In “The Invisible Audience and the Disembodied Voice: Online Teaching and the Loss of Body Image,” Joanne Buckley offers a very personal reflection on the possibilities online education offers professors and students with physical disabilities. Buckley, who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a child, found that her “experiences teaching writing online have been the most experimental, fruitful, and often the most intimate work I have done, mainly because I feel freed from the real—and perceived—constraints of my physical body.”
Buckley’s paper is based largely on the contrasting responses she has received in online as opposed to traditional classroom settings. She believes that in the online environment she is unencumbered by the biases that unfortunately confront physically handicapped professors. But not only professors: “The absence of barriers between students that may result from differences in age, race, and gender seems to help make communication among students easier and less restrained.”
Furthermore, while it is obvious that the online classroom relieves disabled students and professors from the physical constraints of inadequately designed classrooms, Buckley argues that the online classroom also confers psychological benefits. To a list of benefits that includes the privacy needed to write well, greater opportunity for participation, and personalized pacing, she adds “the chance to avoid being judged by one’s physical appearance.” Buckley also believes that greater credibility attaches to her person when she is communicating in disembodied venues. Finally, Buckley also contends that her wheelchair as well as the difficulty with which she stands up to write on the board or use the overhead projector amounts to a significant distraction from the actual content of her teaching.
For all of these reasons, Buckley is hopeful that the disembodied experience of online education will create opportunities for students to learn and express themselves without having to deal with the prejudices that sometimes shape fully embodied interactions. Moreover, the professor or student is freed not only from the bias of others, but also from the anxieties that attend the anticipation of such treatment. The online space then, precisely because of its disembodied character, becomes a utopian space where pure minds engage free from the complications attending the body and its particularities.
Underlying Buckley’s analysis is the assumption that the body and the self (or, selves) are only contingently related to one another. So, for example, she approvingly cites the following observation by a person interviewed by Sherry Turkle for Life on the Screen: “why grant such superior status to the self that has the body when the selves that don’t have bodies are able to have different kinds of experiences?” Likewise, she borrows Emerson’s metaphorical rendering of soul and body as dreams and beasts respectively and suggests, again following Turkle, that computer mediated communication can, for a time, hold “the beast at bay in pursuit of the dream.”
For those with physical disabilities, a technology that enhances access to educational opportunities is a welcome development. Buckley reminds us that most of our thinking about online education is conducted through the lens of those whose bodies are whole. But one wonders whether in its hiding from view the body and its particularities, online education does not perpetuate, to some degree, the very prejudices it purportedly overcomes. In fact, such prejudices are not overcome at all. It seems preferable to bring students together in a fully embodied context so that whatever prejudices exist are not merely bracketed, but rather confronted and truly overcome.
A good deal of my course work over the last couple of years has been conducted in online environments. My university offers three types of courses: face-to-face courses, hybrid courses with online and face-to-face components, and fully online course. The majority of my courses have been either hybrid or fully online. On the whole, I’ve not been pleased. This is not necessarily an indictment of the professors who have supervised these courses. It is true that some have been better executed than others, but even the best have been a disappointment despite the professor’s best efforts.
I’m not sure how typical my estimation of online education may be, but The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that the growth of online courses has slowed and may be approaching a plateau. Here are some of the findings of the survey of more than 2,500 institutions of higher education:
An online course is now part of the experience of 31% of all students
Enrollment in online courses grew by 10%, considerably less than last year’s 21%
67% of academic leaders rated online education as the same or superior to face-to-face learning
Fewer than one-third of chief academic officers feel their faculty “accept the value and legitimacy of online education. This percent has changed little over the last eight years.”
For my part, and take this with a grain of salt, I suspect that “academic leaders” may be driven by considerations that have less to do with quality education than with other benefits that may arise from the implementation of online classes. More online classes, for example, mean growing the student body without necessarily expanding the physical plant which is always an expensive venture.
Online classes do confer certain benefits on students, of course, flexibility being only the most obvious. Again, though, I wonder how many of these benefits are related to the actual educational quality of the online experience. I realize that face-to-face classes in many instances will also leave much to be desired, but based on my limited experience, I’ll take an imperfect face-to-face class over an ideal online class in most cases.
