Technology and Education:
A Vision for Librarians

Jessica George

I. The Problem

In an important sense in librarianship the customer is always right; that is, we the librarians are there to help with whatever task the patron brings to our desk. But it would be an impoverished view of librarianship that stopped there, because librarians are more than mere executors of patrons' requests. They are also, inescapably, pedagogues, albeit of a most peculiar sort. The library is perhaps better likened, after all, to a rather large and unwieldy classroom than to a business enterprise. The argument here is that we need to appreciate the educational metaphor for our mission if we are to seize forcefully and judiciously upon the possibilities offered by the current dazzling round of information technologies that are coming more and more to define our work. Accordingly, some of the discussions in the educational literature are as relevant for us as they could be at one of our profession's most critical hours.

We in academic librarianship are ambivalent about the proper role of information/educational technology. On one hand we seem swept away by the amazing possibilities of our ever-faster and prettier on-line systems and our powerful and ever-evolving search engines of various kinds. In a recent presentation to the Illinois Association of College and Research Libraries, Richard T. Sweeney summed up the most dangerous of our library stances toward technology when he stated that "ninety-five percent of what I need to know in my job I learned during the last two years."¹The heads nodding in the audience and the absolutely unapologetic tone of the statement illustrates the concern that we have allowed technological possibilities to determine and structure our jobs as librarians, our collections and offerings and our instruction. We, therefore, have allowed technological possibilities to dictate the effect we have on students as learners.

There is a price for this ambiguity. As we go higher and higher it seems that it is no longer our own two feet that anchors us to the ground, if we are really anchored at all. In short, it seems like we are not as in control as we once were, as our very lifeworld recedes from our competence. We seem simply to drift along down river, our critical faculties comfortably snoozing, in part because so much of this stuff really is neat and exciting, but also because we have not yet learned how even to raise real questions about technology, without being branded a dinosaur, a Luddite, or, heaven forbid, not "with it."

But this unthinking state of affairs is unfortunate if we mean to do well by our libraries and by ourselves as librarians. It is clear that it is high time for us to begin engaging in a dialogue that has been going on for some time now among thinkers who have carefully questioned (but not necessarily condemned) the role of technology in human history and in contemporary society. There are such creatures out there, and they are worth listening to.

Keeping the analogy with education in mind let us examine two preliminary points that any sober analysis of library technology must recognize:

1. Like schools, libraries have historically followed society rather than the other way around. We are for the most part funded by the same state and/or powerful private interests that call the societal shots in general. Academic libraries are even a few steps removed from teaching departments in the power- prestige business, as the curriculum demands of "real" educators tend to guide our decisions in collection development and the acquisition of new tools. Our parent institutions look to us for immediate technological solutions: "The kids want research to be easier, get them full-text databases." And so we do. "We need Internet access because these students have to be network-sawy for their futures in business." We comply. "Look at this great stuff coming out, we have to keep up to compete."

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In his Illinois address alluded to earlier, Richard Sweeney, declares that it is a "disastrous" mistake to guide students in information choices (or as he puts it, "tell them what they need"); by this view, in order to continue as active institutions and not be swallowed by purely commercial choices or lose our jobs to the "digital library," we must be driven by what students and university administrators want.

2. Many of today's emerging technologies often are wonderful and essential to managing the exponential growth in information and information processing. Who in their right mind would want to go back to the exclusive use of printed periodical indices, card catalogs or the restriction of access before document delivery? E-mail is in exciting ways facilitating communication in contemporary society (at least among certain relatively resource-rich groups). The Internet offers undeniable alternatives to the lack of access to information that is too expensive, unique or current to be offered in traditional forms.

But is it all for the better, especially from the point of view of the two voices with which librarians must speak: citizen and teacher? Ameritech and Microsoft, of course, have not problem answering in the affirmative. But bracketing the obvious and simplistic reality-check answer, "it is happening, we'd better get with it," the question cannot be ignored: should a basically corporate-friendly revolution decide the future of the developing human intellect that we have a large part in forming?

