It is imperative Technology is embedded in schooling,
but not for the reasons we all think
Today's college students are habituated to a world of Online logging, instant messaging, and Web browsing that leaves electronic traces. Yet they have had little experience with the right to privacy. Unlike past generations of Americans, who grew up with the notion that the privacy of their mail was sacrosanct, our children are accustomed to electronic surveillance as part of their daily lives.
Power-point equates bulleting with clear thinking. It does not teach students to begin a discussion or construct a narrative. It encourages presentation, not conversation. Narrative, the exposition of content, takes time. Power-point, like so much in the computer culture, speeds up the pace. Today, when people say that something is transparent, they mean that they can see how to make it work, not that they know how it works. In other words, transparency means epistemic opacity inability to see the logic needed to know or the conditions for acquiring knowledge through systematic study {my notes} . Today's college students are already used to taking things at (inter) face value; their successors in 2014 will be even less accustomed to probing below the surface. Some thinkers argue that the new opacity is empowering, enabling anyone to use the most sophisticated technological tools and to experiment with simulation in complex and creative ways. But it is also true that our tools carry the message that they are beyond our understanding. It is possible that in daily life, epistemic opacity can lead to passivity.
I first became aware of that possibility in the early 1990s, when the first generation of complex simulation games were introduced and immediately became popular for home as well as school use. Sim Life teaches the principles of evolution by getting children involved in the development of complex ecosystems; in that sense it is an extraordinary learning tool. During one session in which I played Sim Life with Tim, a 13-year-old, the screen before us flashed a message:
"Your orgot is being eaten up."
"What's an orgot?" I asked.
Tim didn't know.
"I just ignore that," he said confidently. "You don't need to know that kind of stuff to play."
For me, that story serves as a cautionary tale. Computer simulations enable their users to think about complex phenomena as dynamic, evolving systems. But they also accustom us to manipulating systems whose core assumptions we may not understand and that may not be true. We come to written text with habits of readership based on centuries of civilization. At the very least, we have learned to begin with the journalist's traditional questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Who wrote these words, what is their message, why were they written, and how are they situated in time and place, politically and socially? A central project for higher education during the next 10 years should be creating programs in information-technology literacy, with the goal of teaching students to interrogate simulations in much the same spirit, challenging their built-in assumptions. Despite the ever-increasing complexity of software, most computer environments put users in worlds based on constrained choices. In other words, immersion in programmed worlds puts us in reassuring environments where the rules are clear. For example, when you play a video game, you often go through a series of frightening situations that you escape by mastering the rules -- you experience life as a reassuring dichotomy of scary and safe. Children grow up in a culture of video games, action films, fantasy epics, and computer programs that all rely on that familiar scenario of almost losing but then regaining total mastery: There is danger. It is mastered. A still-more-powerful monster appears. It is subdued. Scary. Safe.
Yet in the real world, we have never had a greater need to work our way
out
of binary assumptions. In the decade ahead, we need to rebuild the culture
around information technology. In that new socio-technical culture,
assumptions about the nature of mastery would be less absolute. The new
culture would make it easier, not more difficult, to consider life in
shades of gray, to see moral dilemmas in terms other than a battle between
Good and Evil. For never has our world been more complex, hybridized, and
global. Never have we so needed to have many contradictory thoughts and
feelings at the same time. Our tools must help us accomplish that, not
fight against us) (is it not the purpose of education
to help us select, understand, and use our tools? Do we neglect these issues
in the current state of school and standards movement? {my notes}.
Information technology is identity technology. Embedding it in a culture that supports democracy, freedom of expression, tolerance, diversity, and complexity of opinion is one of the next decade's greatest challenges. We cannot afford to fail.