Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 317.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 20:51:03 +0100
From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman@bi.no>
Subject: Imagining the Wired University
Dear Colleagues,
Passing on to you an important recent article by Phil Agre.
Best regards,
Ken Friedman
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Imagining the Wired University
Philip E. Agre
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520
USA
pagre@ucla.edu
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
This is a draft. Please do not cite it or quote from it.
References and footnotes to follow.
2500 words.
How can we reinvent the university for a world of radically improved
information technology? The question is hard because the design space
is so large. The vision of a university with no physical facilities
or face-to-face interaction, despite the publicity it receives
from futurists, represents only a small corner of this space. Some
educational activities will certainly conform to this all-virtual
model; indeed some already do. But the majority of wired higher
education will lie in the broad middle of the spectrum, combining
technological mediation and geographically localized interactions in
various ways. The possible combinations are numerous, and different
models might work best for different fields.
The question of how to design the wired university is hard for
another reason. The university that we know today is a highly
evolved institution that serves many interlocking functions.
Like any institution, the university has developed a large number
of taken-for-granted routines that are not easily changed. This
body of routines is, depending on how you look at it, either a
repository of accumulated knowledge or a mindless obstacle to change,
either tradition and wisdom or cluelessness and resistance. Both
perspectives have their elements of truth, of course, and as the
technological environment changes it becomes increasingly important
to discover the dividing line between the elements of past practice
that the wired university should keep and the elements that it should
discard.
The picture is not entirely bleak. The institutions of university
research, after all, are governed by norms of originality that
encourage a continual turnover in the topics and methods of research,
and even to a degree in the institutional forms through which the
emerging knowledge itself is practiced. The Internet was largely
developed in university environments, and universities drove diffusion
of the Internet through their early commitment to e-mail access for
students and staff. The university has already changed considerably
through e-mail culture and intensive use of the Web. In these
ways the university has proven itself resilient, and it is entirely
plausible that if workable designs for a wired university exist then
they can be chosen.
The path from point A to point B can be analyzed in different
ways. One analysis is frankly political. The university, like
any institution, reflects a routinized accommodation among interests,
and the institution will be reinvented through a fresh engagement of
the many social groups that have a stake in it. The tools of this
political analysis are familiar; they begin by assessing the degree
to which each stakeholder group is organized, the coherence with which
it articulates an agenda, and the adroitness with which it enters into
coalitions with other groups as the technological and institutional
redesign process unfolds. These political contests will occur in
diverse venues, and most of them have hardly begun.
Although this kind of political analysis is surely needed, in this
context I want to pursue a different line of analysis, one that is
normative and imaginative. How *should* the university be redesigned?
The answer is not to throw out the institution and start over. The
university embodies so much enduringly useful knowledge that it would
be hard to replace. To be sure, many of the entrepreneurs who are
designing competitors to the university from scratch will find niches
for themselves, but they will not reproduce the useful complexity of
the university except through alliances with the university.
Instead, the university community might pursue a strategy of rational
reconstruction. Research has made clear that the adoption of advanced
information technology requires a re-institutionalization of the
university. The question is what institutional structure to choose.
The institutional structures that come programmed into a software
package such as SAP can only go so far, and they may even be
ill-adapted to the university's needs. So it is crucial to take a
stand about the specific nature of the university. Begin, therefore,
with a structural analysis of the university: a nontrivial story about
the dynamic equilibria through which the university reproduces itself
and serves positive social purposes in the present day. Then ask
how those structures could be re-implemented using radically improved
information technology. Because these structures are already in
effect, the design process becomes a sort of institutional judo, using
technology to turn existing forces into means of change rather than
ignoring or fighting them.
To illustrate how rational reconstruction might proceed, let us
consider ten structural features of the university, together with
some of the considerations that arise as one attempts to preserve or
amplify them using new technology.
(1) Economies of scale. Universities are currently shaped by the
dividing-line between the aspects of teaching that enjoy economies
of scale, such as textbooks in introductory courses, and the aspects
that do not, such as the supervision of individual student projects.
That dividing line will shift for two reasons, one more obvious than
the other. The obvious reason is multimedia courseware that extends
the functionality of a textbook while incurring much greater production
costs. The obscure reason is the ongoing worldwide destruction of
diseconomies of scale, for example through the emergence of English
as a global language, the standardization of digital computer networks,
the globalization of more forms of knowledge, and the rising numbers
and prosperity of potential students. In some subject-areas the
shift to increased economies of scale will be dramatic, and will bring
the danger of market concentration and reduced intellectual diversity.
