Too many colleges fail to hold technology to academic standards of cost analysis and assessment
Technology advocates — of which there are many in business and education colleges, campus libraries and bookstores, student services and teaching centers, and, of course, IT departments — seem out of touch with today’s budget realities, lost in 1990s-era technostalgia.
Those well-intentioned colleagues are still caught up in the hype of the “information age” that promised a global village and also delivered a big bill, driving up the costs of a college degree to such an extent that access to education is a much-larger issue on most campuses than access to the Internet.
Consumer technologies — whether they be avatars of virtual worlds or “clickers” used in classrooms to allow students to answer questions by remote control — have corporatized rather than democratized academe.
The typical college purchases, installs, and maintains the hardware and software of technology companies through which marketers often gain access to professors, staff members, and students. Those marketers sell additional products or services directly to individuals rather than going through the formal procedures of campus purchasing departments. Sales reps for approved vendors typically count on employees’ ability to use institutional credit cards at their own discretion for expenses under $2,000, or to spend even more for “add-ons,” an accounting term that justifies discretionary purchases to enhance existing equipment, such as new graphics cards for computers that use virtual-world applications.
Those practices, in effect, circumvent the more cost-effective method of having vendors respond to an institution’s request for proposals (RFP’s), chosen on a low-bid basis.
Many institutions, for example, absorb the costs of training faculty members and other employees to use technologies — costs that used to be covered by vendors responding to RFP’s.
More disconcerting are instances of companies charging students fees for use of a particular technology. In academe any fees charged to students usually require approval by trustees. But some technology companies are getting around that. In 2006, for example, our IT experts at Iowa State University identified this problem and replaced a certain clicker that was used in our classrooms because the company’s business model required students to pay a $15 registration fee. Worse, that vendor, through its service, had access to some student exams and surveys, which required our lawyers to draft a document that transferred to the company liability for any breach of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
In return for access to our “customers,” technology companies give us services and software that do not uninstall, that infect systems so that other programs fail, that overbill for upgrades (really downgrades in disguise), that permit data mining (compiling user information and reselling it to consumer lists), that restrict use with license agreements, that flood networks with spam and junkware, and that obscure pricing and outsource support.
I’ve warned about those realities before in The Chronicle, but the above paragraph is also based on PC World’s recent article entitled “The 10 Most Annoying Habits of Technology Companies” by Rick Broida.
The technology companies are only part of the problem. The other part is made up of all the campus administrators and professors who embrace the hoopla rather than hold technology to academic standards of cost analysis and assessment.
The opposite of Luddites, these “hoopla-dites,” as I call them, ignore terms of service when patronizing a vendor or purchasing devices or applications, clicking on “agree” without fail, because it is all good. They think technology is free because someone else is paying for access, service, maintenance, and equipment. Hoopla-dites tolerate incompatibility issues because they can always buy additional technology or rely on IT departments to come to the rescue with a fix. They allow vendors and academic departments to make decisions in favor of technology without proper faculty or student input.
And hoopla-dites dismiss anyone who questions their vision of innovation and engagement at all costs. They respond emotionally when technology is assessed for outcomes, believing dubious results are part of the innovation process and doubtless will improve over time.
My point here is to show that advocating blindly for technology is as bad as disavowing it entirely. I invited experts to respond to my assertions, including the concept of hoopla-dites.
Christine Rosen, senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, said she was intrigued to witness “how insidiously and effectively computer and software companies have colonized academia.”
The culture of higher education “prides itself on research and rigorous inquiry in all other areas — and an abiding skepticism about the conventional wisdom,” she said. But in the area of technology, academic culture seems “uncritically enthusiastic, judging by the amount of money administrators are spending on technology on campus.”
Rosen believes that technology has become a status symbol for institutions — “akin to having a successful sports team that draws alumni and student participation (and dollars).” But does technology really serve any of those roles? Does it attract students or donors? Few institutions are taking the time to answer that question empirically, she said.
The reason, Rosen said, is related to a theory by the late Neil Postman, communications scholar at New York University, who warned that technology becomes dangerous when it achieves mythic status, as it has in the hoopla-dite mind. At that point, little can be done to modify or control the proliferation.
Nonetheless, she adds, administrators should factor not only the price but the time that professors and students spend learning, using, fixing, and updating new technologies rather than mastering subject matter or doing research.
