The Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts hosted two meetings in 2003 about the place of technology in liberal arts education. It seems that most of higher education has been talking about technology for the last decade, and many of us have invested numerous hours in faculty development sessions learning how to use new resources and learning about innovative uses of technology in the classroom. Workshops abound for "converting" the "reluctant adopter" and claims proliferate, sometimes with good reason, about technology as a "lever" for pedagogical change. While massive education-technology conferences like Educause and Syllabus, with thousand of attendees and vendors, populate the landscape, the focus there is generally on the large-scale and especially on research universities and distance learning. So we thought there remained a strong need for prolonged, introspective, intellectually focused discussion about the ways in which emerging technologies are affecting teaching and learning in liberal arts colleges.
Everybody seems to be talking about technology, but it has proven difficult to get a purchase on the real intellectual content of this subject. For many of us working in this area—and probably for deans, provosts, and presidents trying to figure out what the money invested in technology has actually bought—the intellectual resources and conversations have yet to catch up with the resources and possibilities. That gap was the key rationale for the Center of Inquiry technology inquiries. These consultation meetings began with a focus on ideas—and, crucially, with a sense that our efforts must be ongoing. Unlike many conferences that bring people together for a few days of interesting conversations about technology, these two consultation meetings at the Center of Inquiry were shaped to initiate conversations that would carry on past the events of a weekend. Also, the generating spirit of our meetings included a commitment to gathering interesting people together who might otherwise not have engaged in this conversation.
The groups of approximately 20 participants we gathered at the Center of Inquiry in August and September were diverse. The institutions represented ranged widely—including public institutions like Thomas Edison State College, the University of Illinois, the University of Missouri, and the University of North Carolina-Ashville, and a variety of private liberal arts college, including Bowdoin, Nebraska Wesleyan, Wellesley, Whitman, St. Olaf’s, Davidson, Eckerd, Denison, DePauw, Wesleyan, Emerson, and Alma. The participants included professors, information technology directors and designers, leaders of teaching excellence centers, consortium leaders (from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest and the Midwest Instructional Technology Center), a librarian, and at least a couple of associate deans.
Framing Questions: "Teaching, Technology, and Effective Practices"
Our topic, technology and its impact on liberal arts education, is, of course, vast, and thus it was crucial to create some framing questions for our sessions. We think these are useful questions not just for understanding our work but also for broadening this conversation on other campuses. First, though, the organizers faced an interesting procedural issue: do we talk about foundational assumptions first or consider current practices and move from there to deeper, more philosophical questions of how technology is changing knowledge and learning? We chose to begin with practice, and assembled first from July 31-August 3 to talk about" Teaching, Technology, and Effective Practices."
We asked participants to consider these big questions: "In what concrete, demonstrable ways does the use of technology improve undergraduate education? What evidence is there that the investment in technology is actually worth it?" From that starting point, we then framed the following set of issues:
- In what ways does technology shape community? In the terms of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, "a delivery view … underlies much of what is said about schools. Moreover, the delivery view leads people to think of educational technology as a sort of intellectual forklift." They go on to argue that giving students access to rich and varied communities is central to effective education and that "it can be difficult to form suitably dense communities to support learning in cyberspace."
Conversely, they claim, citing research by Dan Huttenlocher of Cornell, "digital technologies are adept at maintaining communities already formed"; small, residential communities that effectively use information technology to enhance face-to-face meetings would seem to have the best of all worlds.
- Trent Batson and Randy Bass argue "Whether through the capacity to access and manipulate data or the enhanced ability to collaborate and communicate with peers, information technologies bring process to the foreground. It is hard to find any discipline where vital processes in the field are not becoming more accessible in one way or another." They argue as well that "at the least, substantial affinity exists between newer pedagogical emphases and the capabilities of information technologies: it is likely that the sum of the two will be greater than either aspect alone."
- Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson, in their much-cited "Seven Principles for Good Practice" highlight "active learning," and much of the research and experimentation in educational technology focuses on interaction. David Brown writes that he changed the title of his book from Computer-Enhanced Learning to Interactive Learning because that was the universal focus of his respondents. Research and discussion in this area, we said, must focus on what truly "interactive" applications might be and what must happen to enable productive interaction; focus on simulations and modeling would seem especially productive.
- Finally, collaborative learning is also widely cited as a goal and benefit of technology-enhanced instruction. Brown and Duguid, for instance, cite a study in which engineers at Hewlitt-Packard using distance-learning technology supplemented by group discussion and collaboration outperformed a parallel group in a conventional classroom at Stanford. To what extent could we claim—we asked the participants—that technology can bring students together to work, study, and publish?
Before gathering at the Center of Inquiry, participants created a "vignette" based on David G. Brown’s Interactive Learning model and posted it on the Center’s Blackboard site. Drawing upon their own involvement with technology projects—or in some cases on the work of colleagues, participants offered descriptions of these elements:
- Course design and scope of the project
- Incorporation of technology
- Measured results
- Lessons learned and conclusions
This collection of vignettes from participants gave us a foundation for discussing interesting uses of technology in the classroom—and the implications for liberal arts education. We will soon have a link here to the ongoing development of these vignettes, an expanded discussion of projects from a variety of institutions using a rubric based upon Chickering and Gamson’s "Seven Principles" and other ways of talking about teaching and learning.