But the greatest institutional challenge will be the increased variety
in the degree of economies of scale that different fields exhibit.
(2) Modularity. Courses in some areas will be relatively natural
to teach online, and in those areas pressure will grow to allow
students to mix and match courses from different schools. This
is a radicalization of the trend that is called articulation in
the US and modularity in the UK. Radical modularity has powerful
consequences for the architecture of technologies, institutional
forms, and curricula into which the courses fit. Frameworks must
be standardized, as must the contents of courses. Professors will
effectively lose the autonomy to write their own syllabi, and again
intellectual diversity will suffer. These deleterious impacts,
therefore, must be traded off against the benefits of competition
and geographic flexibility that radical modularity promises. In
particular, these impacts lessen the argument in favor of pushing
courses toward an all-virtual format, and motivate the search for
appropriate hybrid forms.
(3) Regional networks. The university is, among other things, a
factory for creating social networks. For most universities, these
networks are primarily regional in nature. Social networks are a
crucial component of a region's economic and political health. They
also contribute to the health of the university, which in many cases
could not function without alumni connections and contributions.
Suitably designed and administered, computer networks should make
it easier for universities to maintain the networks they have built,
and they should also increase the institutional incentive to invest
in building such networks. Universities may therefore be motivated
to treat their students more humanely and integrate them more
systematically into existing networks. The robust networks that
result could provide the foundation for the intellectual life of a
region, not to mention the basis for a market in continuing education.
(4) Coupling to workplaces. Too often, schools teach students how
to be in school. Learning is most effective in the real world if the
situations of learning are analogous to the situations in which the
learning will be used. This analogy can be achieved in many ways,
each of which can benefit from technology. Students can do more of
their learning in actual workplaces, for example, if they have more
robust ongoing communications with their instructors and with other
students in similar situations. Computers can be used to simulate
workplaces, or to capture the full details of real-world case studies.
At the same time, the university should also be a place apart from the
real world -- a place to practice the kinds of analytical thinking and
innovative intellectual connections that real-world workplaces, with
their established routines and pressure of deadlines, do not afford.
The wired university can more effectively maintain this duality of
engagement and detachment.
(5) Matrix structure. Most universities teach many topics.
The university world thus has a matrix structure, with university
organizations on one axis and disciplines on the other. The wired
university should resist the temptation to overcome geographical
and organizational boundaries by collapsing this matrix into
discipline-specific units. The matrix structure plays an important
role in creating spaces for innovation. Disciplines are always
threatened by the hegemony of particular dominant approaches, but
minority approaches can colonize a few universities until they grow
stronger or are shunned by a new generation of students. The matrix
structure will be threatened with collapse, however, if new technology
enables faculty to strengthen their disciplinary bonds at the expense
of their ties to particular universities. Processes and incentives
should be structured to maintain a balance between the two allegiances.
(6) Informational substrate. Information technology increases the
design space for individual courses, and so the university must
learn how to support a greater diversity of course designs. Faculty
must be able to negotiate their needs with a range of campus support
organizations, including the ones now known as the library, audio-
visual services, computing services, telecom services, the career
center, room scheduling, and many others. The UK is a leader in
exploring ways to integrate these services -- an idea that may seem
futile in practice simply for being ahead of its time. What is needed
is a relatively stable repertoire of course designs with which the
institutional culture has grown culture. At the moment, one is more
likely to encounter individual heroic faculty who suffer intolerable
overhead to pioneer new course forms that may or may not be capable
of routinization. One common problem, for example, is that the
instructor has no way of specifying, and the university has no way of
guaranteeing, that all students entering a given course will have the
particular set of technical and professional skills that the course
design requires.
(7) Conceptual frameworks. Computers are capable of representing
information in highly structured ways, and much could be accomplished
by explicitly representing the conceptual frameworks that underlie
specific fields of study. Much learning consists of practicing the
application of such frameworks, for example in the analysis of legal
cases or business plans, and even a very simple conceptual framework
can be heuristically powerful when it is applied to so many disparate
cases that unexpected analogies emerge. If the students in a field
routinely prepared structured documents that reflect that field's
distinctive conceptual framework, then digital libraries could emerge
to support the community life of the field. Automatic processing
could identify similar case studies and initiate communication between
their authors, and case studies could be made available in an orderly
way for peer review by working professionals.
