" The savage and the animal at least have the need to hunt,to move about, etc., the need of companionship. The simplification of machinery and of labor is used to make workers out of human beings who are still growing, who are completely immature, out of children, while the worker himself becomes a neglected child. The machine accommodates itself to man's weakness, in order to turn weak man into a machine." Karl Marx, from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844)"Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way ... we call ... standing-reserve.... Whatever stands by in the sense of standing reserve no longer stands over against us as object." Martin Heidegger, from "The Question Concerning Technology" (1957)
"We may thus expect a thorough exteriorisation of knowledge with respect to the "knower," at whatever point he or she may occupy in the knowledge process. The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so. The relationships of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume - that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange." Francois Lyotard, from The Postmodern Condition (1979)
Introduction: Fourfold Educational Software?
We'll spend the day on Tuesday discussing the essay by Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa in light of the essays you're (already) writing (I hope). It might seem that both the writing assignment and the assigned reading don't belong in this course which, after all, is not a course in the philosophy of technology, literary/technology criticism, or anything where there seems occasion to talk about "things thinging". But in fact "Highway Bridges and Feasts" provides a very different way to think about both the project work we're doing in CS92, and the criteria by which we should judge the success of a piece of educational software. By thinking about what are termed "focal practices" in the essay, and the views of Heidegger, Borgmann, as well as the essay's authors, we might well come up with a framework for evaluating educational software quite different than those we've encountered thus far. For example, what might come of designing educational software so that, when it's used, it brings together what Heidegger called "earth and sky, divinities and mortals"?
But first we should talk about if/why it's really necessary to use phrases like "a thing thinging" to talk about how/whether to affirm technology.
Dreyfus & Spinosa 2002
We'll begin the discussion of the essay by discussing two examples of non-computer/non-digital technologies that illustrate the difference between affirming our focal practices and distorting them. We'll consider the Pressure Cooker (of which I've become a fan lately) in the context of the Passover Seder, and the AP exam in calculus (in the context of secondary school calculus classrooms). Can we find analogous digital technologies (in analogous contexts)?
The question that Dreyfus and Spinosa recognize as most difficult in thinking about the issues raised by Heidegger and Borgmann, is "How can we relate ourselves to technology in a positive way while resisting its devastation of our essence as world-disclosers?" First, we should be clear about everyone's answer to the question "World-disclosers?" Then, we can talk about reactions to the examples the authors give of experiences that preserve our nature as world-disclosers as opposed to "turning us into resources". The final question we want to ask on Tuesday is what it would mean to design/build instructional software that supports students as "world-disclosers" (i.e. integrated human beings) rather than as "standing reserve" (i.e. dis-integrated collections of skills). What is at stake here, for the authors, is hinted at in the following passage (following the teenagers-buying-a-CD description):
"If people lived their whole lives in [an] improvising mode, they would understand themselves only in terms of the skills that made the most sense at the moment. They would not see themselves as having a coordinated network of skills, but only in being led by chance to exercise some skill or other. Hence, they would not experience themselves as satisfying desires so much as getting along adaptably. Satisfying a desire here and there might be some small part of that."
A simpler way of putting it might be to say that what we think we can know, what we think we should do, and what we think we can hope for in life, will depend (perhaps enormously) on whether we think of ourselves as world-disclosers or as an accidental nexus of different skill-sets.
What would it mean to have design paradigms for educational software that took the distinction seriously and tried to promote/affirm/reenforce the world-disclosing nature of students? Can/should educational practices with the computer acquire the kind of significance that we could describe as possessing elements of "earth, sky, divinities and mortals" in the Heideggerian sense? If so, what sorts of educational software would support this kind of practice?
Why ask such abstract, heady questions? Well, one reason is that there is a tendency to lump computers in with earlier "instructional technologies" (e.g. television) and to view them as contributing to nothing but decline in humanistic education. Without aspirations grounded in humanistic goals as well as technical capabilities, it's difficult to see how computers could be anything but "trainers" rather than educators.
Designing for Interaction: A Process-Oriented Methodology
On Thursday, we'll take up an article written in a rather different style, and of course a different discipline as well. Strijbos et al try to formulate a set of principles or guidelines for CAL/CSCL/CSGBL grounded in goals more concrete (they claim) than can be derived from the words "collaborative", "cooperative", etc. In some ways this approach recalls Scheffler's admonition to be clear about means and ends
For Next Week: Read the articles by Shapiro (Tuesday) and Ainsworth et al (Thursday). The next step in the project process will presentations of prototypes and the results of testing, the week of the 27th. Final demonstrations will be held on Thursday, May 6th.