Role of Education

The Work of Education in the Age of Electronic Interaction
Maria Bakardjieva
University of Calgary

Richard Smith
Simon Fraser University at Harbour Centre ABSTRACT In this paper, we attempt to learn from Walter Benjamin (1968) by analyzing the observed and anticipated implications of electronic interaction for post-secondary education. We consider both the dangers of alienated, commodified education and the “unexpected fields of action” for educators that arise from technologically mediated interaction between teacher and students. We begin with the premise that the practice of education is comprised of two main communication processes: information transmission and interaction (instructor-student/s; student-student/s). Then, we explore how information and network technology transforms these processes. We consider what this means for the overall structure of post-secondary education including roles, relationships, and economies. Introduction: The Relevance of Benjamin’s Analysis Walter Benjamin’s (1968) article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” has been a touchstone for writers reflecting on the impact of modern technological society on our culture and especially the artistic aspects of culture. In the present article we consider another important facet of culture, post-secondary education. With the advent of computer-mediated communication, postsecondary education faces issues similar to those that inspired Benjamin’s original essay. Benjamin (1968), writing in the early 1930s, recognized the profound cultural repercussions of the technologies of mechanical reproduction proliferating in the late 19th and early 20th century. The technological possibilities for unlimited reproduction of the works of art, Benjamin pointed out, brought forth deepcutting transformations in the relationships between the work of art and its audience, between artist and audience, and respectively, in the practices and institutions of artistic production and consumption. What Benjamin (1968) was reflecting upon was the dismantling of the traditional forms of social existence of art—art as ritual—and its transformation into one of the multiple social spheres governed by the laws of capitalist production. Reproduction technology was deeply implicated in that process because it allowed the organic link between work of art and context (e.g., cathedral and wall painting) to be broken. Henceforth the work of art could be freely moved from one context into another, from one pair of hands into another. Thus transportability had proven to be an aspect of commodification. Benjamin (1968) called the dimension of the work of art that was lost in its reproduction and transportation (“the eliminated element”) its “aura” ( p. 220). The work’s aura is its “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” ( p. 220). Mechanical reproduction brought the work of art into countless different situations—the studio, the drawing room, the dining room, etc.—but no matter how perfect the copy, the quality of the artistic presence was, Benjamin thought, always depreciated. . . .that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it
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reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.” ( p. 221) Note that Benjamin approached the related concepts of crisis and renewal dialectically. For example, the destruction of the aura was linked to both depreciation (of the ritual value) and the emancipation of the work of art from its dependence on ritual and tradition. The connection between the artist, his/her work, and his/her audience is another organic link that no longer seemed to hold in the age of mechanical reproduction. This was exemplified in Benjamin’s (1968) comparison of live theater and cinema. The work of theater could not exist separately from the actor. For it to come into existence, actor and audience had to meet face to face and spend time in each other’s physical presence. The camera—a reproduction technology—introduced the possibility of peeling the image off the physical body, heart, and soul of the actor and putting this image in mass circulation. In doing that, the camera became the actor’s master. The actor lost his/her central position on the stage and, instead, became an object under the command of those (directors, editors) who had control over the camera: “The camera director in the studio occupies a place identical with that of the examiner during aptitude tests,” Benjamin noted. “What matters in these tests are segmental performances of the individual, not his/her character as a whole” ( p. 246). The relationship between actor and audience changed as well: instead of leading the viewers into the ritual space of the stage performance, the actor was subjected to a new more disengaged and critical scrutiny by the audience. (Benjamin, 1968, p. 228). The film actor also lost the opportunity to adjust to the audience during performance. Consequently, “the audience takes the position of the camera, its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed” ( p. 229). Thus, the ritual awe and spiritual bonding with performance and performer experienced by the audience in the theater is replaced by fragmented and disengaged consumption on the part of film audiences. The practice of punctuated commercial breaks and channel flipping in television viewing, as our generation well knows, has brought this disengagement to further extremes. The technologically ensured transportability of the actor’s image was closely related to the alienation of the actor from the product of his/her work. Benjamin (1968) brilliantly analyzed this by bringing in the following quote from Pirandello’s novel Si Gira: The film actor feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage, but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort, he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice and the noises caused by its moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence. . . . The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera ( p. 229) While facing the camera, the actor knows that ultimately, he/she will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. However, “this market where he offers not only his labour but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in the factory. This may contribute to this new oppression, this new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera” (Benjamin, 1968, p. 231). That which is lost with the destruction of the actor’s aura is replaced by the “artificial build-up of the personality outside of the studio, the cult of the movie-star fostered by the money of the film industry – the phony spell of a commodity” ( p. 231). An Immense and Unexpected Field of Action Notably, Benjamin (1968) did not blame this estrangement and the substitution of aura with the phony value of stardom on the technology of cinema as such. “So long as the movie-maker’s capital sets the
Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 2, Issue 4 (November 2002), 1–13 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.2.4.002

