Reading Online - Electronic Classroom: September 1999 Technology Column from JAAL

Educational Reform: How Does Technology Affect Educational Change?

Bertram Bruce
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
United States

This column is reprinted from the Technology department of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (JAAL). It contains the following sections:

Author's Message
Issue of the Month
Websites of the Month
Other Views
Glossary
References

Author's Message

As we start off the 1999-2000 volume of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, we are likely to experience a continuing vigorous discussion about the year 2000 problem. Whatever the ultimate resolution, a safe forecast is that many in computer circles will be devoted to talking about this issue, if not to actually fixing it.

In case you live in a cabin in the woods, comfortably oblivious to all modern communications media, the year 2000 problem (also called the Y2K bug) refers to a class of computer malfunctions that will affect computers and all sorts of other devices with embedded processors when the year changes from 1999 to 2000. The general difficulty is that many computer programs take shortcuts, such as storing years by the last two digits -- 99 instead of 1999, to take a pertinent example. The year 2000 is then interpreted as 1900, meaning that calculations based on subtracting one year from another can go seriously awry. The nature of the problem is captured concisely by Steven C. Meyer at www.mcs.net/~shs/coolquotes.html: “It would be just like programmers to shorten 'the year 2000 problem' to 'Y2K' -- exactly the kind of thinking that created this situation in the first place.”

When we consider the interdependencies of modern life, it is clear that completely fixing our own computers does not protect us from other parts of the modern system breaking down. Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Great Britain, has said, “The Millennium Bug is one of the most serious problems facing not only British business but the global economy today. Its impact cannot be underestimated” (Rosencrantz, 1999).

There is already much written about the year 2000 problem, including Web sites such as the United Kingdom's Action 2000 site, which is counting down the seconds to January 1, 2000; many books, which are smugly Y2K compliant; and even a Web site of editorial cartoons about Y2K. Accordingly, this month's Technology column will not dwell on the topic. Nevertheless, Y2K is a timely focus to keep in mind as we explore the question of how technology relates to educational reform, whether it is seen as a key to bring about reform or as a reason to reform education in the first place.

In the coming JAAL volume year, from time to time guest authors will add different experiences and perspectives to the Technology column. In the meantime, this month, I want us to look at the relation of technology to educational reform. Will new technologies bring about improvements in the overall state of literacy? Will they demand changes in what literacy means? How well can we anticipate what these changes will be?

Issue of the Month: Technology and Educational Reform

In his annual State of American Education speech, United States Secretary of Education Richard Riley echoed a sentiment central to the educational reform agenda when he asserted that “How we learn is changing and technology is very much at the heart of this transformation.” The tangibility of this view is evident by the inclusion among the seven initiatives for American education the challenge: “Every classroom will be connected to the Internet by the year 2000 and all students will be technologically literate.”

Many educators see technology as central to education reform. Some emphasize the need to teach students new technological skills. Others argue that new technologies can transform education by offering new tools to support inquiry throughout the curriculum. Finally, many see the need to teach about the impact of new technologies on business, health care, science, media, education, and everyday life.

This is an exciting time, and the prospect of improved education for all students is one that deserves more attention. But, as every teacher who has worked to bring technology into education has learned, the simple addition of new devices has little chance of producing real change. Moreover, we are now seeing the unanticipated effects of new technologies, ways in which they do both more and less than we had hoped.

One reason that educational reform through technology is difficult is that reform of any large system is an uncertain enterprise. Not only is it uncertain, but also our expectations about how change can occur are often unrealistic. We often expect that a technology will accomplish a particular task, assuming that the main issue is simply to obtain it and learn how to use it. This presumption of simple, linear change is evident in the discussions about wiring up the schools. But there are many reasons why change does not occur in straight forward ways.

