Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
Dr. Charles Crook Presentation
Dr. Charles Crook, Dept. of Human Sciences, Loughborough University, United Kingdom
Distributed Computing and the Re-mediation of Study Practices on a Traditional Campus
I must apologize for not using PowerPoint, particularly as Loughborough is the town in which Ned Ludd lived, and he gave his name to the movement ‘luddite.’ However, I have a feeling that PowerPoint exerts a tyranny on us that I’m determined to resist. So, hopefully, my colleague here will succeed in getting through my transparencies.
Being last on the presentation list is a marginal misfortune for me because I’m very tired, but it does at least give me the privilege of thinking back on what’s been said today, and a couple of things occurred to me that I’d like to start by mentioning. One question that’s been going through my mind is whether our sponsor, Peder Sæther, would have given money to a virtual university. I suspect he probably wouldn’t, unless in his role as a banker rather than a benefactor. A second, more important question been going through my mind, and that is why so little is being said about students and teachers, why the participants in these possible worlds that we’re toying with - the foot soldiers, as it were - receive such little attention. So it’s very refreshing to be in this seminar, albeit a slightly smaller one than expected, to hear that issue introduced when we opened up. The work I’ve been involved with is about that, although on a modest scale.
First, just a note about the context. It’s a project that’s being funded by UK Economic Social Research Council, in a program they run called ‘Virtual Society?’, which is a portfolio of projects concerned with the virtualization of social life. Our concern has been with the way in which this has been felt within higher education.
What I think we need to ask about students and teachers is what they want, and whether what we are offering them with this technology corresponds in any close way to those aspirations. If it doesn’t, then we must ask how they experience it and what we can learn from how they experience it. Take a look at my next slide, it gives me a chance to remind you what students look like. But it’s also a small part of this project. Because one of the things that we’ve done is to take a very interesting form of document, namely the University Undergraduate Prospectus in Britain, something that is seen by a lot of school leaders intending to be students. We’ve done a content analysis of some of the images that are used to convey a sense of what teaching and learning involves. These are fairly representative images, and I would just like to make a couple of points about them. One, is that the image communicated is grossly dishonest; this isn’t what actually happens. If I can just go to my second slide and then return to this one. If we look at what’s represented in the images as the predominant activity of teaching and learning, as it’s projected in this way, it corresponds very poorly with what students tell us they do when we ask them to keep very detailed diaries. But the dishonesty of it perhaps is not the important thing. I think, when you go back to the montage slide, what we should think about when we look at these images is what is it that we do feel convivial about when we make a representation of teaching and learning? Often, what you see represented is visions of community life. This is a collegiate form of activity. But also representations--in all these pictures here, really--of activity, people doing things in a constructive, creative, exploratory way.
My worry is, of course, how far our putative virtual universities can deliver on these species of experience, how far they can readily - once the low-hanging fruit of business studies and information science has been picked - give us experiences that do deliver on the active nature of learning and the exploratory nature of learning, as represented in these images that we do find convivial, and how far they allow us to experience such occasions in a community sense.
Look at my next slide. This is an image that we could imagine in a prospectus for a virtual university. But it’s not, actually; it’s taken from a European Union publication, which is celebrating in various ways the need to develop these kinds of institutional changes. So perhaps it’s not a bad approximation. A couple of things occur to me as I look at it. One is that, again, I think it’s a bit dishonest because all the paraphernalia here is very much part of student life in the traditional sense, and they very cleverly located our imaginary virtual student in a world that’s actually normally defined by the community life of a university. But let’s pass over that. What I think strikes me as more important is the question of how much we will find, within this form of interaction, a powerful form of motivation because what is most significant about the corporate structure of learning is that it is from there that we gain those forces that sustain us in our efforts to be learners. So I’m worrying about understanding a little bit more about what does engage and sustain individuals like this one in their learning agendas.
Well, our project is geared to this kind of person here, and we’re looking at a campus which is fast virtualizing its life. It has laid down distributed networks that allow students to make intensive use of intranet and Internet facilities from their study bedrooms. It has gone to considerable lengths to provide quite sophisticated resources in this way: the library puts most of its text, the recommended material, on-line; lectures have extensive web notes associated with them; electronic mail. All the paraphernalia that we’ve been talking about today is available to these students. But at this point in the project, only some of them are using it, partly because of a technical reason to do with the laying down of the infrastructure. But it gives us a chance to compare students who are well resourced in this way with a matched group of students who are not making use of it from their study bedrooms. In a way, that’s the core of the project.
Here are the questions we’ve been asking. Firstly, to what extent does this form of technology support some of the social processes that we might think are typical of traditional university life? Of course, people looking at this image will want to remind me that this technology does allow for powerful modes of communication. So to look at that (electronic) communication as it may or may not be occurring is quite important. Secondly, to what extent does this form of opportunity re-mediate or reconfigure the students’ relationships with other campus learning resources? And, thirdly, to what extent, when such technology is being used in this way, does it possibly re-mediate new modes of study at the time of actual use? If you want a less pretentious form of introduction, we could just say, what are they doing with their computers? And that’s very much what we focused on.