II. Beginning To Think Critically About Technology:
Mumford and Luddism

During the middle decades of this century, Lewis Mumford, perhaps the last of our "public intellectuals," posed the problem in a provocative way. Developing a sort of philosophical anthropology he categorizes two types of technology: "polytechnics" and "monotechnics."² The former is at bottom life-centered as opposed to power-centered. As such, it is "in harmony with polymorphous needs and aspirations in life, and it functions in a democratic manner to realize a diversity of human potentials."³ One might think of artisan and craft technologies such as spinning, dyeing and weaving for the production, sale and consumption of clothing. These are technologies that support an entire human ecosystem. Contemporary example might be the less-centralized electronic periodical indices. Internet government resources, or E- mail, which make use of individual human ingenuity in computer technology to solve real problems, and gesture toward democratic systems of learning and non-hierarchical structures of power-knowledge diffusion. In sum, polytechnics are defined by their ten dency to support heterogeneous forms of culture and their resistance to centralized authority.

In contrast, monotechnics is based upon "scientific intelligence and quantified production, directed mainly toward economic expansion, material repletion and miliary superiority."⁴ They seem almost inherently to imply large, centralized systems of authority that tyrannize over traditional forms of life and individual initiative. Here, one thinks of the technologies that make standardized testing possible, advanced marketing techniques, television. A dramatic contemporary example might be a nuclear power plant, which must for security and the financial reasons, give rise to policies of surveillance, domination and control. It would be difficult to run a nuclear power plant as a grass-roots community organization! For security reasons alone this would be prohibited. Imagine if access to the plant were not tightly controlled and some plutonium were stolen by a terrorist group.⁵ Almost by virtue of their very existence, and like most military hardware, including armies themselves, they imply a large-scale concentration of power.

Mumford, in fact, would call such phenomena as the nuclear power plant "megatechnics," monotechnics that have gone a step further and, in an important and frightening sense, have taken on a life of their own. The distinctions are particularly crucial for the library scene, given that it is easily possible for a particular technology to mutate into other forms. For example, it may be that the information superhighway was for a period a playground for a relatively small band of free thinkers and eccentric computer nerds (despite its very military prehistory), and that it was (and still is in some respects) relatively free and open to individuals and communities. But corporate control is looming ominously behind it, and it may be just a matter of time before the democratic and emancipatory potential of this technology is commandeered just as surely as was television by the major networks in the 1940s and radio decades earlier. Megatechnics always sells itself as liberating; it sets up a "myth of progress" while actually destroying family relations, culture and history." ⁶And why not? The driving force behind the technology has become power and profit as opposed to any deeper sense of human flourishing.

The dreaded Luddites of 19th century England, despite their inefficient and fatal "smash the machines" approach, did have something very basic quite right.⁷ They were against something very much like megatechnics because they understood that more technology does not necessarily mean more progress, in the sense of basic human nourishment, and at the very least we ought to train ourselves to think through any given introduction of a new technology before we

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push through with it. But instead of attempting to deconstruct technologies in the literal sense of the Luddites, we ought to be deconstructing it in the sense of not allowing ourselves to be bamboozled into an unthinking, acritical stance toward it no matter how many dollars and amazing applications may seduce us. In the context of contemporary academic librarianship, one of the most important things we can do is try to understand the impact current technologies are having on our patrons as learners. We must think in terms of establishing a "partnership" between the educational information technology on one hand, and our role as librarian-teachers concerned first and foremost with growing our students' minds and their lives on the other.

III. A Framework for Understanding Technology

Some of the emerging literature in technology and education offers a framework that may help us work through some of the difficulties peculiar to academic librarianship. There are three broad categories by which one might understand technologies in general and, by extension, those in education: substantivism, instrumentalism and pluralism.⁸ A brief examination of the first two categories will pave the way for a discussion of pluralism, which in many ways provides the most promising structure that librarians may frame their basic stance toward library technology. Pluralism is the category that most clearly allows for the salutary "partnership" focus just mentioned above.

Substantivism is the view that technology is (or has become) a force unto itself, one that is essentially evil (anti-technology substantivism) or one that is essentially good (pro-technology substantivism). From the anti-technology substantivist view, we on a mass scale are conforming to technology in ways that are basically destructive and alienating; we are allowing it to dictate our future, and this is bad. One of the seminal substantive theorists, French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul,⁹ sees "la technique" as an evil force that has come to dominate Western culture, while educational theorist C. A. Bowers¹⁰ describes society (and, therefore, educational practice) as having fallen victim to a "technological mindset" that must be "overcome" in order to return to a more wholesome educational practice. Also akin to this view, and in some sense their forerunner, are the Frankfurt School social theorists of mid-century who worried over the increasingly dominant role of technology in industrial (and post-industrial) society. For the Frankfurt School theorists technology takes on the role of a vast hidden ideology that "subverts discussion of the ends of human activity, thereby restricting it [the ideology] to talk about means."¹¹

