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John Schostak
Manchester Metropolitan University
2006
(This paper was presented at the APERA conference, Hong Kong, 2006)
Education always has to meet the challenges posed by new technologies and their
implications for new forms of social life. If there is a difference now, it
is because the contemporary challenges have to be seen in a global context where
firstly a sense of the real is fused with the virtual; and secondly, the virtual
enables a new way of interacting with both real and imaginary objects underpinned
by software capable of triggering real effects. The production of imaginary
constructions is a typical way in which people unify and collapse distance in
order to create manageable and manipulable identities and communities (c.f.
Anderson 1983). A powerful image of the sense of the power of technology to
break boundaries, was provided by Hannah Arendt (1958) meditating upon the human
condition. In the preface of her book she referred to the successful launch
and orbiting of the Russian satellite Sputnik in 1957. This event was seen as
“the first step towards escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.”
When the moon was finally reached and pictures sent back of a tiny fragile blue
globe in the midst of a vast black universe, there was an image of the Earth’s
wholeness, its fragility, its vulnerability. The sense of the earth had shrunk,
a sense picked up in Marshal Macluhan’s (1967) idea of the global village.
However, this global village, this earth floating in an immense void contrasts
with the typical experience of a given individual that the world is so vast,
the states, corporations and institutions that control their lives so powerful,
and the multitudes of people so many and so different from each other that little
can be done to make a real difference. Yet, at the fall of the Soviet block
in the late 1980s it seemed that one more barrier to the wholeness of the world
was removed, there was at last the possibility of a new world order and the
realisation, as Fukyama (1992) asserted, of the ‘end of history’.
This ‘end of history’ had been proclaimed since Hegel saw in the
Napoleonic victories the emergence of a world to be ruled by will and reason.
From this point on there would be no big battles between opposing political
visions. For Fukyama and others Western, liberal, capitalist democracies had
won. There was no serious alternative. Even if many disagreed, even if there
are still wars, these are wars of adjustment. The single political and economic
order had conquered the world, only the details remain to be resolved.
Such images and experiences of a unifying, shrinking world are being reinforced through day to day developments in communications technologies that are dissolving the borders between Nation States as people set up on-line businesses and seemingly turn the whole world into a single high street. All this is currently familiar. Education, it might seem, can only have the task of preparing people to fit in with this globalised and unified vision of the political, economic and social order. Its task being merely to bring about the attitudes, behaviours, skills and knowledge(s) required for the triumphant rational order, an order Weber (2001) foresaw in his description of the puritan work ethic as a foundation for industrial society:
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into evervday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
(Weber 2001: 123)
With information technology, Weber’s iron cage becomes increasingly powerful. The mechanisms of control and surveillance are much more subtle. We already know about and are used to finance companies, health organisations, school systems, and governments recording and aggregating vast data bases. Such information can be used as much for individual benefits as for surveillance purposes and criminal uses. In addition, where Fukyama saw the end of history, Huntington (1996) saw its re-emergence through a ‘class of civilisations’, a view reinforced by President Bush in his now infamous formulation ‘the axis of evil’. Information technologies can be used to produce and maintain such imaginary formulations of opposing ‘civilisations’. For Baudrillard (1994) the result is that ‘real action’ is replaced by simulated actions in cyber representations of ‘what is happening’. However, the issue here is not about how to stop the technological developments that facilitate this but about how to ensure their proper and legitimate use. In this regard, it seems to me, education has a vital role to play. At stake is the issue of the relationship between individuals, communities and the use of globalised technologies by public and private institutions. To what extent do such technologies enhance or restrict individual freedoms and the development of communities?
According to Hardimon (1994) Hegel considered that what distinguished the contemporary world from previous ages was a particular relationship, perhaps tension, between individuality and community. In short, individuality under modernity is characterised by a desire for freedom of self expression and development in the context communities that enhance the development of individual freedoms. There is an inner paradox here in that communities require some sense of commonality, some sense of shared understandings, as well as a willingness by individuals to sacrifice some freedoms for the benefits that accrue from communal living. It is this apparent incompatibility between freedom for the development of one’s interests and the need to give up some freedoms to belong to a community that provides the starting point for thinking about the role of education in the context of globalisation. In 1983 I first conceived of this issue in a book titled ‘Maladjusted Schooling’. By this I meant schools maladjusted to the needs and interests of children. The question is, will schools employ technologies to reinforce inequalities of power or to increase the freedoms of individuals in the context of developing communities that enhance those freedoms? To explore what is at stake I want to set the scene based on what seems like science fiction but is actually a report promoting the development of possible technologies under the European funding programmes.
A Glimpse of Next Generation Technologies
The European Union’s ISTAG (2001) report is an exploration of the possible
information technologies of the near future focusing on the idea of ‘ambient
intelligence’:
The concept of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) provides a vision of the Information Society where the emphasis is on greater user-friendliness, more efficient services support, user-empowerment, and support for human interactions. People are surrounded by intelligent intuitive interfaces that are embedded in all kinds of objects and an environment that is capable of recognising and responding to the presence of different individuals in a seamless, unobtrusive and often invisible way.
