Hundreds of students visit VCU’s Cabell Library everyday. They do so, not to read books or do homework, but to use the computer. After the stairs and the ubiquitous coffee shop, which makes the library look more like a bookstore, we come to the array of computers colonizing the first floor. This is recent; VCU remodeled the library and in doing so swept aside the reference books and journals to make room for more computers. The function of the library has shifted and these two sides stand opposed: computer pointing to book and book pointing to computer, each accusing the other of betrayal. Unsure of what road to take, the student, in apathy, just sits down sipping a latte.
At VCU, there is a confusion of technology. By looking at computers the way we look at research we can examine what technology and education have in common. VCU has integrated technology within the sphere of the library, but the library is a metaphor for the university. As such, the computers and books represent teachers and students and their understanding of technology. The books on the shelves, standing in defiance of a digital age, guard the way to our past, while the computers stand in the way of our future. Look around every classroom at VCU: a chalkboard, chairs, desks, florescent lights, cinder block walls, a TV, and possibly a DVD player? Not exactly the Jetsons. You might argue that with programs like Blackboard, university email, dozens of computer labs, and a few mandated technology initiatives by VCU, that technology is at the forefront of everyone’s mind. But, technology in this university, and in the humanities in particular, plays a tertiary role and does not assert itself as medium as it does in private business, fields of science, or in commercial journalism. Nothing happens on Blackboard: whatever is posted or emailed, a teacher could have said in class; uploading documents simply shifts burden of the cost of printing from teacher to student. Nothing is communicated in classroom bulletin board discussions that couldn’t be said in a real conversation. What do students use computers for? Research? We have a Library. Word processing? Our every application of technology, here at VCU, always constitutes its minimal use. I would like to suggest that when we consider the question of technology and its relationship to education that the litmus test of successes in integrating new technology should not be seen in terms of “time-saving,” but whether or not these new modes of communication have changed anything at all.
My claim is that it is the responsibility of universities to encourage the potential for more legitimate forms of discourse in technology; in fact that it is incumbent of educational institutions to engender these forms in students. In order to illustrate the immediacy of this issue, I will use my experience at VCU and in this English 200 class. English classes have made an effort to integrate technology into their curriculum, but the proprietary solutions provided by university administration and the inability of teachers to understand technology have hindered the student’s ability to learn necessary skills and to achieve the professed goals of English studies and University education.
In a study on Israeli blogging, Michael Keren notes that “every society needs a social stratum providing it with meaning and guidance,” and when, in the case of Israeli society, politicians and public intellectuals fail to provide that, “then we must look for it elsewhere” (189). America faces a similar problem, shown in the work of Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford, as media companies converge into owning every kind of media: television, radio, books, print journalism, movies, and telecommunication (Weinstein 364). This has allowed advertising to become a substitute for civil discourse and genuine content to exist only as a parade to intellectualism. Thanks to the commoditization of media, participation in our society is boiled down to a scheme of consumer choices, sometimes even at the level of democracy (Weinstein 371). Politicians sit idlely by as the entire sphere of public discourse becomes bought and sold into copyright and copyright laws are extended (Weinstein 372). We too, like the Israelis, have looked for meaning and guidance somewhere else and found it as the highly articulated apparatus of the ‘blogosphere’ shows. But as private interests obscure the possible functions of technology in general, we must be reminded that Internet, while still relatively new, is quickly being divided up. However, universities have only just begun to assert themselves in the realm of cyberspace and as a result are decades behind in understanding how important practices of information management are to the field of education, while commercial interests have virtually swallowed the issue whole.
In order to understand the relationship between universities and technology today, we must first understand where that relationship began. The Internet was born in 1969 as a military-financed closed network between Stanford, UCLA, the University of Utah, and UC Santa Barbara. The initial investment of universities to advancing forms of communication and thus discourse has since become diluted by commercial interest. It was not until 1989, a full twenty years later, that private business was allowed to use the Internet for it’s own purposes and universities gave up what was before then a purely educational tool (“Internet”).
