If we think of direct democracy and the Borg as two distinct ways the collective might function, what determines the one from the other? If we think of teenagers, in particular, their desires to be well liked and hence to be part of the crowd, isn’t there a force that drives them to behave like the Borg? Might social networking a la Facebook be considered more an encourager of Borg-like behavior than of direct democracy? And likewise for Twitter and text messaging?
What of learning technologists in this regard? (Just about everyone I know in the profession is at least 30.) Does this direct democracy versus the Borg distinction make sense for them? Are they wary of any of these technologies because they might promote an undesirable view of the collective?
And what of faculty whom learning technologists might lobby to use some of these technologies? What will the selling point be – the kids are doing it so they need to also to keep the kids’ attention? Do we really expect that argument to work? Faculty want depth of argument from the students. If these technologies are associated with shallow, quick-hitter response, how should a sensible non-Luddite faculty member react to them?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. My concern here is not with the answers. It is that the profession doesn’t seem to be asking them. It seems to be blindly accepting. Part of that is in the spirit of experimentation with the technology. The experimentation per se is fine. But such experimentation can co-opt a critical perspective.
As far as I can tell, the spectre of the “blind acceptance of technology” is a fiction. I suspect the source of the fiction varies: for some, an appeal to this fiction is a way of setting themselves apart from a group. For others it appears to be borne of a systemic pessimism. Some simply don’t pay attention, assuming that promotion of particular technologies must be happening without thought or knowledge of their productivity and problems.
Whatever the case may be, while I am sure there are examples of blind acceptance of technology somewhere, they must be in a tiny minority of educators. There might be something like this going on at the administrative level in particular institutions, but in every case I have experienced it comes from a long-standing legacy of fiscal philosophy that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the material nature of good and products– and the lessened requirement for sustainability that is assumed to come with them.
I also find the intermingling of technological methods of communication and social practice in Lanny’s post– the assumption that technology must not be neutral– and the conflation of short thought with shallow thought troubling. I’m not advocating that more communication has to be better (this is part of my own position when it comes to connected learning and connectivism, where I explicitly believe that this is not the case, though for a different reason), only that this obligation to skepticism is a bit overwrought given that the alternative experiment is not only in place, but entrenched in our educational system.
I just saw this so am reacting with substantial lag from when you wrote it (and when I wrote my post to which you reacted). I am too negative on occasion and this may have been one of those times. With regard to the particular offending line about blind acceptance, there were some people at ELI who were cheer leading and I react poorly to that type of behavior so, unfortunately, I let it get the better of me. I shouldn’t have conflated their behavior with the entire profession. That’s an error.
And on the pedagogic benefits of Twitter, etc., the point I was trying to make is a little different. Most of the instructors whom we support have limited patience. If we recommend a technology to them it should produce good results, or we end up weakening our standing with them. So we need to be as explicit as we can about both the effective use of the technology and the likely benefits from use. And we need to be skeptical in doing this because they are. So we need to understand how to counter their arguments in a credible way.
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