Technoliteracy and the New Professor

Comment made by an irate Frenchman to an American some-where in the Greek islands, fifteen years ago: “Vous les américains! Vous avez le pétrole, mais nous avons les idées!” (You Americans! You’ve got the gas, but we’ve got the ideas!). Fifteen years ago, America could count on gas and not ideas for its expansion. Recently, however, the United States in general and higher education in particular have been running low on fuel. Public higher education in America is suffering its first reductions in public financial support in modern times. And those reductions, sometimes labeled a “crisis,” are no temporary aberration; like periodic earthquakes in California, decreased state support and slowed tuition increases are realities with which higher education probably must deal for the foreseeable future.

So it has become necessary, to a degree that it has never been before, to have ideas. Those outside of colleges and universities, but responsible for them in some degree—legislators and bureaucrats—have the idea that institutions of higher education should use new telecommunications and computer technologies to multiply the teaching power of faculty.

Those who propose that solution, among others, to the problem of decreased resources often have little knowledge of information theory or experience in using the new teaching tools. At one level, they seem to be in the grip of the technological utopianism that is so venerable a tradition in American culture. But at another, they have an urgent and legitimate desire to solve the problem of educating more people with less money, without degradation of quality. And they clearly understand that, since salaries are the single biggest cost in the universities—accounting for up to eighty percent of educational budgets—and since faculty salaries constitute the main portion of that expenditure, any solution must involve extending the reach of faculty.

Other attempts to increase teaching productivity have been triedincreasing class size without changing instructional format, increasing the proportion of courses taught by teaching assistants or adjunct faculty, and reducing the availability of courses central to the curriculum. But most educators would agree that these approaches have generally led to a loss of quality that they, not to mention the tuition-paying public, find increasingly unacceptable. The imposition of mandatory teaching assignments for faculty, under consideration in a number of states and instituted in some, is a particularly misguided attempt to increase learning by raising faculty time spent teaching,

The new technologies are appealing for important reasons beyond merely extending the reach of faculty, though. The world from which college students come and into which they move is increasingly permeated with information technology. The capacity to manipulate that technology may very well be the most important ticket to the middle and professional classes to which higher education has long promised access. The dystopian version of this story is that as the gulf between the two nations in America widens, technological literacy will allow some people to have access to the upper class, when otherwise they might well fall into the underclass. The utopian hope is that if the general population masters the new technologies, national prosperity will increase and the gulf will narrow.

Another reason to consider technology as a necessary part of higher education’s future is that students are changing. As an example from one state, less than a third of the enrollments in Virginia’s state-supported institutions in 1993–1994 were full-time, degree-seeking eighteen to twenty-three-year-olds. Higher education is attracting more and more older students, who are generally place-bound and cannot afford to be cloistered for four or more years or to travel long distances to get the education that they see as the key to a better future. Colleges and universities will need to reach beyond their walls in order to serve those people whom they have recently begun so successfully to recruit. They must also respond to society’s larger demand that its citizens have access to education throughout their lives, another necessary condition of national prosperity. Eliminating constraints of time and space, one of the promises of the new technologies...