There are, in a real sense, new beings having new kinds of identity that can interact with people. Although they do not yet exist, the report describes several ‘scenarios’ that were developed by Schostak (2005) for use in a proposal to the EU:
Alice is event-manager of sporting events that can take place in any European venue. Currently she in organizing a series of football matches. The first is to take place in Manchester. On her way from the office to the stadium her route is organized by her P-Com, her ‘key of keys’ that ensures her route is smooth.Alices’s P-Com “allows her to move around in an ambience that is shaped according to her needs and preferences.” In particular the P-Com has been designed following research into gender preferences and a full range of special needs (in aiCity terms). “In the past travelling involved many different and complicated transactions with all sorts of different service vendors, often with gaps and incompatibilities between the different services. In the past few years a series of multi-service vendors (MSVs) have emerged offering complete packages of services linked to the P-Com that tailor the user’s environment according to their preferences. User preferences are set up during an ‘initiation period’ during which personal agents (personal-servants or perservs) are instructed or learn how to obey their master’s (owner’s?) wishes. These agents are in continual negotiation with those of participating service providers (such as shops, rental companies, hotels and so on)”. ISTAG report p26)
Alice is guided by ambient information displays which show the optimal way to the stadium and the upcoming events. These have been specially designed not to be distracting. While this takes place in the background she calls up her personalised collaborative work-management intelligent agent. This is an intelligent agent that automatically keeps track of the multiple collaborative work groups that she is involved with. Since she is driving, it ‘knows’ not to distract her attention with visual displays but to inform her orally of the state of play and await instructions. Its task is to prioritise which collaborative work groups need her input and which ones she needs input from.
If this is a matter of everyday experience what will be the impact on schooling?
Currently, we are used to searching the internet, using voice over internet (e.g., Skype) , or video conferencing (e.g., AIM) for communications between people, making on-line bookings for hotels and travel, playing games or meeting people in chatrooms. Many people use or create on-line communities to share information, develop interests in common or chat about everyday events. However, I am particularly interested in how scenarios like that described above transform the use of communities for the creation, management and sharing of ‘intelligence’. Communities for the sharing of ‘intelligence’ are not new, nor are they simply due to information technologies. People have always met in groups, created networks and organised information. Thus:
Intelligence communities have always existed and are vital as tools for education and schooling. They are not the invention of the modern technologies. Nor are they idealistic deschooling conceptions. They are practical and already functioning groupings of enthusiasts and like-minded people. Individuals tend to seek out others, or associate with others having similar interests. In conversation (recall that one meaning of intelligence involves ‘intercourse’ or ‘communication’) they share views and criticise or explore the implications of certain views. In short, intelligence communities create intelligence, that is ‘know-how’, ‘critical insight’, ‘informed opinion’, ‘intersubjectively validated facts’, and other intelligent behaviours or products.
(Schostak 1988 p. 227)
Intelligence in the sense that I am using it here, is much more than just the use of reason or research in the production and manipulation of shared information and knowledge. It is fundamental to what it means to be a member of human societies engaged in the everyday politics of living and working together. As a basic political act, people form associations with others for reasons of increasing their sense of security, that is, for protection against predators. It is to that extent a rational act calculating the relative advantage of complete individual freedom as against the possibility of attack by others who are stronger and thus more able to assure their own desires. By engaging with a community of people who have different interests there is the need to handle the multiplicities of meanings, intentions, feelings, values, beliefs inherent in communicating and being with others. However, information technology of the sort described in the scenario above introduces new factors: there is the activity of a non-human intelligent agent and a globally distributed community that is made present anytime, anywhere within a virtual space; and there is the possibility for individuals to create avatars that become alternative identities through which they interact with the avatars of others. Although people have always been able to mask their identities and their true intentions, contemporary and near future technologies enhance this ability and extend the impact globally, creating virtual worlds populated by a fusion of real and virtual identities.
This is a world, therefore of hybrid identities constructed through the mediation of intelligent agents supporting communities that live, play and work in the context of cities where the buildings and spaces are as much virtual as real (Schostak and Fraser 2005). Imagine now the idea of a city composed of multiplicities of communities developing, sharing, exploiting knowledge bases covering the whole range of human activities. Imagine then, that anyone, anywhere can be a citizen of such a city that has been constructed to be a fusion of the real and the virtual. It is a place where information is intelligently selected, organised and ‘pushed’ towards those who want it from any database anywhere in the world. Imagine too, the development of the reasoning and decision making capabilities of virtual intelligent agents. How soon will it be before an intelligent agent ‘writes’ an essay, a dissertation, a thesis? It may seem like a world located more in science fiction, in films like the Matrix, rather than in sober reality. How far off is such a world? It is certainly the aim of major research programmes as prefigured in the ISTAG report. To some extent it is already here. Intelligent management of information is already built into search engines. However, the intelligent agents of the scenario are still some years away. But more fundamentally, it is the existence of globalised communities that will really challenge contemporary education. What would happen if for example there were 100,000 children on line with say 11,000 teachers and that this constituted what they accepted as an educational community. And what if the children spent four to five hours a day on line. Would that now constitute a school? Many might still consider that this is mere fantasy. Actually it already exists . Its existence already represents a real challenge to the way in which contemporary schooling and education is organised. Such a global community having members from all around the world challenges conceptions of a common cultural identity or a ‘national’ education defined by state laws inside a particular territory. In short, the political implications of such communities allied to future technologies sets up a major challenge for educationists.