Ultimately, I attribute this to the manner in which the medium abstracts the body from the learning experience. In the next day or two I’ll be posting some more reflections on the topic. If you have had any experiences as either a student or a teacher in an online environment, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Cowan’s book tackles three related but distinct phenomena: the history of household technologies (and to a lesser extent the systems that support them), the social factors that shaped their development and adoption, and the evolution of gender roles. To borrow an analogy, the household is not unlike a complex ecosystem. The introduction of a new factor, such as a new technology, is bound to have multiple consequences, some paradoxical and some unintended, and its absorption into the ecosystem will be shaped by existing conditions. New household technologies entered an ecosystem in which existing gender-based divisions of labor, for example, meant that initially men were relieved of more (household) work than women. The household ecosystem is also shaped by socially constructed expectations such as those disseminated by popular magazines and, later, television programming. As some tasks were made more efficient and less arduous by certain technologies, popular media tended to create expectations which undermined those gains.
In the following paragraph, Cowan gives as concise an overview of her argument as one could hope for:
“Some of the work that was eliminated by modernization was work that men and children — not women — had previously done: carrying coal, carrying water, chopping wood, removing ashes, stoking furnaces, cleaning lamps, beating rugs. Some of the work was made easier, but its volume increased: sheets and underwear were changed more frequently, so there was more laundry to be done; diets became more varied, so cooking was more complex; houses grew larger, so there were more surfaces to be cleaned. Additionally, some of the work that, when done by hand had been done by servants, came to be done by the housewife herself when done by machine …. Finally, some of the work that had previously been allocated to commercial agencies actually returned to the domain of the housewife — laundry, rug cleaning, drapery cleaning, floor polishing — as new appliances were invented to make the work feasible for the average housewife …”
More Work for Mother remains a classic in the field and deservedly so. It reminds us of how much can be obscured by our collective historical memory. It also suggested to me what might be the title for a companion volume: More Work for Teacher.
The assumption that new technologies make things easier certainly applies to more than just housework. In the case of education, technology may not so explicitly present itself as labor saving, but it does typically present itself as an unalloyed enhancement of the classroom while the question of labor remains surprisingly muted. In my own experience, the introduction of the new technologies almost always leads to more labor for the teacher that is hardly ever acknowledged, much less compensated.
Just to be clear — because I certainly don’t want to come off as a coddled, whiny teacher that is simply resistant to change and hard work — this is not intended as a critique of educational technology in general, nor is my point that teachers are overworked and underpaid, true as that may often be. My point is simply to make an observation and to draw attention to what seems to me to be an insufficiently commented upon dimension of educational technology.
Consider the introduction of online educational platforms used by schools to post homework, grades, and other class related materials. These platforms, on the whole, increase the teacher’s workload by requiring the teacher not only to announce homework and post it in the classroom, but now also to post it online. This may seem like a small thing, but consider a high school teacher who teaches six sections a day and must go through the several steps necessary to enter in homework for all six classes each day. Depending on the software, this is often a less than user-friendly or streamlined experience.
These platforms also tend to generate what may gently be termed heightened grade awareness on the part of a small number of parents and students. Again, don’t misunderstand me, we do want students and parents to care about learning. But, for one thing, caring about grades is not always synonymous with caring about learning, and there does come a point when one more email interrogation regarding the reason for an A- rather than A gets a bit old.
Teachers in the past were asked to tabulate their grades at the middle and end of the quarter, now they are expected to keep grades up to date to the day, in some cases to the hour. But, you may ask, raising a skeptical eyebrow, don’t these platforms typically tabulate the grades for you? Yes, but teachers have to record them and this again amounts to added time because, in my experience anyway, a teacher is asked to keep both a hard copy and online grade book. Again, not a huge amount of time considered independently, but we’re concerned with the aggregated total.
The matter of emails alluded to earlier is also worth mentioning. Teachers are now asked to field emails from parents, students, and administrators and as anyone who receives a heavy volume of emails knows, this is not necessarily arduous work, but it is, once again, time-consuming. Ironically, these email sometimes involve questions regarding assignments that had been explained in class and also described online.
