, for two and a half years I spent my time doing everything other than technology and economic growth: in the Treasury I worked on GATT and NAFTA, deficit reduction and monetary policy, health care reform and welfare reform, INS issues, the impact of the international economy on American workers, and so forth.
So when I came out of the government and moved to Berkeley in mid-1995, catching up with the field of technology and economic growth was one of the first things I wanted to do. And a lot of people said that putting up a WWW site was a good way to catch up to what was going on today...
As web pages go, my web page is not especially fancy. I don't think good web pages can afford to be fancy yet. Bandwidth is too low. Emulate Yahoo, which takes seven seconds to load. What I do is that whenever I finish something--or finish drafting something--I make a .html version of it and put it up on the WWW. There was a considerable up-front investment necessary in making the website initially: I had to find copies of my writings, get them into some electronic form or other, figure out how to turn them into .pdf files, and so forth.
There was also the investment required to keep control of the thing: issues of organization become very important as the website grows if it is to stay useful to me (or to anyone else). This part of the job I am not very good at--as glancing through my website will convince you.
But then, not many other people are very good at it either. You need to be (a) a professional librarian, and (b) an expert in the particular discipline being covered in order to figure out how to organize a good website.
So the website takes very little time save on those occasions when I think that I really should try to reorganize it to make it easier for me (and others) to find things on it. And perhaps the most difficult task (at which I am failing) is to figure out how to tell people what kinds of things are on it before they search.
I like Hal Varian's website very much--it is the mother of all economists' websites. I like Paul Krugman's website because I like and respect Paul Krugman. Nouriel Roubini's East Asia Crisis website is amazing--but it needs reorganization badly: by now visiting it is to drown in data. My friend Michael Froomkin's website at the University of Miami Law School is also a place that I can go to learn something new every day, and that I visit often.
I think that Salon is doing a good job at being a literary-and-culture magazine light. Too many people have too hard a time reading stuff on screen for it to replace the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books. But they do a very good job. I think that Slate could do a better job (and I have ranted about this on occasion). But I don't go there very often: they seem very slow to load on my machine at least, and so reading Slate becomes a definite pain.
The AllPolitics website is good for political news and gossip, as is the National Journal's Cloakroom. Rewired, the Netly News, Such, Wired News, and Robert X. Cringely at PBS are essential reading for the cybernetic buzz, I think.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox is a portal to a lot of interesting information on the design and effectiveness of hypertext systems.
I also like the summaries of daily news...
I have gotten lot of feedback. But the piece of feedback that is most interesting came from my brother Chris DeLong about four months ago:
"Hello?"
"Hello Brad, it's Chris."
"Yes?"
"Did you know that you are quoted in ForeignAffairs_ [the high-circulation flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations] this month?"
"No."
"Did you know that you are quoted twice in ForeignAffairs_ this month, and that both quotes are not from anything in print but from offof_your_website_?"
"Can you give details?"
"Jagdish Bhagwati [Columbia] quotes a paragraph from your website and then slams you as a banner-waving proponent of international capital mobility in the lead article. Paul Krugman uses you as an ally to dump on new-economy people later on in the issue, quoting something you wrote for the e-zine Rewired."
"And both quotes are from the website?"
"Yes."
"That's interesting. This means the website has been a good investment of time."
"I think it's been a much better investment of time than you had ever dreamed, DeLong..."
To the extent that putting things up on the web makes them easy to find so that more people read them, that's the whole point of the exercise. And the leakage back the other way-- from my website to Foreign Affairs, from my website to Harpers (and I hope from my website to Lingua Franca), the exercise is succeeding.
I am not aware of any restrictions that Berkeley has placed on what I can put up: I can't use the UC Berkeley seal unless I go through some complicated and probably not-yet-defined review process. My syllabi, assignments, and back exams are up on the web. I no longer have to worry about keeping copies of every problem set and handout with me whenever I go to class. It's now a lot easier for me to find out what books Doe Library has--and whether they are on the shelves.
In general, academics write not because they hope a lot of people will pay a lot of money to read what they have written (although they dream of it), but because they have ideas to express and points to make, and what to add those ideas and points to the body of human learning.
For academics the internet is a godsend: it allows you to add your ideas and points to the body of human learning for free: you don't have to convince a publisher that enough libraries will buy your conference volume that it is worth its time to print it up. You don't have to wait three years between the time you write something and the time the first person reads it. When the internet has reached its full growth, you will not have to reside at one of the world's centers of knowledge in order to tap the body of human learning as fully and completely as you can.
The problem of separating the gold from the dross will remain, and will become much more difficult and important. But that's what we have librarians for. They'll solve it somehow...
For teachers the internet is a godsend: it opens another channel of communication to students--in addition to those provided by lectures, discussion sections, office hours, and problem sets or other assignments. And we teachers very badly need this extra channel of communication because we are not doing a stellar job with the channels of communication we now have, and we need help.
I think that for other writers the coming of the internet may be a two-edged sword. I think that they may find their conditions of life changing drastically. But for academics the internet looks, to me at least, like an unmitigated blessing.
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