Week #1 Notes: Ullman and the culture(s) of computing

• What are the projects this semester?
• What is a seminar for?
• What are the readings for?
• Questions about Ullman 1997
• Thursday notes
• For next week

What are the projects this semester?

Details on the projects that are briefly described in the Project Pool.

What is a seminar for?

As an environment for teaching and learning, the undergraduate seminar is useful for subjects that are more concerned with ideas than with techniques. In a successful seminar, the discussions occupy a middle ground between extreme objectivity (e.g. definitions) and extreme subjectivity (e.g. non-verbalizable impressions), and promote learning and understanding through debate, the clarification of ideas, the refinement of arguments, and the experience of intellectual community.

What are the readings for?

The choice of readings in a seminar is designed to elicit discussion, of course, but the readings also allow participants to understand and evaluate particular ideas and arguments by seeing them projected into a text. This projection also allows participants to debate the ideas and arguments in a more depersonalized way than if the ideas and arguments were always tied to a particular person in the seminar.

Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine

1. Before the widespread use of computers, debates about the use of technology often concerned the sense in which technology should be considered "neutral" with respect to the way it is employed. The view that technology *is* neutral is sometimes called the "instrumental" theory. For example, you can use fountain pen technology to write a short story or prove a mathematical theorem, to write a thank you note to your aunt or a letter of protest to the editor of a local newspaper, to sign a stay of execution or a declaration of war. Thus, you might say that the fountain pen is neutral with respect to how it is employed, for good or for evil, intelligently or not, well or badly, etc.

   After the Second World War, however, a significant body of literature developed -- you can think of it as beginning with Martin Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology" -- that claimed that technology was not at all neutral, that technology (at least some technology) exercises as much power over us as we do over it. For example, we might say that the existence of nuclear fission technology has determined the nature of global politics as well as our sense of personal security whether or not anyone chose to have it be so influential. The non-neutral view of technology is sometimes called the "substantive" theory.

   Obviously, the role you think computers should play in education depends a bit on your position concerning the neutrality of technology/technologies. In chapter 4, Ullman addresses the neutrality issue explicitly, but you might consider the entire book a comment on this issue. What is Ullman's position on the neutrality of computer technology and how does it compare to your own views on the subject?

2. The subtitle of Ullman's book is an obvious reference to Freud's CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS. That book is beautifully written argument about life being a perpetual conflict between the individual's desire for freedom and the demands of society, and it begins with the famous sentence:

   "It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement -- that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life."

   Ullman's book is clearly about conflict as well, but what is the conflict about? If you were to imitate Freud's sentence so as to make it appropriate for a beginning to CLOSE TO THE MACHINE, how would you write it?

3. Like automobile commercials in the pre-desktop age, computer ads often promote an equation between technology and freedom (e.g. "Where do you want to go today?!"), and such an equation is often part of the rhetoric concerning the use of computers in education. Ullman's book is clearly a comment on some of the issues involved with such an equation. Compared to Ullman, and the views of your peers, in what sense(s) do you think the equation is true and in what sense not?

4. In our discussion of the "pathology" of the narrator in Ullman's book several people argued that the kind of behaviors portrayed in the book can be observed in other professions (e.g. the Law, the Theater) and thus may have more to do with general working conditions and life (in certain communities) in the 90s than with technology or working "close to the machine."

   In Chapter 5, however, the narrator talks about the experience of aging close to the machine, and specifically in a profession in which age is associated with obsolescence and valuelessness rather than expertise and wisdom (as it is in the Law or the Theater for example). Does this distinguish the life/work of the software engineer (and perhaps computer workers generally), and what do you think is Ullman's argument about its significance?

5. On Tuesday morning I was sitting in the Graphics Lab, and a graduate student I know walked over and said, triumphantly, "You know the feeling of finally solving a problem you've worked on for a WEEK?!" I was struck by the "week" part, as a criterion for judging a really hard problem; in most disciplines, even most technical disciplines, work on "hard" problems is usually measured in years. The experience made me realize again the extent to which the computer allows for, and even insists on, a compression of time, and so one question is how this time compression shows up in Ullman's book. More importantly, what are the consequences (for both problem solvers and the people affected by their "solutions") of modeling, solving, and/or simulating problems that have certain "natural" spatial and temporal dimensions, with techniques that so compress both the spatial and temporal dimensions? Similarly, are there issues associated with this kind of compression (which after all is also a kind of reduction) that we need to keep in mind when we build software for use in education?

6. As you finish CLOSE TO THE MACHINE, consider that the meaning of a portrait may depend as much on what the artist leaves out as on what she includes. What are some of the things/ideas/ activities that Ullman's narrator downplays and/or leaves out (e.g. topics the narrator doesn't give much/any thought to or things you do in the course of a week or a month that she doesn't seem to do), and what difference does this make to the story she is telling and the meaning of that story?

   Thursday notes

   • On Tuesday we distinguished between some of the issues that had to do with the "pathology" of the programmer, and those that had to do with the power that computers and those who program exercise (consciously or not) over those who live and and work in a computer-permeated society. While both sets of issues are important, we will be most interested in the latter, which have important implications for the use of computers in education.
   • The discussion of Question #3 above that began on the list has been excellent, and Ericka's initial posting was particularly rich. Two readings which bear directly on some of the questions she raised are Weizenbaum 1976 and Kranzberg 1985. See especially Weizenbaum's Introduction, which concludes with the statement:

     "We can count, but we are rapidly forgetting how to say what is worth counting and why."

     and Kranzberg's explanation of what he calls the "First Law" of technology:

     "Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral."

   • Finally, I want to discuss the ideas from Ullman that you think most relevant and important to keep in mind as you begin thinking about your software projects.

   For next week

   • Read the two assigned chapters from Dewey's Democracy and Education for Tuesday, and the Russell and Scheffler readings for Thursday. As you read these selections, think about the following questions, both from the point of view of how the authors do/might answer them and how you would answer them:

     1. What is a system of education for, and what are institutions of education for?

     2. Who is state-sponsored education for and what is it for?

     3. What is and should be the relationship between schools and the social/political structures in which they exist?

     4. What difference should the existence of computing technologies and computer networks, and their place in contemporary society, make in our consideration of questions #1-3?