February 4, 2012

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Fall 1999 Vol. 8 No. 3

A Primer on Taming the Beast

by Jason Ohler

This author has written a book for TECHNOS Press that is a rare blend of philosophical reflection, earnest wit, and hard-nosed guide — it casts a discerning eye on our love-hate affair with technology. In Taming the Beast: Choice & Control in the Electronic Jungle, Mr. Ohler explores 27 key issues about technology which we need to pursue in order to understand its ultimate impact on ourselves, our social structures, and the environment. Here is a sampling of his take on technology in our world.

Hurry Up and Don't Wait
In 1992, when the World Wide Web began churning out information at an exponential rate, a teacher approached me with a look of abject panic in his eyes and pleaded, “Please help me. I've got to get on the Internet.” When I asked why, he responded with even greater panic, “I have no idea!”

The fundamental questions that drive our educational institutions have always been easy to identify. What is important to us as a culture? How do we impart that to our children? How do we support it as adults? While the answers have never been simple, the relatively slow pace of change until recently has imbued schooling with a sense of continuity — which suggested that we had found workable solutions. However, with the advent of desktop computing, we have neither the expectation of continuity nor, it seems, the time to deliberate new directions.

The philosophical underpinnings of the technological age of education that drove the teacher quoted above to near distraction can be summed up as follows: Hurry up, you're late

Everything's changing, and there's no time to think about it.
Get moving before you and your students fall behind.
We'll worry about where we are going when we get there.
Does anyone have any idea why the printer doesn't work?

To Use Technology Effectively, Creatively, Wisely
Like many schools of education in the early 1980s, the Center for Teacher Education at the University of Alaska Southeast began to develop programs to meet the challenges posed by the presence of technology in education.

As we watched technology appear in classrooms with increasing acceleration, we noticed something that would define the educational technology revolution from its earliest days. The infusion of information technology produced, in Neil Postman's terms, an ecological rather than an incremental impact on our institutions and processes of learning. That is, adding technology to conventional educational systems did not produce technologically assisted conventional education. It produced something profoundly new. Everything — from classroom dynamics, to the role of the community, to where we found our information, to what we studied, to how we paid for it all — was destined to change. Most important, with all this transformation would come ethical challenges of a depth, magnitude, and complexity quite foreign to us. More than ever we needed to think about what we were doing, a luxury there didn't seem to be time for.

With all of this in mind, our Center for Teacher Education drafted the following vision statement for the Educational Technology Program. It has remained more or less intact over the years.

The Educational Technology Program supports a number of degrees and activities designed for practicing teachers, educational administrators, and specialists from fields other than formal education who want to develop technical, instructional, and leadership expertise in the field of educational technology, and who want to learn how to use that expertise effectively, creatively, and wisely in pursuit of learning and teaching.

Using technology effectively was a fairly straightforward concept, however devilish in the details. Teachers needed to know how to operate technology and integrate it into the educational process in ways that produced results. The emphasis on creativity was our way of acknowledging that computers were fundamentally different tools that would facilitate our imaginations in ways that were profoundly new. This would eventually result in the language of art taking center stage in a multimedia world and becoming the next literacy, or 4th R (see www2.jun. alaska.edu/edtech/fourthr). But highlighting the importance of wisdom in our use of technology in education was to take upon ourselves a most daunting task. We could already see that information technology tools were so powerful that using them would require a heightened sense of responsibility as we navigated the future. We knew that ultimately, beyond the hype and the hope, the glitz and the promise, either our new tools would enhance us as a community or diminish us. Helping students develop a path with wisdom was going to be challenging.

Pursuing wisdom in our program came in the form of a required course for educational technology majors called The Social Impacts of Technology (now available on the Web as Thinking about Technology at www2.jun.alaska.edu/edtech/tat/cover/covfram.html). This course gave our often techno-enthusiastic students time to pull off the info highway and think about technology and change, and the need for values in guiding the two. If they were going to “tame the beast,” they needed to understand that technology disconnects as well as connects, debilitates as well as empowers, enslaves as well as liberates.

For this course, I wrote a short book called at various times “Technology: A User's Guide,” “Coming to Grips with Technology,” and “Assessing Technology and Its Impacts.” That book has evolved into Taming the Beast: Choice & Control in the Electronic Jungle, published this fall by AIT's TECHNOS Press. While it was intended for use with university students, parts of it have been adapted for use with middle school and high school students as well. The first of two major parts of Taming the Beast begins a journey toward wisdom by exploring what it is about technology that bothers us so much.

Why Technology Bothers Us
At the heart of our anxiety about living in the modern world is the fact that when it comes to technology, each one of us is comprised of two incompatible mindsets living within a single consciousness.