But there are also pro-technology substantivists, who welcome and even celebrate the all consuming power and agent-like autonomy of technology. An example of such computer romanticists in education is a group adhering to what Blacker calls Radical Instructional Design (RID) theory. RID theorists hold that technology (or technologists!) should guide the role of technology in educational practice; instructional computing is a sort of savior of an otherwise dying educational system. RID theorists want to make classroom technologies "teacher-proof," for example, and see their role as circumventing the human instructors who will most likely, in their view, disturb the learning process. Flesh and blood teachers should stand back and get out of the way so the tools can educate! (The analogy with flesh and blood librarians and certain visions of technological services may appear obvious.) Extreme RID views even hold that instructional technology should migrate outward from Colleges of Education, which are traditionally too caught up in the old-fashioned business of preparing teachers, and set up shop on their own.¹² According to this view, teachers represent stagnation, tradition rootedness, and they have devised a culture that tends to resist technological innovation in favor of "business as usual."

In many ways, administrators of libraries are especially likely to adopt some form of pro-technology substantivism as it has been described. The pro-technology substantivist's most influential rallying cry is that we dare not resist the technological tide of society, if we fall behind we are doomed, not just to preserve our image with client groups (students, parents, taxpayers), but also in the interest of playing our proper role in the race to upgrade the nation's economy. Who can argue the point if our very national security depends upon technological preparedness?

The second view, instrumentalism, springs from the common sense view that it is human beings, after all, who are calling the shots and controlling even the most complex and powerful technologies. It may seem to be working according to its own logic and agency, but if you look hard enough you will find a behind-the-curtain Wizard of Oz, like a Bill Gates, or some group of actual human beings who are designing and using the tools. Technologies are and always have been human tools, from the hunter-gatherer's spear to Windows 95. If they are good, it is because they answer to real human needs and/or aspirations as they were designed or discovered to do (like Mum-ford's polytechnics). If they are bad, it is not the tool itself at fault ("guns don't kill people, people kill peo-

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ple"), but rather must be placed upon the uses to which they are put by bad individuals, groups, or entire social systems.

Pro-technology instrumentalists tend to see only the benefits of technologies. An example includes MIT computer theorist and educator Seymour Papert, designer of the famous LOGO program for children and author of the widely-read book Mindstorms. Papert argues that the computer culture in which we now have the opportunity to raise our children offers "powerful ideas" for problem solving that can transfer to many other areas of life. Papert believes that the greatest benefit technology will bring is not exactly in the effect upon the mind (this would be more of a substantivist position than Papert would countenance), but more subtly in the new kinds of thinking that computers encourage and the ways in which computers require us to master them. It's not just that computers do things to us; rather, we do things to ourselves, good, enriching things for the most part, as we do things to them. Learning a programming language, for example, requires one to become a sort of epistemologist, to have some interest in and sense of how knowledge is constructed and identified.

But just as with substantivism, the theorists comprising the instrumentalist camp are anything but one big happy family. Anti-technology instrumentalists present a forceful challenge of their own, usually from a more or less left-wing social-critical perspective. The Marxist historian David Noble exemplifies this strain of thinking. According to Noble¹³, despite the advertised liberatory promise of technology and its alleged value neutrality, technology is actually having seriously deleterious effects upon the mass of society. Noble examines the ways work has changed in settings where various technologies have been introduced, such as the shop floor of the machine tool industry. In such settings, what technology has tended to do is empower management by de-skilling labor into its constituent parts. Workers are divested of their training-intensive and nearly irreplaceable craft-based knowledge, and they become mere equipment maintainers (at least those who are not laid off) who are easier to replace. If you are easier to replace, you have proportionately less power to, say, strike. This is a pattern consistent with the politics of capitalism, the ongoing battle between management and labor. High-technology tends to give management the upper hand in the above sense. One need look no further than one's local McDonalds to see this logic in operation. Despite the ad nauseam mantra "high-tech, high-wage," it is clear that in most cases high-tech more likely means the opposite, namely, low-skill (and hence low wage). Do the new fast-food cash registers that require the mere pushing of an icon require more or less skill than the old fashioned kind? The answer, of course, is less, and this is why we are approaching the point where trained animals might be able to perform some of these jobs. Workers in such situations have very little power.