If in class lessons are expected to take advantage of available technologies, projectors or smart boards for example, then more time is added to the planning of each lesson. Again, this is not a commentary on the effectiveness or desirability of technologically augmented lessons; it is only to point out the added time requirements.
Some teachers I know are also expected to post summaries of lessons online or create and post podcasts of each class. Wonderful perhaps, we’ll let the efficacy of all of this go for the purpose of this post, but again time consuming. All the while remember that the work of grading, preparing lessons, tutoring, staying after school to help students, myriad administrative duties, extra-curricular responsibilities, committee and faculty meetings, keeping up with the field — all of the typical work that teachers are expected to do, and much of which more often then not gets taken home and worked on over the weekends — none of this goes away, more work just gets added to it.
Most of these observations have been made with the high school teacher in mind. The college instructor may face similar circumstances with the additional possibility of being expected to teach online classes. These classes, much like household technologies, may appear to be more convenient. The teacher doesn’t have to go to a physical class two or three times a day, all of the work can be done from the office or even the home. But the amount of work that goes into setting up an online class, or at least setting it up well, is not at all insubstantial. And the maintenance of a class throughout the semester, again if it is done well, takes considerable more time than showing up to class two or three times a week. In large measure this is due to what must be done online to compensate for the absence of face to face time. Usually this amounts to online “discussion” and this means faculty members read and perhaps comment on student posts throughout the week. In a class of thirty, say, in which students are expected to post and respond to other students twice a week, this quickly adds up to over a hundred posts a week, and often much more.
Cowan wrote More Work for Mother to scrutinize the assumption that new technologies made life easy, simple, and unambiguously better for housewives. Her scrutiny revealed that such was simply not the case. I’ve written this post because teachers are encouraged or pressured from several directions to incorporate more and more technology into the classroom. The most important question to ask is whether or not the particular technologies actually enhance learning. Not far behind, however, is the question of time and labor. What sorts of demands have new technologies placed on teachers who already are expected to do a good deal of off the clock work? And because time is ultimately a finite resource during a school week, what is being crowded out by the aggregated time demands of educational technologies?
If you’re a teacher, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Does this ring true, or is there more to the story? On balance, how would you evaluate the demands of technology on your time in and out of the classroom?
And to wrap it up on a positive note, here’s a little inspiration via Taylor Mali:
I remember having a discussion with students a couple of years ago about the desirability of instantly acquired knowledge or expertise. It was a purely hypothetical discussion, and I don’t quite remember how we got around to it. Somehow, though, we found ourselves discussing a Matrix-like or Google-chip-type scenario in which it would be possible to instantly download the contents of a book or martial art skills into the brain. The latter, of course, begs all sorts of questions about the relationship between the mind and the body (and so the does the former for that matter), but let’s set those questions aside for the moment. My argument at the time, and the one I’d like to briefly articulate here, was that even if we were able to acquire knowledge through such a transaction, we should not really want to.
It’s not an easy argument to make. As you can imagine many students were rather keen on the notion of foregoing hours of study and, just to be clear, the appeal is not altogether lost on me as I glance at the mounting tower of books that looms nearby, Babel-like. And the appeal is not just a function of the demands of an academic setting either. I am the sort of person that is more than a little pained by the thought of all that I will never read given the unyielding limitations of a human life. Moreover, who wouldn’t want to possess all of the knowledge that could be so easily attained? (Interestingly, it is tacitly assumed in hypothetical discussions of this sort that retention is no longer a problem.)
This discussion came to mind recently because it struck me that the proposition in question — the desirability of achieving the end while foregoing the means — takes on a certain plausibility within technological society. In fact, it may be the very heart of the promise held out by technology. Efficiency, ease, speed — this is what technology offers. Get what you’ve always wanted, only get it with less hassle and get it faster. The ends are relatively fixed, but technology reconfigures the means by which we achieve them.
This is the story of automation, for example; a machine steps in to do for us what we previously had to do for ourselves. Consider this recent post from Kevin Kelly in which he outlined “The 7 Stages of Robot Replacement” as follows:
A robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do.
OK, it can do a lot, but it can’t do everything I do.
OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.
OK, it operates without failure, but I need to train it for new tasks.