Latent functions. The sociologist Robert Merton (1957) distinguished an important feature of technologies and how they affect social systems: “The distinction between manifest and latent functions was devised to preclude the inadvertent confusion, often found in the sociological literature, between conscious motivations for social behavior and its objective consequences” (p. 60). Merton's distinction can be applied to examine how a new technology, introduced to accomplish one purpose, has functions inherent in its design that bring about other changes. For example, the introduction of a word processor in a classroom has the manifest function of making it easier to edit documents. But its attractiveness as a device can lead students to “mill about” as they await their turn to use it. This milling about can in turn lead to increased social interaction and to more reading of one another’s drafts (Bruce, Michaels, & Watson-Gegeo, 1985).

Revenge effects. A general aspect of the introduction of any new technology are the consequences that no one could have anticipated, the latent functions that no one saw. One such category includes what Edward Tenner (1996) called “revenge effects.” These occur when a technology entails system changes we never anticipated or wanted; for example, the new office suite software that requires you to buy a new computer just to run it, or to seek technical help you did not need with the previous version. “Revenge effects mean in the end that we will move ahead but must always look back because reality is indeed gaining on us” (p. 354).

There are also reverse revenge effects when a technological change brings with it benefits we never imagined. This can happen with an abandoned technology, which had values we never recognized until the newer model appeared. For example, carpal tunnel syndrome, a repetitive stress injury of the wrist and forearm, is a revenge effect of the office computer, one that may become prevalent in schools when computers become more commonplace. This syndrome was a rare occurrence with the manual typewriter. As Tenner (1996) has said, “In retrospect, the key-pounding, carriage-returning, paper-feeding chores required by the old manual-style typewriters had the reverse revenge effect of reducing the likelihood of carpal tunnel syndrome. Unfortunately the light touch and blazing speed of computer keyboard entry often turned out to cause unexpected pain” (p. 12).

Cascade effects. The various effects, side effects, and unanticipated effects of the introduction of a new technology become part of the system of use of that technology. As the system changes, its reaction to the new technology alters further. There are then effects of the effects, which lead to more massive but even less predictable changes.

This can be seen in terms of a problem recently recognized in the United States space program. This is an unpredicted, but literal, example of a cascade. As the U.S. has launched more and more satellites, space probes, and human space missions, with all their rockets and boosters, the amount of debris in space has rapidly grown. Collisions are becoming increasingly frequent, and each collision adds to the number of objects able to participate in future collisions. The fragmentation of one spacecraft can then generate debris that can destroy other spacecraft. The accumulation of debris in an orbit, and the potential cascade effect, then endangers use of that orbit for any future space missions.

Tom Malone and Kevin Crowston (1993; online document) discussed another kind of cascade with the introduction of trains and automobiles. They talked about a “first order” effect as people simply substituted train travel for horse-drawn carriage rides. This led to a “second order” effect: The overall amount of travel increased when it could be done more cheaply and conveniently. Finally, there were “third order” effects as people began to live in suburbs and shopping malls developed.

Invisibility. Ironically, as new technologies become incorporated into our daily practices in significant ways, they tend to become less, not more, noticeable. Soon, we cease thinking of them as technologies at all. To some extent, this has happened with the telephone, although we are continually reminded that it is a new technology when we see offers of mobile phones, answering machines, and other enhancements.

A striking example of the invisibility effect was given by Henry Petroski (1989) in his book, The Pencil. Referring to the meticulous list Henry David Thoreau made prior to his adventure in the woods, he said,

But there is one object that Thoreau neglected to mention, one that he most certainly carried himself. For without this object Thoreau could not...[sketch] the fleeting fauna,...label his blotting paper pressing leaves...record the measurements he made...write home...[or] make his list. Without a pencil Thoreau would have been lost in the Maine woods. (pp. 3-4)

As new technologies become incorporated in education we may similarly forget that they are there. Already, many people do not consider the word processor to be a new technology, like the Web, but merely an ordinary tool needed to accomplish daily work.