Earlier, in the same decade that the Internet was founded, Universities began to concern themselves with other problems of information and knowledge management. In the United States, higher education was becoming mass education and many theorists debated about the place of community and the context of knowledge in education. (Fox 96) The “deschooling argument,” as it was called, said that, formal education, “limits personal freedom to learn by instituting compulsory curricula, competitive examination and a model of knowledge acquisition which is sequential and higherarchical” (Fox 96). Referred to by Fox, in his article on networked learning, as the “authoritarian principle in education,” we accept today what is a “regime consisting of authorities at the upper end handing down to the receivers at the lower end what they must accept (Fox 96). Criticism of these ideas of mass education continued into the 70s and 80s, and many advocated that “the disadvantages of schooling so far outweighed the benefits that society ought to disestablish it.” Although, since few had alternative solutions, little was done to challenge the established order (Fox 97). However, some still posited that, in some distant future, the role of educators would change and “that the gradual computerization of society might of it’s own accord, or with some careful design, do the job for them” (Fox 97). The infiltration of “information professionals” into the arena of education technology has made that task a lot more dubious (Matlow 105). Educators, as illustrated by Erica Matlow, who taught Graphic Design at the University of Westminster for 20 years, often unknowingly, outsource the control of the content of learning to companies willing to provide solutions that are restrictive and brand dependent, because they were not educated in the fields of technology and feel that paying others to do their thinking for them will keep their decisions from being uninformed.
That university decision-makers do not understand the capabilities of technology is evidenced by their use of proprietary technology, which hinders the needs of students. If the purpose of education is to dispense information and cause its practice, it is technology that manages that information and creates the form of that practice. The quality of an education might be best judged by the application of that technology. A study in “Education Technology News” reveals that many school are switching to open source technologies, in which educators can modify components for their intended purpose, and that proprietary software “is difficult to integrate when purchased from different vendors.” VCU students face the kinds of problem presented by proprietary software everyday.
For example, VCU uses an email program written by IBM, called Domino. Domino is proprietary software. It is not compatible with the browser, Firefox, used in the VCU library. Because the source code of the program is unavailable, there is little choice but to use Internet Explorer, the only browser supported by Domino. Firefox is an open source browser, most often used because the predominant browser used on the Internet, which is installed with Windows---a proprietary operating system created by Microsoft---is notorious for allowing adware and spyware to invade a computer system.
At VCU, Microsoft, which has been heavily criticized for it’s monopoly of software, even sued for anti-trust, has been deemed to be the only thing a student absolutely needs to know about technology. The only course on technology required by VCU is called “Computer Literacy Assessment,” which is actually a test required for graduation. This course teaches Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The course has several problems: the limitations the Microsoft format is never described, nor is exactly how Microsoft technologies relate to other software. Providing no context for students in understanding what might be required of them in a business world increasingly reliant on changing technologies, students instead are told simply to use it. Berry, a scholar of open source technology, is quite clear that without democratic accountability software choice lacks legitimacy (83). Are we at VCU to believe that we should accept an illegitimate technology to facilitate our education? Proprietary software companies like Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and Adobe, have asserted their muscle to establish standards in computing for business, educational and personal purposes, in order to control the flow of information into a brand-specific monopoly.
Blackboard, the course management software used by VCU, is another representation of how proprietary software can hinder the educational process by “a transition of agency away from users onto technology itself” (Payne 496). Contrary to the goals of humanities studies, Blackboard “denies the social and cultural differences in the identities of its users by reducing their opportunities for legitimate self-expression” (Payne 494). By reinforcing “homogenized and normalized images” of students and the preference of quantitative to qualitative assessment, the student-user is forbidden to challenge the assumption of middle-class values taken for granted by Blackboard’s corporate iconography. Blackboard will need to be resisted by staff and student “if higher education is to be a site for democratic dialogue and negotiations of difference” (Payne 498). Without that ability to access the source code, the text in which a program is written that can be accessed by the user, and build a course management system that fits the need of individuals and of universities, the education guaranteed by such artifices will always be a “course-in-a-box”, not a community of practice as envisioned by Lave and Wenger (Fox 97). Payne recommends that students and teachers construct alternative spaces and that only active participation in planning and policymaking will “ensure fidelity to the evolution of disiplinary theory and practice” (497).