Whew, that was a job that no human was meant to do, but what about me?
My new job is more fun and pays more now that robots/computers are doing my old job.
I am so glad a robot cannot possibly do what I do.
Kelly, as always, is admirably optimistic. But this seems to me to beg certain questions: What exactly is the end game here? Where does this trajectory culminate? Are there no good reasons to oppose the outsourcing of human involvement in the means side of our projects and actions?
Let me go back to the matter of reading and knowledge, in part because this is the context in which I originally formulated my scattered thoughts on this question. There is a certain unspoken assumption that makes the possibility of instantly acquiring knowledge plausible and seemingly unproblematic: that knowledge is merely aggregated data and its mode of acquisition does nothing to alter its status. But what if this were a rather blinkered view of knowledge? And what if the acquisition of knowledge, however understood, was itself only a means to other more important ends?
If the work of learning is ultimately subordinate to becoming a certain kind of person, then it matters very much how we go about learning. In some sense, it may matter more than what we learn. This is because the manner in which we go about acquiring knowledge constitutes a kind of practice that over the long haul shapes our character and disposition in non-trivial ways. Acquiring knowledge through apprenticeship, for example, shapes people in a certain way, acquiring knowledge through extensive print reading in another, and through web based learning in still another. The practice which constitutes our learning, if we are to learn by it, will instill certain habits, virtues, and, potentially, vices — it will shape the kind of person we are becoming.
As an aside, this consideration bears significantly upon the digital humanities project. (You can read a recent piece about the digital humanities here.) The knowledge achieved by the computer-mediated work of digital humanists will be acquired through practices that diverge from the work of print based scholars, just as the practices associated with their work diverged from those associated with medieval scholastics. New practices will yield new sensibilities, new habits, new dispositions. The digital humanities can produce impressive and well-executed works that genuinely advance our understanding of the humanistic disciplines, so this is not exactly a critique so much as an observation.
This is one reason, then, why the means through which knowledge is acquired matters: it can shape the sort of person you become in the long run. Another has to do with the pleasure that attends the process. Of course, if one has not learned to take pleasure from reading or, to take another example, the physical training associated with athletic excellence, then this point will ring rather hollow. Let me just note that if I could immediately acquire the knowledge of a 1,000 books, I will know that I had missed out on a considerable amount of enjoyment along the way. The sort of enjoyment that leads us to pause as we approach the end of a book we will be rather sad to close.
All of this is also closely related to the undesirability of a frictionless life. When I seek to remove all work, all trouble, all resistance that stands between me and some object of desire, my attainment of that object will be simultaneously rendered meaningless. But finally, it may be mostly about virtue. What do I desire when I am lured by the promise of instant knowledge. It seems to me that since it is not the pleasure that attains to the work and accomplishment of its acquisition, then it is just the power or prestige that it may bring. The elimination of the work associated with gaining knowledge or skill, then, may not be a function of sloth but rather of pride.
And as with knowledge, so with countless other facets of human experience. Technology promises to reconfigure the means so as to get us the end we desire. If, however, part of what we desire, perhaps without knowing it, is intimately wrapped up with the means of attainment, then it will always be a broken promise.
Steve Jobs on technology and education from a 1996 Wiredinterview (via Nick Carr):
“I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent … Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology. It’s not as simple as you think when you’re in your 20s – that technology’s going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won’t.”
I’m curious to know if this remained Jobs’ view following his return to Apple. Apple markets its products for schools pretty hard it seems for this to have been a normative position for the company.
As it stands, though, it strikes me as eminently wise.
Education technology in the hands of Apple and Steve Jobs has been a mixed bag. We shouldn’t be so dazzled by his magic that we forget to ask the hard questions about what’s worked and what’s failed and why. Remember: at some point, Apple decided to eschew the education market and build consumer electronics devices. It was a brilliant move, for innovation and for the company’s bottom line. What do we want to make of that? And now, in ways that I think have yet to fully play out, we’re seeing what’s going to happen when these consumer electronic devices enter the classroom.
That seems to answer my question above. Apple, according to Watters, shifted from making products for education to making consumer devices it markets to the field of education. That is a non-trivial distinction.
L.M. Sacasas 