The Liminoid Quality of Instructional Technology
At the suggestion of my colleague, Ed Webb, I’ve just read bavatuesday’s post, “What is an instructional technologist?” It is brilliant. It gets to the heart of the matter about what is wrong with how instructional (and academic) technology is often framed by administrations who insist on modelling it on the ERP paradigm of central IT. I would only add that the problem is not central IT per se, or its mindset, or its institutional imperatives. The desire to model academic technology after ERP — essentially the Blackboard model, in which the enterprise application becomes the focus — makes a great deal of sense coming from a world in which business processes are well-understood, the risks are high, the costs are very high, and the rewards are relatively low. In that world, system failure can be catastrophic, whereas success is often measured in terms of absence — as with email, success is silence. When things work, no one thinks about it.
In the world of academic technology, the risks and rewards associated with disruption are often what we are looking for. Instructional technologists don’t just deliver prepared solutions to the classroom context, they experiment every time they help a professor develop a course with new media. It is tempting to think of this constant experimentation as the result of the rapidly changing nature of technology, or as the result of the relative youth of instructional technology (compared with enterprise IT, which goes back to the 1950s). However, I think that the difference is, as bavatuesday suggests, structural. Education is not a business process. Teaching and learning are different than working and executing a business process because the former is an inherently liminal process.
I am reminded of a series of post-structuralist oppositions from my anthropological background — Victor Turner’s concept of liminality vs. structure, Lucy Suchman’s contrast between planning and situated action, Marshall Sahlin’s idea of the “structure of the conjuncture” between structure and event, Bourdieu’s concept of improvization and the messy, quasi-structural dialectic between objectification and embodiment.
As academic technologists, we occupy the liminoid space between formal structures — encoded in org charts, assessment rubrics, enterprise software design (see Lessig’s principle that code = law), etc. — and the “event” of learning, which is always partly green (William Carlos Williams) and which is why those who teach are attracted to the classroom. That is why we favor open source software. Not becuase it is free — we know it isn’t — but because it is flexible, agile, and adaptive to the situation of teaching and learning, which not only changes over time, but from professor to professor. It may be messier than proprietary solutions, but then, we herd cats, not dogs.
To borrow another anthropological trope, perhaps instructional technology is to enterprise computing as celeritas is to gravitas:
Celertas refers to the youthful, active, disorderly, creative violence of conquering princes; gravitas to the venerable, staid, judicious, priestly, peaceful, and productive dispositions of an established people.
Marshall Sahlins, “The Stranger-King,” in Islands of History.
Reference to conquering princes may sound a bit extreme. But that’s not too far from the concept of a change agent, which is what we are. And maybe it’s not too bad of a model for the kind of leadership we seek to have.
November 1st, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Wow,
How beautifully said, and the examples you bring up make me want to do some serious reading in anthropological theory. I’m particularly fascinated by Bourdieu’s “concept of improvization and the messy, quasi-structural dialectic between objectification and embodiment.” The idea of embodiment is so key to these online learning spaces, and the way this frames that dialectic makes some elements of the discussion so much clearer to me. Namely, it is often with the loosely structured applications and approaches that professors and students feel like they inhabit these spaces, that they are somehow representative of their teaching and learning process, rather than an externalized objectification their work. They embody their work, and it becomes something they return to and take possession of. It isn’t a microwavable experience that objectifies their relationship to thinking about these works, it is an open space wherein others can join and complicate their thinking. When you are conceptualizing and designing your own space to teach and learn,it seems it is necessarily messy.
I wonder if you have some ideas about how folks controlling the aesthetic and design of these spaces impacts their relationship to them. or even having the option to map their own domain. The whole idea of embodying these spaces in some real way, and fostering this relationship seems to be the crux of the difference between the approaches, and I think you are right on that it is not necessarily about central IT, but about the misplaced business logic grafted on universities–learning isn;t effecient.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:53 am
Yes, I think you are right – the crux between the two approaches seems to be where the locus of aesthetic control resides. In the Central IT model, information architecture and layout are controlled by well-meaning administrators, in the name of security, efficiency, control, and, sometimes, branding. But faculty want to control their own spaces – to embody them, as you say – in order to take ownership of them for maximum pedagogic effect. In the Central IT model, courseware is all about managing what is perceived to be an objective and fungible informational “stuff” (files, syllabi, discussion lists, etc.), and aesthetics and design are relegated to a secondary, indeed superfluous, status. But in fact control of those dimensions seems to be closely tied to the effectiveness of courseware as an agent and artifact in the actual process of teaching, and faculty instinctively know this. Or, they know it when given the chance, as the UMW experiment so compellingly shows.
You asked if I may “have some ideas about how folks controlling the aesthetic and design of these spaces impacts their relationship to them, or even having the option to map their own domain.” You point to the key here – at issue is not only the impact of ownership on their relationship to courseware, but the recognition of this relationship in the first place. The centralized courseware model reifies, into the notion of abstract information that is being “managed,” the situated and always improvised relationship between faculty, students, and courseware in the teaching situation.
I think this question raises a line of research that someone (we?) ought to pursue. I would love, for example, to deploy Nancy Foster’s ethnography of “work-practice” approach to the situated use of learning management systems, to explore the effects of embodiment. Other theoretical currents are applicable here, such as Lucy Suchman’s work on “affiliative objects.”
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I do love the way you frame this question, and exploring the aesthetic space of teaching and learning is something I am fascinated by, so count me in—I guess we’ll have to talk more about this offline for I find it fascinating and important.
November 5th, 2008 at 3:32 am
[…] The Liminoid Quality of Instructional TechnologyAt the suggestion of my colleague, Ed Webb, I’ve just read bavatuesday’s post, “What is an instructional technologist?“ It is brilliant. It gets to the heart of the matter about what is wrong with how instructional (and academic) … […]