The problem at VCU is not just the wrong kind of technology, but also a lack of implementation by the instructor of the software VCU already has. VCU’s “Black History Month Blog” (http://blog.vcu.edu/blackhistory/) is a perfect example of how technology at VCU is both misused and misunderstood. Maintained by Jill Stover, an undergraduate services librarian, the blog behaves more like a message board than a participatory technology. Even though the expected effect is two-way, information exchange is only one-way. This is demonstrated by the fact that out of an entire month’s worth of postings, only two comments were made; out of those two comments only one was genuine and the other a copy and pasted article about a related black history month event. If this blog were judged by the standards of Technorati, an Internet company that ranks the relevance and authority of blogs by the amount of conversation that they generate, it would be considered a dismal failure. It is inappropriate to create a blog for such an occasion as a “month.” In order to build readership and thus participation that blog has to be available and posted to all the time, so that students can discover and develop reading habits in relation to the content of the blog before they feel comfortable posting replies. But since students are seldom required to read or respond to blog postings, even within the context of Blackboard, in most university courses it seems very unlikely that this would happen. The content of the blog is factual, containing links about black history month, and was never truly meant to elicit a response from the reader. Instead the blog was feeding information that the blogger felt was appropriate for the event, leaving the opinion of the student reader a secondary consideration.
Ms. Stover’s blog might have received a lot more comments and conversation if she had started it with a post talking about Morgan Freeman, a notable black actor who, two weeks earlier, had, in a 60-Minutes interview, referred to Black History Month as “ridiculous” (“Morgan”). Given the high profile of the speaker and the interest of the topic, perhaps students could have commented and debated about the validity of Black History Month on the blog. The idea behind a blog is not that this digital manifestation should supplement real world happenings, for instance by announcing when a forum on race-related issues is convening, but that the blog itself should be the forum and conversation should be taking place in the digital space. Not that there is anything wrong with having a real-world discussion about race, but if all you are doing is giving facts and dates, you don’t need a blog---you need a poster in the hallway. Fox calls this “revolution-lite,” that is the adoption of technology without challenging the flow of knowledge from top to bottom (101).
Blackbird, another example of how the university fails to fully implement technology, is the flagship of the VCU English Department’s presence on the Web and represents a style of website design that is elsewhere being discredited. Called Web 2.0, this movement, which subscribes to open source values, has been sweeping the Internet. Google, Wikipedia, and Technorati all count themselves as Web 2.0. These companies say that technology, like web sites for example, should prefer participation to publishing and syndication of information to it’s propritorization (O’Reilly). Blackbird is it’s very opposite. An institution like the VCU English Department, whose sole purpose is to teach students how to write, does not display anything anyone has written. Rather than establishing a collaborative node through which can access and develop their own writing and the writing of their fellow students, Blackbird, instead, prefers to promote writers who are not VCU students and who clearly already know how to write, hoping that students will be able to gleam by example some knowledge of the craft. This also fails to admit that good writers becomes good not by watching, but by doing, and technology already available at VCU gives them the potential to do that.
Thanks to the advent of available Internet technologies, we have the opportunity to create “communities of practice,” hypothesized by educational reformers (Fox 97). VCU began to lay the foundation for a community of writers by adopting Peter Elbow’s ideal of the student-centered classroom, but falls short of this goal in its implementation of technology. The application of open source solutions, like Slashdot, could help facilitate both learning and discourse in the educational setting (Froomkin 867). Slashdot provides an arena or ‘public sphere’ where literature, such as student writing, could be not only discussed and commented on by the student and faculty bodies at large (an experience usually limited to the classroom), but elevated within the website itself based on the accumulated merit of peer review. So, when students, teachers, or visiting writers came to the front page of the VCU English Department they could see not writers they do know, but those they do not. Similarly, the content on the website would not be the expected drab poetry and short stories selected by a committee, but unexpectedly, we would see the voice of the student and the refection of VCU writing community. While this might seem a little bizarre to the uninitiated, it is quite common with technology and news websites and shows how the Internet might be used to construct new communities of shared interest in our own university (Froomkin 856). Additionally, the possibility of an internet community that serves to shrink the size of an otherwise massive student population into a series of web-sites that are navigable by interest and participation would facilitate a true ‘student-centered’ educational experience and opens the door for inter-departmental and inter-university exchange.
The English classroom environment is hostile toward the Internet. We, as students, cannot begin to understand a potentially mysterious place, like the Internet, and how to navigate it safely and reliably, if our teachers don’t know how. In the manual prescribed by English 200, and in the bible of research papers, The Craft of Research, we are told, “Unless you have a good reason not to, prefer a printed source to one on the Internet” (Booth 83), and this attitude is carried through to the classroom. But, technophobia is not a case of ignorance; teachers and scholars readily admit that part of their own purpose is to not let themselves fall behind in technological times (Marlow 106). Rather, when teachers were asked why they felt that despite their recognition that technology was important, why they didn’t show more interest, “they cited lack of the following: training, support, space, equipment, and knowledge of what was available and how items could be obtained.” (Rebaza) A situation like this would be unsurprising in an overly bureaucratic place like VCU, where, it seems, both student and teacher are left to fend for themselves. According to the webpage for VCU’s Instructional Development Center, technology education is available and free, but not required, often not taught on the Monroe Park campus, and during traditional class hours. Rebaza says that “what people really will find most helpful is a one-on-one approach, with instruction at the point-of-need,” but that the pragmatics of that often become overly politized in the university environment. Unless VCU puts money into teacher and student resources, instead of costly proprietary software, the way that they have invested in expensive building projects, this is unlikely to change.