Noble's argument speaks vividly to librarianship today. For years we have felt as a profession that the more removed we become from the creation and maintenance of the technology, the more marginal we become as professionals. Our disastrous response has been to require our profession to become increasingly systems-based. Carol Tenopir¹⁴ suggests that our future holds a "shift in emphasis" toward the design of systems and software. The LA Times hails the coming of the "CyberLibrarian" or electronic information filter, and the exit of the traditional librarian role.¹⁵ Library schools are emphasizing "information science," hiring Ph.D.'s in business, computer science and communications, at the expense of those with the M.L.S. In the current whole-hog for the silicon environment, it is as if actually being a librarian matters less and less. The most frightening thought is that it may be meaning less and less, too.

IV. Pluralism as a Way Out (or In?)

Substantivism and instrumentalism in all their varieties clearly represent important avenues for librarians to pursue. But it is the third type of theory, pluralism, that will in the end be the most fruitful for us. Pluralism offers a sort of middle ground between the intuition of substantivism that technology seems at times to be a force unto itself and the instrumentalist intuition that human beings are always at the helm, by recognizing the usefulness of both frameworks. It also tends to root itself farther outside of pure theory and closer to the actual day-to-day practice of teachers or, in the present context, librarians and their patrons. Pluralist theorists from educational research, such as Karen Sheingold and Stephen Kerr, offer a key contribution by arguing that the teacher and the tool ought to be understood as forming a "partnership" with one another. The partnership theory applauds the presence of computers in the learning environment. Computers offer "new learning interactions," the organization of complex tasks, communication among students and teachers, and the simplification of much of teaching's largely unrewarding tasks such as record keeping.¹⁶ But the mode is also clear to state that the benefits of computers can only happen in an environment in which "the teaching part of the equation is given pride of place."¹⁷ Our romance with technologies must be tempered by the truth that:

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If districts, schools and teachers decided that the central (if not the sole) purpose of technology in the schools was to help achieve active learning and adventurous teaching, then technology would have a comprehensive, exciting and forward-looking role in the schools. This purpose would bring focus and depth to the use of technology, would enable schools to take advantage of the expertise of teachers who are already using technology to further these goals, and would probably have significant educational impact.¹⁸

Thus it is left to the educators to determine whether or not our technologies are serving proper educational ends. The ambiguity concerning who is minding the store, the technology or the humans, is resolved in favor of a partnership in which they co-develop.

Kerr argues that (David Blacker's) RID theorists "ignore that education is more than just the transfer of information," since their principal mission is to design instructional procedures that minimize the teacher's role.¹⁹ Kerr wants technology used to bolster the teacher's role, to empower teachers within their schools, and "allow them to find and amplify their collective voice."²⁰ He recognizes that truly educational interaction with technology must take into account the entire picture; learning is so much more than the cognitive measurable outcomes. It must also be recognized that sometimes it is advisable to "follow along" with technology, as it may help break up ossified and unproductive habits and routines; sometimes technology can crash the party with positive results. We should be open to that possibility. But whether or not the results are interpreted as positive depends upon having persons around who are capable of exercising judgment, otherwise known as professionals. But the only way we could ever recognize this happening is if we understand that the partnership between technology and education must be grounded in a firm commitment to the teacher's role in fostering students' growth. "It is not just a matter of altering our outlook so as to take advantage of the possibilities of the machine; we can with justice "ask" the machine to adapt itself to us, too."²¹

We have been doing that in libraries for decades. The current climate, however, reveals a slippage away from a true partnership in favor of a dangerously unthinking adaptation to the powerful tides of industry, government and student demands, which, as if in an incestuous closed-circuit work themselves into a frenzy via advertising, the "whoosh" of fast information (regardless of its quality), and the demands of the workplace. These dangers are even more pronounced in the library than they are in the classroom because we lack the institutional acceptance and professional vision of our place in the process of education that "true" teachers often have. But if we were to clarify that vision, establish our goals in relation to the vision espoused in accounts that put educational considerations first, we could get out from under the vexing spell of the seemingly all-powerful technological behemoth. We could then, and only then, aim for that partnership to grow together, with technology giving us exactly what we need to supply our vision, even as we give technology what it needs to grow in an educational manner.