Andrew Keen, a London-born former academic, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a blogger, and author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, believes we are “in the 1950s now in terms of all the optimism about the digital revolution, equivalent to the Eisenhower years.” Eventually, he says, society will have to endure a reaction reminiscent of the 1960s.
“My greatest fear is that the digital utopianism of Web 2.0 will degenerate into the whole-scale destruction of mainstream media. That’s Web 3.0. Then,” he prophesied, “Web 4.0 would be a Luddite reaction to that digital utopianism, a Luddite reaction of the children of the YouTube generation, sick and tired of the narcissistic culture of their parents.”
Paul Gilster, a journalist who wrote Digital Literacy and The Internet Navigator, is unsure about the narcissism but often encounters educators whose goal is not to produce “enlightened individuals but ‘users’ who know how to get the most out of the latest applications and hardware.”
Anyone who dares to criticize “the technological baseline” is condemned, he says. “This is hardly the kind of critical thinking that should be a core principle of higher education.” Indeed, Gilster adds, the adoption of technology “ought to be something we discuss with due respect to earlier tradition, to future possibilities, and to each other.”
Jeffrey Cole, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future, analyzes the pros and cons of technology and, like Gilster, encounters hoopla-dites “who become rigidly defensive” when the effectiveness of technology is measured in assessment studies and new-media research.
“Although more universities are giving professors the discretion to cut the wireless ‘plug’ in the classroom, many still see technology as the ultimate solution to all problems,” he said. We need objective assessment because “the IT guys are too enamored of the engineering features of the technology and frequently overdesign or simply miss the real uses that people want.” Luddites, on the other hand, have attitudes “filtered by an overall disdain (or hatred) for how technology is changing the old ways.”
The changes I’m talking about in cost containment and technology assessment “can only come from the users,” Cole said, “the people who see the real application of technology to the lives they actually lead. It is the users who will demand transparency in all they do, and it is they who can provide the data for effectiveness studies” conducted by universities or technology centers like his own.
Bryan Alexander, director of research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, advises educators on the effectiveness of technology for learning. He recommends that pilot programs be assessed to scale, “namely that the larger and deeper the impact of a technological implementation, the fuller the review.”
He also observes that “Web 2.0-published content” — blogs, wikis, social-networking sites, and the like — “has not been able to drown out content disseminated through other more-traditional platforms,” like The Chronicle and “the world of scholarly communication (journals, society newsletters, e-mail Listservs, conference presentations).”
Some criticism of technology is truly alarmist, Alexander said. But he also said that responsible criticism is more widely accepted now — even by IT advocates — especially when it concerns practices of the megacorporations like Microsoft and Google.
For a long time, students’ loans provided easy money to cover spikes in tuition and finance our technological proliferation. But that era has ended, and a new one has dawned, focused on containing expenses and maintaining enrollments. When institutions are asked to cut costs, they can do so in two primary ways: They can cut courses and programs and they can cut technology.
To prepare for that reality, all of us need to focus more on the hidden costs of technology. We need to assess technology to weed out ineffective systems and applications and preserve those that truly enhance our educational missions. We need to make sure we aren’t allowing corporate motives to guide our educational decisions. My recommendations:
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Assess the product before making the investment. Technology is not free; it comes with costs and learning curves that may determine whether adoption is in the best interest of students, professors, and staff members.
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Continue to test technologies after purchasing them, analyzing whether the cost is worth the learning outcome.
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Evaluate terms of service. Consult with campus lawyers when user agreements shift liability to the institution or allow access to student records through a company’s hardware or servers.
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Check with purchasing officials about the feasibility of sending out formal requests for proposals before using institutional credit cards to buy new technology or enhancements.
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Reject incompatible systems. Don’t just rely on IT staff members or your unit’s budget to fix problems caused by vendors. If a system is continually crashing, it’s time to stop using it.
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Advocate transparency. Terms of service, assessment data, and IT-related budget decisions should be made a matter of record online. Chief information officers should be models of openness.
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Do your part to contain costs and lower student fees before cuts are mandated by others or by the economy.
Adopting those suggestions rather than the latest untested technology may mark the end of hoopla and the start of an era of accountability for new technologies, elevating pedagogy over profit and ensuring access not to the Internet but to education.
Michael Bugeja, who directs the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, is author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age and Living Ethics: Across Media Platforms, both from Oxford University Press. For more information on this article, see http://www.interpersonal-divide.org.