In recognizing that available technologies like Wikis and Blogs have already made their mark as literate practices, teachers could allow the Internet to take creative expression and the research process out of the classroom and into the student-body. Wikis are online collaborative word processors that produce hypertext documents that allow the observer to measure individual contributions. What better tool can an English teacher have? So much of the problems with group assignments that involve writing is that it becomes impossible to tell which members of the group did the writing and which members merely put their name to it. Wikis allow you not only roll back and examine the exact steps of composition, but also see which users actually made those changes. I think that the analytic potential for examining and composing text “in process” is completely untapped. This would allow for the development of roles that would otherwise be obscured by the semantics of analog composition. Grading for group projects could be quite specific to the individual’s needs, as the whole would not have to suffer for the individual. A student’s blog could fulfill a dual purpose, one that student’s should be encouraged by mandatory blogging to write socially and to develop their interests in a public way. Because blogs are readily available to anyone who wants to see them, students will apply the principles of good technique in order to appear professional and informed about their subject matter. Things like “critique” and “peer review” could become new creatures as this process could go from a few students at certain times providing input to year round projects, both personal and educational, receiving help from their peers. When web standards are applied to rhetoric and composition, blogging allows a student an opportunity to faithfully execute the tenants of good writing and research that are being taught in English classes today. Using a blog as the central location for a student’s work might also encourage a breakdown of the division between personal and educational interests and allow students to see tasks not mandated by their instructors as more important. Considering the little amount given for actual class time and the increasing numbers of students in each class, this time should be used for learning concepts and for the assignment of practices for learning that can be demonstrated and explained. While the production of these practices and the associated distribution and critique that comes with it can be achieved electronically.
If all texts were digitized it would allow for instantaneous verification of bibliographic sources, but the ability to produce this kind of text, at the moment depends on the author’s knowledge of HTML to actually create a hyperlinked document. Right now, MLA format provides a standard, for which we have a kind of analog address for text retrieval, but a physical library limits this and even in the best situation can be time consuming. Search results can lead the would-be researcher to irrelevant sources and dead ends. If subject matter could be explored within the particular conversation of the research, finding sources could be much less pragmatic. With hyper-linking and proper application of semantic web techniques one would be able navigate research conceptually instead of topically. As texts are produced in a more technologically accessible ways, with features like “Trackback” or Technorati’s “Cosmos” feature---which is available on many kinds of blogs---there is quite literally conversation between articles. Student researchers are not only able to examine the ongoing conversation of experts, but even participate in that conversation.
Universities must be the ones to make the Internet reliable for educational purposes and these efforts must be coordinated with other universities in order to be effective. The Student Computer Initiative (SCI), the most visible technology policy at VCU, takes no accountability towards the problem of inter-departmental computer standards. The recommendations made by SCI are all very costly and for the most part incompatible with each other. An art student is told to buy an Apple computer for the purposes required by it’s major, but are not told that the software and formats are completely inexchangable with IBM-based computers, unless you purchase several hundred dollars worth of extra software to work around that incompatibility. This must come as quite a shock when a paper needs to be emailed to the instructor the night before it is due. If you happen to receive an article from the Library’s ILLIAD service, the format required by the humanities (Microsoft Word) is not compatible with the Adobe PDF that digitized articles are converted to, completely restricting your ability to copy and paste for the purposes of quoting. The university should pursue server-side implementations and more unified standards of computing to defer the costs associated with SCI. VCU has given little thought to the fact that the programs provided to universities might serve as double-edged sword, that serves to increase sales of proprietary software rather than to enrich the user experience of the student. Many cheaper and more efficient standards exist, for instance the OpenDocument format, that have yet to be explored by the administration because they are not presented on a plate.