Let’s just say something very brief about each of those broad areas. One that has been of particular interest to us has been the use of email, because email is the first thing we think of when we speculate about the social possibilities of this technology. The next slide is a reminder that this takes place in a university that looks not unlike Berkeley, on the road map anyway. And the next slide shows a comparison between networked and non-networked students' email use. Let me explain the context here; it’s very difficult to find out what students do with email. Why should they tell you? And how can you get access to it? We’ve built an application that allowed them to store their own email, and then code it and classify it for us, thus really protecting us from needing to look at it in terms of its content, but allowing us to get some kind of sense of the way in which the medium is being used. All I’m focusing on here is the issue of how much email plays a part in the academic curricula, the academic agenda of their lives. And this is a comparison between students who do have the Net and students who don’t, in percentage terms. Certainly the students who have room access to this use email a lot more, but they all use it in the same way. So the pattern, the functionality, if you like, is very similar. And although it looks as if there’s a lot of use that’s related to the academic agenda, it actually isn’t, because all this is about is lecturers sending out various kinds of emails of the form, ‘The lecture is canceled,’ or ‘Don’t forget to hand in this piece of work by such-and-such a date’. And the amount of traffic that’s given over to any kind of academic discussion is relatively small.
What do we learn from this? The general message I’m toying with is that it’s clear that, at least in this tradition of university life, interacting collaboratively with peers and opening up discussions with tutors is very rare. Those practices are extremely robust and established, so it’s very difficult to break them down by simply making available new forms of communication technology.
Let me say something about my second general area, which is to consider how far access that we give in this way re-mediates the use of other learning resources on campus. Take a look at my next slide. It’s a way of presenting (in the continuous line) students who have room access to the Net and (in the broken line) students who don’t. And this shows the probability that when they’re doing their private study, they will be making use of IT to do so at different times of the day. The time of day issue is not important for this presentation. The only thing I want to say about it is that they use IT a lot more to engage in their private study, the things that they’re set to do in their own time, in their own way. So it’s certainly making a difference as to how this more intensive access to technology gets used in that way.
Looking at the next slide, this means that they spend more time in their private spaces. And the message I want to draw out of it is simply this, that this doesn’t profoundly reconfigure how the rest of their relationship with the curriculum stands. They continue to go to lectures as much, they continue to take part in all the corporate activities of the campus, they continue to use the library as much, and so on. They don’t do any more work, this doesn’t make them any more diligent or vigorous students. But it reconfigures, in a slight way, the way in which they do their private work, and it tends to leave them, perhaps, a little bit more stranded in the privacy of their own room because they’re leaning more on technology as a resource for their private work. So, again, my thinking about this is that the students’ relationship to the traditional resources of the campus is fairly robust, and it’s not greatly reconfigured by access to this.
The next issue is of more interest to me because, in a sense, I feel that the effects are more profound. How do we describe what they are doing when they are using their computer in this private solitary way? Well, we can maybe express it in a number of graphical representations, and here’s one which is interesting in some respects, but doesn’t take us very far. It’s simply showing - across from the first hour of the day to the last hour of the day, for a cohort of about 40 randomly selected students who have networked PC’s in their room - whether or not they’re likely to be using that PC at any given time of day, for weekdays and weekends (although that is not an issue I’m concerned with at the moment). The only thing that I would draw out from this is that they use it a lot; after some time around lunch time, more than half of the time it is the most likely thing you’ll find them doing, so there is a more than 50% probability that they would be using this technology.
Of course, what we have to keep in mind is not to talk about this as ‘a’ technology, since what is actually being used is a wide variety of different things. And in the next slide, which is another way of presenting what’s going on, we get a little snapshot of the sorts of applications that are being used within that intensive period. I’m not going to dwell on this either, because I don’t think it quite delivers what we want. It shows you there’s a lot of Web use and a lot of word processing, and a fair amount of email. But on the other hand, for some of these things, it’s not an issue of time allocation, but rather an issue of how frequently they’re used; that’s certainly true for something like ICQ, which is used a lot. Perhaps the only point worth dwelling on is that the games, which people worry about most, are used rather rarely in this group. That may be, to some extent, because the game-playing has migrated onto other forms of platform.
What I do want to say about this, and what, I think, is more interesting and possibly more important, is that what’s actually visible in these records is not a different pattern of activity -- it’s not so much the amount of time they’re spending or how they’re distributing it across these different forms of application -- but the extremely animated nature of it. So this is a very multi-tasking environment. If you look at a student at any given point, they’ve probably got six or seven applications open at any one time, and they’re shifting between them at an extraordinary rate. One way in which we have tried to capture this is to take those occasions where students are using a word processor, which we assume from other logs that they’re doing for work-related purposes, and we look at a one hour session from when that session starts. We ask how often that word processing session is interrupted, and it is interrupted frequently. As can be seen in the next slide, it actually amounts to an interruption about once every 10 minutes, and it means that only slightly more than half of that representative hour is spent in the principal application.
So what you see here is a very animated, almost agitated, form of working. And I think it has to be taken seriously. What students are bringing to this technology is a very resilient culture in relation to the larger campus, and what they’re bringing is a very volatile situation in relation to how their study practices might be remediated, as it were, at the desktop level. We have to think about that, and not fail to notice that this is a different way of working, and it brings with it a different pace and a different range of activities that interact at that desktop level.
So my final observation would be, as a psychologist (and I think I'm possibly the only psychologist here), to remind us that what psychologists say about teaching and learning is that it’s the one thing that only human beings do. Only human beings instruct their young. What’s maybe important to notice next is that the process of doing that in a formal sense, the process of orchestrating instruction and making a proceduralized activity of it, is a very strange thing to do, and not a very easy thing to do. When we decouple that from the whole socialization process, and try and do teaching and learning in ways that are not continuous with the manner in which people have grown up and been socialized, then we probably are going to face a resilience that’s going to make some of these innovations very difficult.
A different argument applies to what’s happening on the desktop, but I can see the chairman getting more and more impatient. So thank you for your attention.
© 2006 UC Regents
Last modified: 15 April 2006 | e-mail