"Digital Culture and the Nature of Liberal Arts Education"
The framing questions for our second meeting, held September 25-28, 2003, were broader and more philosophical. We began with another big question: "If we are indeed within a technology or knowledge ‘revolution,’ must we reconceive our notion of what it is to be ‘liberally educated’?" And we asked, "Have technological innovations made it necessary for us to re-evaluate what students must know and do to achieve knowledge, and what faculty must know to teach effectively?" Again, we framed the meeting with a series of crucial questions and readings:
- How do new technologies reshape knowledge? Trent Batson and Randy Bass argue, The unsettling changes for those venturing into "deep" application of information technology in their teaching and learning are not only in the teacher-student relationship, but also in the scholar-scholar and the scholar-sources relationships. We are finding that, for a small but growing percentage of people, new forms of communications, publications, and collaboration and the way data are accessed, represented, and manipulated are changing the way knowledge is conceived, challenged, justified, and disseminated in their disciplines. Perhaps we will see changes of this depth more frequently across all fields and disciplines: changes in how we organize the process of deciding what is true, whose voices are heard, and how we communicate and work in groups. Familiar boundaries may already be changing.
Batson and Bass go on to assert that "knowledge products" in print culture are "not obviously connected to the process that created them," whereas in digital culture "knowledge products are more immediately embedded within the knowledge community. Closure is harder to achieve, so knowledge seems to be more an ongoing process than an object." It would be useful to ask if these reconfigurations tilt the balance of higher education in the direction of the generalist, integrative character of liberal arts education.
- How do new technologies reshape our concepts of literacy? John Seely Brown claims that This past century’s concept of "literacy" grew out of our intense belief in text, a focus enhanced by the power of one particular technology—the typewriter. It became a great tool for writers but a terrible one for other creative activities such as sketching, painting, notating music, or even mathematics. The typewriter prized one particular kind of intelligence, but with the Web, we suddenly have a medium that honors multiple forms of intelligence—abstract, textual, visual, musical, social, and kinesthetic."
Batson and Bass claim that print culture foregrounded "cognitive skills needed to produce knowledge products" and "structural (linear, logical) thinking skills." In contrast, digital culture demands "cognitive skills to produce consensus in a collaborative process of knowledge-building"; "thinking skills leading toward conversational congruence as well as hypertextual and associational thinking gain credence" in the new paradigm.
- How do new technologies reshape our ideas about the college and curriculum? Most liberal arts colleges and universities of all sizes have been wrestling with the question of whether "technological fluency" is a set of skills, tools, ways of knowing, or something not yet determined. The threats of distance education and the abovementioned reconfigurations demand a rethinking of old patterns. Mark Taylor, in his recent book The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, puts it in terms of walls and grids changing into "permeable screens" and networks, a change that makes "the university as we have known it for two hundred years...a thing of the past." "Try to imagine," he challenges, "a university modeled on the architecture of a Frank Gehry rather than a Mies van der Rohe building. Is it possible to create an educational institution whose structure and function more closely approximate Nasdaq than a Ford assembly line?"
- How do new technologies change the ways in which students learn? All of the previous questions point to the overriding issue of how students learn. Claims have been made that students today, influenced by digital culture, learn in ways that are more associative, more social, and more visual than students in the past; finding excellent research and summaries of these changes will be a daunting task. Don Tapscott, in Growing Up Digital, contends that digital media allow educators to exploit "a new, more powerful, and more effective learning paradigm," characterized by the following:
- from linear to hypermedia learning;
- from instruction to construction and discovery;
- from teacher centered to learner-centered;
- from absorbing material to learning how to navigate and how to learn
- from school to lifelong learning;
- from one-size-fits-all to customized learning;
- from learning as torture to learning as fun; 8)from the teacher as transmitter to the teacher as facilitator. (146-48).
Do these generalizations in fact describe a paradigm for new modes of learning in a digital culture?
Summary and Beyond…
These were the framing questions, questions that stimulated productive discussion and debate and excellent collaborations. Summarizing our conversations is extraordinarily difficult, but two powerful generalizations can serve:
- Technology, more than anything else in higher education today, we agreed, is a constructive force for disruption, an agent for generating questions and, indeed, for calling everything into question. Because technology has such power for good and bad, it has prompted re-examination of our pedagogical practices, our assumptions, and our interactions. Is this respect, technology should not be underestimated as a force for prompting reflection and re-examination; even for transformation; it has been a "silent hand" writing the requirements for thoroughgoing review of all aspects of college culture. Clearly, one of the important outcomes of new technologies in liberal arts education has been to open all our practices to scrutiny—and when we think broadly about the costs and effects of technology, we should look more closely at this point.
- The technologically enabled explosion in access to information means that the traditional goals of liberal arts education are more, rather than less, important— especially making sense of data, critically analyzing information, and achieving the ability to make connections across a multitude of disciplines. However, the ubiquity of technology means that we will have to change the way we focus teaching and learning in liberal arts education in order to explicitly develop the core intellectual skills of the liberal arts, rather than emphasizing factual subject area expertise, which is now more readily available through alternative means.
These are still very broad statements, but the work is ongoing and developing. From the extraordinary energy that came from our meetings, we hope to build on our spirit of collaboration to a sustained conversation about this complex and demanding subject. The Center of Inquiry and the Working Group on Technology invite your expressions of interest and participation as we extend this conversation.
References
- John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School P, 2000), p. 219.
- Brown and Duguid, p. 216.
- Trent Batson and Randy Bass, "Primacy of Process: Teaching and Learning in the Computer Age," Change (March/April, 1996): 45.
- Batson and Bass, 43.
- Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson, "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." Available online <http://www.aahebulletin.com/public/archive/sevenprinciples1987.asp>. See also Arthur Chickering and Stephen C. Ehrmann, "Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever," AAHE Bulletin (October 1996): 3-6.
- David G. Brown, ed., Interactive Learning: Vignettes from America’s Most Wired Campuses (Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing, 2000).
- Batson and Bass, 44.
- John Seely Brown, "Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn," Change (March/April 2000): 13.
- Batson and Bass, 46.
- Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2001), p. 257.
- Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), pp. 146-48.