Taking the example of other universities, and even successful businesses, might help us solve some of these difficulties and understand what good technology strategies look like. Three years ago, MIT developed an extremely popular course management software, called Open Course Ware (OCW), that MIT built to it’s own specifications as opposed to having courses taught around software made by a programmer, not a teacher. This allows students from all over the world free access via the web of almost all of MIT’s prestigious courses (Diamond). While it may seem daunting to build a course management system from scratch, the initial leap was made some time ago and I’m sure MIT could offer some help. Google makes a fine example of a company that is proprietary, but has set worthwhile goals. Google’s website makes the statement that “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” If only university education had such a lofty set of ideals, then I might not have a topic to write about.
One of the traditional opponents of the computerization of society is limiting access; this states that “any Internet-based discourse threatens to exclude those who cannot afford access” (Froomkin 858). Payne suggests that “students who cannot afford the technology will simply not apply,” and even if this effect of proprietary software is mitigated by shifting the burden on to the university, students still will have to navigate an undecided university unwilling to give up control of the “material conditions that determine who gets to participate and, in turn, whose identities get inscribed and reproduced” (Payne 491). This effect is fully demonstrated by VCU’s Blackbird and Black History Month Blog as being reinforced by the “top-down” model dissemination of information favored by proprietary software companies.
Another major arena of criticism to blogging, voiced by Keren, concerns its relative anonymity. Keren articulates this view when she says, “the Internet lacks responsibility” and “the maintenance of a dialogue conducted not in virtual reality but in real life” (203). She goes on to say that the Internet as a medium is “widely mistrusted,” because its discourse is “situated between fiction and reality” (203). As evidence Keren points to the fact that “nicknames come and go, statements can be written without much thought, promises can be made that do not have to be kept,” concluding that “this is acceptable in novels, plays, and movies” but not in responsible “media content” (203). Sherry Turkle points out that while some users enjoy creating “fake” identities that this behavior often embodies the “conflicts he or she experiences in their everyday lives” (Lindemann 358). Lindemann continues by suggesting that “ethical performance online is not simply a matter of whether one pretends to be someone else without a disclaimer,” but “acknowledges the often incongruous relationship between body and text. For to do so is to recognize the effect that technology has on our bodies” (369). Indeed, Lindemann proclaims, “authenticity is unimportant when discussing the marking of identity online,” this can be thought of as an “avatar” that becomes more real than the original self. Benedict Anderson, when weighing in on the effect of media on communities says, “communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness but by the style in which they are imagined” (Fox 100).
The Internet poses the potential for more legitimate forms of discourse, as private interests obscure the possible functions of this technology; the public sphere has potential to advance it. The only positive use of technology in the VCU community has not been initiated by the administration but by students themselves. I refer to the campaign websites, established in January 2006 for the student government elections, VCUorDIE.com and VCYou.org. While the election has passed and the sites are no longer active, they represent an attempt by the student body to use the technology discussed in this paper, such as blogging, to establish more legitimate forms of discourse and democratic participation. Froomkin predicts such student-generated sites will fulfill the need for diversity in electronic discourse as we explore “to what extent one can use Internet tools to enhance awareness, debate, and deliberation within existing, usually geographic based institutions” (869). The precedent has been set for students to respond to technology in the realm of discourse in a useful and interactive way, confirming the doctrine of Diem that “our students are a part of the information and communication revolution” (Marlow 106). Even now, a student Senator of VCU’s SGA is working on a university Wiki, but without the support of the staff and administration the project will probably go to waste---just like the ‘VCU Blogs’ site.
In conclusion, VCU must have a fully articulated policy of technology that addresses not just the semantics and standards by which technology should operate at the university level, but the ramifications of technology on the curriculum. Technology has necessitated a shift in pedagogy from critical to collaborative ways of thinking that in its logical extension requires the digitization of the material life of the university. A digital pedagogy must include student-defined content, not just the ability to take traditional classes in an electronic way. Even referring to efforts to the digitize classroom as “online learning” or “Internet classes” misses the point entirely. In particular, English studies has it’s own challenges in this respect. The literate practices that English claims to examine have shifted from print to electronic media (Fox 100). The English department defines itself as “a critical pedagogical project designed to expose and challenge the identities produced by an arbitrary, ideological system of hegemonic cultural productions” (Payne 484). But, the “ideological system of hegemonic cultural productions” at issue here is clearly proprietary software, which keeps us from seeing forms of electronic identity as reliable or accessible (Weinstein 364). The classroom must be a space for things that can’t be done with technology and the classroom can’t be a space where forms of technology are accepted without question.

Works Cited
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