This article may actually offer a neo-Luddism of a certain type. The Luddites responded to an absolute loss of partnership between themselves, the lifeworlds they valued and the tools that were necessary to support their roles in a fast-industrializing Britain. Libraries must respond in kind. Only this time we should not smash the machines, but we should smash the complacency and non-reflectiveness surrounding those machines. We are obliged to do so, as professional librarians, teachers and as human beings.

Footnotes

1. Richard T. Sweeney, paraphrased from an opening address at the IACRL Fall conference. Technology, Telecommunications, and Tomorrow, October 12,1995.

2. Discussed in Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine. Vol. 1, Techniques and Human Development. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967).

3. Carl Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). Mitcham's discussions of Mumford, Jose Ortega Y Gasset, Jacques Ellul, and others is one of the best text-book style synopses of philosophies of technology I have encountered.

4. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine. Vol. 2, The Pentagon of Power. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970): 155.

5. Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 36-38.

6. Several "Neo-Luddites" can be credited with such thoughts. See, Mumford, 1967, 1970; Jacques EUul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. (Addison-Wesley, 1995); Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. (New York: Doubleday, 1995).

7. Kirkpatrick Sale, 1995.

8. See David Blacker, Sources for a Philosophical Critique of Technology in Education. (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1994) (Doctoral Thesis from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); Andrew Feenberg, A Critical Theory of Technology. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Everyday Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

9. Ellul, 1964.

10. C. A. Bowers, The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-Neutrality of Technology. (New York: Columbia University, Teacher's College Press) 1988.

11. Blacker, 1994:5.

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12. Robert Heinich, "The Proper Study of Instructional Technology." Educational Communication and Technology ]ournal 32 (Summer 1984): 67-87.

13. David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

14. Carol Tenopir, "An Interview With Carol Tenopir," OCLC Newsletter, May/June 1995: 22-23.

15. Emily Gest, "Jobs of the Past, Jobs of the Future," Los Angeles Times Magazine, August 20,1995: 26-27.

16. David Blacker, "Three Visions of Technology in Education and Beyond," Planning and Changing: An Educational leadership and Policy Journal, 25:1/2 (Spring/Summer 1994): 95.

17. Ibid, 94.

18. Karen Sheingold, "Restructuring for Learning With Technology: The Potential for Synergy," Phi Delta Kappan, 73: 1 (September 1991): 21.

19. Stephen T. Kerr, "Technology, Teachers, and the Search for School Reform," Educational Technology Research and Development, 37:4 (1989).

20. Ibid, 11.

21. Blacker, "Three Visions of Technology in Education and Beyond,": 95.

References

1. Blacker, David. Sources for a Philosophical Critique of Technology in Education. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1994.

2. Blacker, David. "Three Visions of Technology in Education and Beyond." Planning and Changing:

An Educational leadership and Policy Journal, 25:1/2 (Spring/Summer 1994).

3. Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Everyday Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

4. Bowers, C. A. The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-Neutrality of Technology. New York: Columbia University, Teacher's College Press, 1988.

5. Ellul Jacques. The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.

6. Feenberg, Andrew. A Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

7. Heinich, Robert. "The Proper Study of Instructional Technology." Educational Communication and Technology Journal 32 (Summer 1984).

8. Kerr, Stephen T. "Technology, Teachers, and the Search for School Reform." Educational Technology Research and Development 37:4,1989.

9. Mitcham, Carl. Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

10. Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine. Vol. 1, Techniques and Human Development. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967.

11. Noble, David. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

12. Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basic Books, 1980.

13. Sale, Kirkpatrick. Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution:

Lessons for the Computer Age. Addison-Wesley, 1995.

14. Sheingold, Karen. "Restructuring for Learning With Technology: The Potential for Synergy." Phi Delta Kappan, 73:1 (September, 1991).

15. Stall, Clifford. Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

16. Tenopir, Carol. "An Interview With Carol Tenopir." OCLC Newsletter, May/June 1995.

17. Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

*]essica George, Reference Librarian, General Reference & Documents, Milner Library, Illinois State University Normal. This article is derived from a contributed paper that was read at the Illinois Association of College & Research Libraries (IACRL) Fall Conference in October 1995; the paper received the Honorable Mention award.

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