On the one hand, we are the rational, impassive philosophers, standing on the ledge of objectivity, peering out over the masses of humanity as they move slowly through time and space. It is from this perspective that we see technology as a long-term investment stripped of its excitement, as a product of environmental and social sacrifice, always taking away with one hand, while giving with the other. But on the other hand, each one of us is also the philosophee, one of the faces in the crowd below, who lives emotionally, day by day, and judges life by what needs to be accomplished to assure the health, happiness, and success of those close to us. Technology's problems are almost invisible, and when they do surface, they are just part of the deal.

The philosopher declares genetic engineering to be wrong because it dilutes our genetic diversity and puts the power of the gods in the hands of human beings incapable of responsibly dealing with it. The philosophee, on the other hand, can't get genetic therapy fast enough when it promises to help a beloved relative or friend. Our technology splits us right down the middle, creates two people, and then pits one against the other to such an extreme it seems like a design flaw in nature. The art of living gracefully in the technological era requires balancing and reconciling these two.

But even if we reconcile ourselves to technology's presence in our lives, there are six aspects of technology that really seem to vex us.

1. Ubiquity. Technology is ubiquitous and so massively interconnected that rather than see it as an endless stream of peripherals we simply add to the primary natural ecosystem, we need to consider it a secondary ecosystem in its own right: a tecosystem (TEE-ko-system). It is the human-made part of reality, which we can never escape and upon which the Y2K bugs feed.

2. Stealth. In an age of digital magic, “seeing is believing” has been obsolesced. Much of the digital age flies in underneath our radar, achieving a kind of super stealth because we suspect nothing — and even if we did, we are too busy to investigate. Digital trickery mocks us if we are trusting, dares us to be vigilant, and then laughs when we fail to catch it in the act.

3. Amplification and Leveraging. The desire to be more than ourselves has always been with us. In the old days, a lever was placed over a rock in order to lift something that could not be lifted directly by human effort. Today we plug our levers into a wall socket. An amplifier is just an updated version of the lever, designed to take advantage of modern power sources. But what happens when you give a bad guitar player a bigger amplifier? Today, technology provides each of us with unbelievable amounts of power to affect not only ourselves but also those close by and at a distance.

4. Ephemerality. In retrospect, history seems to have been kind. We were allowed a few millennia of relative down time between agricultural and industrial revolutions, then a few centuries respite before the Information Age urged us into overdrive. Now the changes come so quickly that we speak of phases rather than ages: the phases of automation, information, communication, presentation, all within years of each other, each with the potential to transform the tecosystem in powerfully unpredictable ways. In an era in which everything from diapers to keystrokes represents disposable commodities, it is hard to get your footing; it is hard to know where home is, emotionally, intellectually, politically, ethically.

5. Sovereignty. All interactions are transactional, whether between people or people and machines. That is, we cannot come into contact with anything and not become at least a little like the thing itself, whether mineral, vegetable, animal, or digital. Because a machine is programmed with such limited behavioral capabilities, we, the adaptable ones, submit to it much more than it to us. And because tools are just ideas with clothes on, we become not only like the tools but also like the social forces behind them. The things we think we control because we made them — and therefore presume to understand and have dominion over — actually control us by our unconscious design. We remain useless until we bend to the limitations they impose. They are our sovereigns.

6. Dehumanization. When a machine misspells our name, erases something we mistakenly told it to, or worse, doesn't understand that a bomb dropped on a city exterminates everyone, regardless of character, we cry dehumanization. But most people would prefer the angst of an ordered, technologically mediated life to the insecurity of living in organic chaos. Inherent in this preference lies the crux of de-humanist experience: complexity always overwhelms simplicity. Langdon Winner put it succinctly: More highly developed, rational-artificial structures tend to overwhelm and replace less well-developed forms of life. In so doing, a technological universe absorbs its non-technological opposition: us, and the natural environment we inhabit.

The net result of the alienation caused by living a technological lifestyle is an overwhelming feeling of having lost control of one's life. For inherently emotional and insecure humanity, there is no greater assault on the psyche. We become immobil-ized by distinctly modern kinds of anxiety, all centered around who, or what, is in control of our destinies, producing victimyopia: either through apathy, resignation, despondency, or a lack of vision, believing yourself to be overwhelmed, at the mercy of, and forever dehumanized by the forces of technology.