(8) Generalizing peer review. As knowledge and learning become
increasingly central to the economy, more occupations begin to
resemble professions. A profession is not just a monopoly on the
exercise of knowledge but an institution for promoting the creation
and diffusion of new knowledge. Innovators can be recognized by
publishing their work in professional fora, and individuals can build
careers by serving as thought leaders and articulating or codifying
new areas of professional knowledge. With ubiquitous computer
networks these social mechanisms can be generalized. All of the
people in the world who operate a certain type of machinery, for
example, can form themselves into a profession with its own autonomous
institutions of publication and professional advancement. The
peer-review publishing model could be introduced into schools, and
there is no reason why ten-year-olds cannot publish their schoolwork
in simplified online journals. Certainly the journal model would be
an improvement over the college term paper that only the professor
ever reads. Teachers at every level are too overwhelmed to provide
students with enough feedback, and a suitably institutionalized
peer-review system could supplement teachers' comments.
(9) Commodity and community. Visions of the wired university tend
to polarize between two models: a radically commoditized model of the
university as a purveyor of human capital in a market for modularized
learning services, and a radically communitarian model of the
university as a global community of practice into which students
can be socialized. These radical extremes are bracing in their
simplicity, but they are misguided as well. The university has always
managed the tension between the commodity and community models, and
there are good reasons why the wired university of the future should
continue to find this balance. This will be hard: the previous
scenarios should make clear that information technology lends itself
to the amplification of both the commodity and community models
simultaneously, and the complementarity between the two models will
certainly change. Each model is propelled by powerful social forces,
and each must be kept from undermining the conditions of the other.
(10) An institutional framework for diversity. Commentators often
remark that the university is more segmentary and decentralized than
nearly any other organizational form. But the obvious conclusion
that the university is therefore outdated is altogether misleading.
The university, in contrast to any kind of private firm, must
embrace subject matters that are extremely diverse in their behavior.
Medicine, mathematics, music, management, mechanical engineering, and
medieval history simply have very different properties. They call for
different teaching styles, social networks, methods of codification,
means of evaluation, relations to tradition, and everything else.
The university exists to provide these fields with the unique
environments they need while also facilitating unexpected interactions
and hybrids among them. In this way the university might be compared
to the market: each is an exceedingly generic framework of rules and
norms that facilitates dynamic, diverse, self-organizing systems of
production. Of course, universities and markets differ in important
ways. Markets produce private goods, whereas universities produce
a complicated combination of public goods, intellectual property,
and services. The point is that the wired university must continue
to provide a robust and flexible framework, both technical and
institutional, without accidentally or deliberately imposing one model
of intellectual production over every field. This is the opposite
of the main tradition of computer system design, which emphasizes
mapping, imposing, and controlling definite patterns of information
flow.
Those, then, are ten structural features of the university, and a
few of the issues that arise as we imagine transposing them into the
new world of information technology. These numerous cross-cutting
opportunities and dilemmas cannot be avoided, for the simple reason
that the technology will continue to improve by a factor of 100
every ten years. The technology will certainly be adopted by many
players within the university, its environment, and its competitors.
The question is not whether the university will change, because the
stresses created by these new uses of the technology will transform
the institution whether anybody makes any conscious decisions about
it or not. The question, rather, concerns rationality. Will the
university community build a rational consensus about the best
methods for reinventing itself in a digital world? That is a test
of institutional resilience far beyond what we have seen so far.
References
Philip E. Agre, The distances of education, Academe 85(5), 1999a,
pages 37-41.
Philip E. Agre, Information technology in higher education: The
"global academic village" and intellectual standardization, On the
Horizon 7(5), 1999b.
Philip E. Agre, Infrastructure and institutional change in the
networked university, Information, Communication, and Society, in
press a.
Philip E. Agre, Commodity and community: Institutional design for the
networked university, Planning for Higher Education, in press b.
Daniel Alpert, Performance and paralysis: The organizational context
of the American research university, Journal of Higher Education
56(3), 1985, pages 241-281.
David Billing, Review of modular implementation in a university,
Higher Education Quarterly 50(1), 1996, pages 1-21.
James Cornford, The virtual university is (paradoxically) the
university made concrete, Information, Communication, and Society,
in press.
David D. Dill, Academic planning and organizational design: Lessons
from leading American universities, Higher Education Quarterly 50(1),
1996, pages 35-53.
William Dutton, Society on the Line: Information Politics in the
Digital Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of
Economic Change, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern
Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Benson R. Snyder, The Hidden Curriculum, New York: Knopf, 1971.
end
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