The Technological Revolution and Higher Education
Richard A. Cherwitz
Stefanie Sanford
Austin American-Statesman
Published: September 18, 1999
On a stage in Austin last week, Michael Dell and Bill Gates proclaimed we are at the beginning of a technological revolution affecting how we live and work. Entrusted with responsibility for shaping the intellect of youth, colleges and universities are hardly immune to the technological revolution. The question on campus is: What is the appropriate role of technology in higher education? Focus of debate is on "distance education"--an icon encompassing everything from for-profit virtual universities to technology enhanced learning. Universities are racing to embrace distance education for fear of being left behind on the information superhighway. This is dangerous. Rushing to expend huge sums of money on distance education without rigorous examination of institutional goals is reckless and may produce disappointing results.
This race to embrace ignores an important lesson about tools. This is not the first time technological innovation in learning revolutionized education. Scholar Steve Erhmann draws a parallel between the information age and two previous revolutions: the transition from the oral tradition to the written word; and the shift from ad hoc groups of scholars to modern university campuses and libraries. Interestingly, many of the promises and threats of those earlier revolutions ring eerily similar to those voiced today. Technology will increase access. It will increase quality. It will kill quality. It will exacerbate the gulf between "haves" and "have-nots." Today's are not new questions. They are not about bits, bytes, servers, chat rooms, networks and email. It is about learning in the post-industrial world, the roles and responsibilities of higher education and the unique missions of institutions. Answers are very different for Harvard than they are for ACC. These questions become especially thorny at schools like UT. Technology advocates tap a raw populist nerve--greater access at lower cost. Those who worry about how technological innovation may produce diminished quality, therefore, are labeled elitist. Ignored in this all-or-nothing debate is the reality that we are in the midst of a revolution requiring institutions of higher learning to proceed thoughtfully, in tune with their best intellectual instincts and attentive to their missions.
Some campuses are asking: What technologies might be incorporated into teaching and learning? The more responsible question, the one being asked at UT, is less about technology and more about mission: How can teaching and learning be improved and which technologies can help? We must be prepared for potentially any answer: increased emphasis on and reward for teaching, more attention to critical thinking and rhetorical skills, overhauling large lecture courses, or perhaps on-line and self-paced learning which, by increasing interaction, could mitigate the negative effects of large faculty-to-student ratios. Whatever answers, UT must not forget the lesson about tools. Instead of offering inducements simply for utilizing technology, incentives for quality teaching and learning should be established; focussing on the revolution's technical tools would be like rewarding the ancient Greeks for word count and paper quality, rather than the content of their new written work.
A promising example of responsibly using technology occurred this summer in one of UT's cutting-edge Graduate School Professional Development courses. Doctoral students, most aspiring to academic careers, enrolled in "Academic and Professional Uses of Technology." Their task was first to decide what they wanted to teach and to whom, and then to determine the most effective way to promote learning. What is my objective? What is the best way to achieve it? The course's value was pressing students to view information technology as one of many available tools. Not surprisingly, instructional technologies ranged from chalk to interactive CD ROM's. To extrapolate to UT's current debate on distance education: What is our mission? Are we raising the next generation of scholars? Are we socializing young people to be global citizens? Are we trying to deliver discrete content to the maximum number of people? Are we creating cogs to fit high tech corporations?
While these are significant
questions, the broader issue is how UT can
serve the citizens of Texas by meeting the
educational needs of the nearly 50,000 students
for whom the forty acres is a learning community.
However technology factors into the equation,
UT must resist easy responses. We must avoid
a knee-jerk rejection of technology simply
because it challenges how things have always
been. Likewise, UT must refrain from blindly
embracing technological change just to keep
up with our competitors and regardless of
direction or destination. Bill Gates often
says that the single most important use
of technology is to improve education. If
correct, then faculty, our premier academic
professionals, must lead the way in determining
to what extent the technological revolution
can support UT's mission of maximizing individual
learning, generating high quality research
and promoting responsible citizenship.
_______
Specializing in contemporary rhetoric and theories of argument, Dr. Cheriwtz is Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at The University of Texas at Austin, and has served as a political consultant.
Stefanie Sanford is a consultant and a doctoral student in political communication and technology at The University of Texas. She holds a master's degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and has served as a policy adviser and speech writer for several state and local officials in Texas and for the White House.