Connection-Disconnection Detection
Control comes through seeing and evaluation. The second part of my book explores an approach I have used with students for a number of years that helps them to see and analyze a technology clearly in all its connective and disconnective properties and then evaluate its relative value to and impact on themselves, society, and the environment. The reader assumes the perspective of an “agent” for the Science and Technology Administration (STA), a fictitious government agency modeled on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is required to evaluate the effect a technology is likely to have before it is released to the public. The investigation is framed as a series of questions, which can either facilitate a Socratic dialogue between teacher and student or simply sharpen the reader's focus. The STA detective's work falls into three broad categories of analysis:

First, the Technology Itself. An examination of the technology in terms of characteristics such as construction, function, and application. The STA agent looks at the human involvement required to use it, how it extends and limits human capability, what kind of tool or machine-like qualities it possesses, what is required to maintain it and fix it when it breaks, and so on.
Second, the Goals of Technology. An analysis of the cultural bias and behavioral objectives implicit in a technology and how it is manipulated toward particular ends.
Third, the Impacts of Technology. An evaluation of the impacts the technology has in the following areas: the environment; the human body; work; education; social relationships; and our relationship with ourselves, the power structure, other cultures, and future technologies.

Finally, the STA agent is required to develop a balance sheet about the technology, which describes its potential positive and negative implications, and to draft a final assessment that rejects, accepts, or specifies modifications for the technology.

It is easy to be cynical. But before succumbing to victimyopia, consider for a moment the impact that this kind of research and evaluation has had on personal lifestyles and public policy in the areas of the environment, energy use, and nutrition. We can make similar kinds of progress with technology. We simply have to decide what we want and be willing to pay for it. If, for example, we value a “green” label on a computer indicating that its manufacturing process has not produced an unacceptable amount of toxic emissions, such computers would begin to appear in the marketplace. If businesses or entire school districts developed policies that stated they would buy nothing but such computers, they would begin to appear in large numbers. If parents decided that it was a priority for their children to understand the risks, limitations, and responsibilities of living a technological lifestyle, it would become part of the school curriculum.

Redefining Technological Literacy
As American education added computer proficiency to its literacy agenda in the early 1980s, we defined it largely in terms of technical proficiency. Later, this expanded to include integrating technology successfully into the classroom as a teaching and learning tool. Now, as states develop K–12 academic standards for technology as well as for content areas, we find a new concern has at long last entered public consciousness: technological literacy should embrace an evaluation of the consequences of living a technological lifestyle.

The long road to including the need for wisdom in our deployment of technology should not surprise us. Traditionally literacy involves three stages: seeing, absorbing, and forgetting. You are truly literate when you are so facile with a medium that you pass through it as though it were not there. Adding an evaluative component to literacy in which we actively look at the media in which we are immersed — moving the background to the foreground as Marshall McLuhan would say — is most unusual, even heretical. And yet, it is becoming clear that if we wish to instill in our children a sense that they control the future rather than the other way around, the fourth level of literacy is needed. That is, if we value not only how our children use technology but also when and why, then the study and evaluation of technology should be standard educational fare.

Getting Involved
All across the United States, school boards and professional organizations have been immersed in the development of educational standards designed to identify what students should know and be capable of doing at various grade levels in various subject areas. Many states have adopted standards in the area of technology, either as a separate category of standard or as part of other content-area standards, such as science, language arts, and so on. While standards are a source of both consolation and consternation for most teachers — offering guidance and constraint simultaneously — they do provide a point for citizens to enter into public dialogue about improving education.

The next point of entry for the public into the education reform process is the public debate over what standards look like in practice and how we will measure them — what is often called assessment. Concern with assessment is largely a debate about how we move from the theory of standards to the reality of the classroom. There is no time like the present to help shape that debate. It is carried on largely by public groups funded with public money. Your input is a democratic privilege and responsibility. It is a debate that is just beginning and promises to be spirited, complex, and ultimately transformational, regardless of the results.

Hopefully, one result of this debate will be a redefinition of the successful student as one with content mastery, technological dexterity, social awareness, and perhaps even wisdom. Hopefully, we will view the technologically literate student as one who knows when to use technology and when not to, and who understands that the technologies which connect us to new opportunities disconnect us from others. We stand at the beginning of a new era of learning in which we can redefine education any way we wish. Driven by a spirit to use our new tools effectively, creatively, and wisely, we can define what it means to be “educated” in bold, new ways. We can decide on the kind of community we want and then create technology to support it, rather than the other way around. We can take back the future.

The book cover illustration is by Brenda Grannan.

Click here for ordering information on AIT's Taming the Beast book.

References

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: New American Library, 1964

Postman, Neil. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York: Knopf, 1995

Winner, Langdon. Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977

Jason Ohler teaches technology assessment and integration at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, where he is director of the Educational Technology Program. As a student, he was profoundly influenced by the lectures of media guru Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto during the 1970s. Mr. Ohler's book, Taming the Beast: Choice & Control in the Electronic Jungle, is available from AIT's TECHNOS Press. Call 800-457-4509 ext. 257, to order a copy; or visit the TECHNOS Press Web site, www.ait.net/technos/books/taming.php, for more information. He may be reached via email, jason.ohler@uas.alaska.edu, or through his Web page, www2.jun.alaska.edu/edtech/jason.

Visit the author's Taming the Beast website at http://www2.jun.alaska.edu/edtech/taming.