The problem of scale. In an article entitled “Reforming the Wannabe Reformers: Why Education Reforms Almost Always End Up Making Things Worse,” Stanley Pogrow (1996) argued that “education reforms almost always fail because they are usually based on combinations of a number of myths” (p. 658). One of these myths relates to scale. When a demonstration or model project is carried out in one classroom or one school, there are a number of conditions that contribute to its success. People are more forgiving of problems, because the new program is considered to be experimental; extra attention is devoted by administrators and the public, because of the novelty; the teachers involved are volunteers, eager to try something new; extra resources are used, before the imperative to become cost effective; and developers are directly involved in making sure the program works. These conditions rarely persist when the successful innovation is expanded to a large scale. Thus we have what Pogrow called the “biggest myth of all! [that anyone] can understand large-scale change by understanding what happens on a very small scale” (p. 659).

Cathedral versus bazaar. In a widely cited article, Eric Raymond (1998) discussed how software development has proceeded by one of two predominant models, the cathedral or the bazaar. He described the highly successful (and free) Linux operating system, which has been developed by a loosely organized confederation of programmers throughout the world:

No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here -- rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

This bazaar approach is effectively what much of the Web has become: People who are geographically distributed collaborating in the creation and distribution of software, music, artwork, texts, and ideas without any central coordination. To the extent that this process continues, the notion of a given information or communication technology having a fixed referent will become an anachronism. Instead of talking about whether a given technology brought about reform, we will have to speak of our immersion in an ongoing, distributed process of change.

Websites of the Month

One of the best sources of thinking about the Internet and its social implications is First Monday at www.firstmonday.dk. I used several articles there in doing research for this month's column and recommend it for readings that take a serious look at current Internet developments, but are neither overly technical nor abstract. It has published articles on the politics affecting the Internet, the economics of new technologies, development of new software and hardware (such as the MP3 music protocol), Internet use in specific communities, and the implications of the Internet for reading and writing in various settings. The Web site contains all the back issues. In addition, there is a monthly electronic-mail posting that describes the articles in each new issue, along with hyperlinks to each of them.

First Monday is also one of the first peer-reviewed journals on the World Wide Web, starting in May 1996. Today, the NewJour archive lists thousands of electronic journals and newsletters. That is but a small fraction of all such e-journals, although only a few are peer reviewed with a continuous publication history.

Other Views: How Technologies Affect Us

Cox (1998)
As Richard Cox has pointed out, if nothing else has changed in the information age, the amount of talk about it has increased. Much of this writing uses technology as a focal point to revisit core issues of human value.

Anyone who may be annoyed, as I often am, with the struggle to keep current with the technical support needed to play in the Information Age, can also be fatigued with reading to understand what it is they are participating in. An unintended consequence of the modern computer or information revolution is the revolution in publishing about the revolution.
FM Interviews (1996)

In the film [Fritz Lang's Metropolis], Rotwang is a mad scientist who creates a robot he hopes he can love, a robot with both mechanical and human attributes. But the robot quickly gets out of control because she has no soul, no heart, she doesn’t care. The point of the film is that technology without heart will be debased. Our own creations, Rotwang’s children and grandchildren, can get it right, if we choose.
Misa (1994)

[A]cross disciplines, authors affirming some version of technological determinism tend to adopt a macro perspective, while those denying technological determinism tend to adopt a micro perspective. This pattern...explains how and where machines are permitted to make history. (p. 118)

Glossary

Cascade effect--a series of effects of an initial perturbation of a social system. This happens, for example, when a new technology is introduced and practices shift to accommodate it. Then, there are effects of that initial change, which lead to even less predictable changes. This is one reason that it is often said that people overestimate the short-term impact of innovations, but underestimate the long-term effects.

In a school, we might observe small initial changes with the introduction of Web browsing. Students would spend some time doing a new activity. But, over time, teachers might see how students could use the Web for research, and later for publishing. As these new uses develop, the entire ecology of reading and writing could shift to a new center of activity.