The Challenge
There are many questions that need to be debated: What now does this mean for
the concept of ‘school’? Who is it for? Who ‘controls’
its agendas, its courses, its contents, its ‘standards’? And ‘who’
is on-line, what are their intentions? How are the vulnerable to be protected?
What counts as a ‘curriculum’, ‘standards’ and ‘learning’
in an age of globalised intelligent technologies? What are the local impacts?
These are not new questions.
In Schostak and Schostak (2006) a project was described that took place in the early 1990s in Northern Portugal. The purpose was to employ the then new technologies in the service of education in small remote rural schools. the rational was expressed by a local project leader as follows:
La télévision encourage la passivité, mais l´ordinateur rend les enfants active. Nous ne nous sommes pas interessé au ordinateur comme ordinateur. Nous voulons utiliser l´ordinateur pour combattre la technocraccie. L´important c´est que l´ordinateur est en service de la culture. (Televisions encourage passivity but computers make children active. We’re not interested in computers simply as computers. We want to utilize computers to fight Technocracy. What’s important is that computers are in the service of culture.)
L´education n´est pas pour la foi. Il y a ceux qui ne peuvent pas poser les questions. Il y a ceux qui ne peuvent pas justifier ce qu´ils pensent. Il y a une manque de confiance en eux-memes. L´education est lié au développement d´un sens critique. (Education is not about faith. There are those who can’t pose questions. There are those who can’t justify what they think. There’s a lack of confidence in themselves. Education is tied to the development of a critical sense.)
(Since neither Portuguese nor English were common to the speakers, the conversation was undertaken in French. The project was undertaken 1990-2. The notes and the conversation was undertaken by Bev Labbett for the Evaluation of the Paneda-Geres Project at the Universidade do Minho, Portugal, EC funded.)
This I think sets out the challenge. It is an age old challenge: how to engage
critically with the world about? However, it has now to be interpreted in the
context of the technologies prefigured in the scenarios I have described.
Are We Ready?
Being ready for such a challenge involves reflecting yet again upon the nature of education itself and the role it has traditionally been expected to play. I have always made a distinction between schooling and education in order to distinguish between those processes through which minds and behaviours are moulded to fit the needs of social organisation and the opposing processes through which individuals assert their mental capacity to challenge and resist. The former I refer to as schooling, the latter as education. Together they evoke the tension I referred to at the beginning of the paper between the individual’s desire for freedom and the need to sacrifice some freedoms in order to benefit from the security and cultural possibilities offered by community living.
Rather than being an insoluble problem, the disagreements that result from multiplicities of individuals and groups engaging with each other, can be a fundamental motivation for the development of creative solutions. Drawing on the work of the political philosopher Rancière (1995, 2004) the question is how to create the conditions in the emergent worlds for people to deal with disagreements. In his view the political organisation that is best able to do this is a form of radical democracy where each individual has no more power than another to dominate and thus must engage in debate and compromise in the production of communities that best support individuality as well as afford protection and the cultural benefits of social life. In effect such communities are self-renewing and self-transforming educative communities. How can such a view be mapped upon the worlds of the emergent technologies? Who is the teacher and the pupil in such worlds? In the on-line community of 100,000 young people earlier mentioned, the role of the teacher is not central and there is no classroom. Rather it is a self organising community with services provided by the company that created it. What now, if, as in the scenario described above, the role of the teacher was in fact taken over by the intelligent agent shaping agendas, pushing information and managing learning communities? Are we really ready for such a challenge?
References
Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York, Verso
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, introduction by Margaret Canovan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; first published 1958
Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor The University of Michigan Press
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ISTAG report (2001) ISTAG report: Ambient Intelligence at Horizon 2010, http://www.euresearch.ch/fr/2300.htm
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Schostak, J. F. (1983) Maladjusted Schooling: Deviance, Social Control and Individuality in Secondary Schooling, London, Philadelphia. Falmer.
Schostak, J. F. (ed.) (1988) Breaking into the Curriculum: the impact of information technology on schooling, London, New York. Methuen.
Schostak (2005) Future Scenarios: the imagined case of Alice, the sports events manager,
Schostak, J.F. (2006) Interviewing and Representation in Qualitative Research Projects, Open University Press
Schostak, J.F., and Fraser, K. (2005) ‘edCity - a New Learning Environment’, British Computer Society, http://ewic.bcs.org/conferences/2005/1stelegi/session1/paper12.pdf
Schostak, J. F., and Schostak, J. R. (2006) ‘Risking Education – including the excluded’, CESE conference, Granada, July; http://www.enquirylearning.net/ELU/Issues/EdList.html
Schostak, J. F, and Schostak J. R. (forthcoming 2007) Radical Research. "How to design, develop and write emancipatory research under 'normal' research rules", Routledge: London, UK