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fashion,” he wrote, “no real revolutionary merit can be attributed to contemporary film” ( p. 231). The capitalistic exploitation of the film in Western Europe, he contended, denies consideration of modern man’s legitimate claim to be an active participant in the art of film - that is, to gain access to authorship, to a voice, to get the opportunity to portray him/herself (see p. 232). The technology and the new art of film, Benjamin (1968) pointed out, provide man with new ways to represent his environment and enrich his field perception. Similar to new conceptual apparatuses (e.g., Freudian theory), they isolate and make analyzable “things which heretofore had floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception” ( p. 235). Behavior shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. From this circumstance follows the mutual penetration of art and science in the practice of film. By close-ups on the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. . . . Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. . . . The camera introduces us to unconscious optics just as psychoanalysis introduces us to unconscious impulses.” (Benjamin, 1968, pp. 236 – 237) Furthermore, by its technical structure, film induces a new dynamic of perception. It produces “a shock effect on the spectator’s senses” (Benjamin, 1968, p. 238) – the viewer’s process of association is interrupted by the constant change of images. This shock, like all shocks, should be cushioned by “heightened presence of mind” ( p. 238), Benjamin contends. Thus, the film corresponds to “profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus – changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen” ( p. 250). Benjamin’s analysis of the way in which the technology of mechanical reproduction affected the work of art in terms of its status as a commodity and as a locus for action and perception was an important milestone in cultural theory. Do these same insights apply to the use of technology in other realms? Can we draw on Benjamin’s analysis in order to understand the recent developments in the field of education? In the next section we set out to explore this question.

The Work of Education Before we can begin to map the recent technologically stimulated developments in the field of education on to the axes of transformation of art isolated by Benjamin, we need to establish the legitimacy of the comparison. A good point to start looking for analogies between “the work of art” and “the work of education” is the analysis of the lecture as a form of talk offered by Erving Goffman (1981). A lecture, according to Goffman, is an event immersed in a traditional context—that of a university or a scholarly society—exhibiting a highly ritualistic character. Here are a few defining characteristics of the lecture as a form of talk. It is focused on the figure of the speaker defined by the unity of animator - he/she who talks; author he/she who has prepared the content (text) that is presented, and principal - he/she who believes personally in what is being said and takes the position implied in the remarks (see Goffman, 1981, p. 167).
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The lecture differs from the written text by its—at least purported—responsiveness to the current audience and local situation. This is typically achieved through contextualizing devices such as topical references and other topicality tokens, fresh talk, etc., through which “mingling of the living and the read” (Goffman, 1981, p. 168) is performed. The speaker presents him/herself in front of the audience in his/her full bodily being (along with his/ her “aura” in Benjamin’s terms); he/she opens up and exposes his/her self, makes him/herself accessible only to the members of the listening audience, a more exclusive type of access compared to that provided by the printed text. Gaining access to the speaker, with his/her authority, the audience also gains ritual access to the subject matter over which the speaker has command. Thus, the speaker’s exposure to the audience, his/her commitment to the particular occasion, his/her addressing of the particular situation constitute important “ritual work” (Goffman, 1981, p. 191) which distinguishes the delivery of a lecture from its printed version. The speaker invites the audience to take up the alignment with the text that he/she models for them – an invitation, Goffman (1981) says, carried in an intimate and comradely way suggesting that people like them—the audience—are fully equal to the task of appreciating the text. Audiences in fact attend because a lecture is more than a text transmission, . . . They attend in part because of something that is infused into the speaking on the occasion of the text transmission, an infusion that ties the text into the occasion. . . . Plainly, noise here is a very limited notion. For what is noise from the perspective of the text as such can be the music of interaction - the very source of the auditor’s satisfaction in the occasion, the very difference between reading a lecture at home and attending one. (Goffman, 1981, p. 186) Post-secondary educational institutions structured around the lecture as a central mode of knowledge delivery share much of their ritual-embeddedness with traditional forms of art. The typical speaker in university lectures—the professor—is a close relative of the theatrical actor. She performs in front of the student audience with her aura of authenticity emanating from her – for good or bad. She performs the ritual described by Goffman with the main goal to connect the content at hand with the immediate situation. She seeks to mingle the textual and the living, to align the audience with the text and to assure members of the audience that they are perfectly capable of understanding the scholarly content (text) of the lecture. She also helps them see that this content is relevant to their lives. All these objectives and the pertaining actions performed by a lecturer are subsumed under the mundane notion of teaching. Goffman’s analysis helps us appreciate the university lecture not simply as a form of information delivery, but also as a subtle form of interaction. But of course interaction in educational work only starts with the lecture. Questions after class and during tutorial discussions, seminars and office hours, feedback on assignments – all these represent a continuum of interactional forms covering the whole range between professor-centered and -controlled to student-centered and -controlled, as well as the different participation modalities: from one-to-one and small-group to many-to-many. These interactions, it should be noted, have always taken place in the traditional context of the university following ritualistic rules of setting-selection, turn-taking, and content appropriateness. The fact that these components of the work of education have survived since Socratic times throughout the numerous transformations that the institution of the university has undergone demonstrates that interaction and education have been seen as inseparable. Or, as Vygotsky (1978) has put it, for an intellectual operation to become possible at the intramental plane, it has to be performed at the intermental plane first. In other words, in order for a new intellectual task to be mastered by the individual student, it has to be tackled by a couple or team including more experienced members. It is worth noting that older technologies of mechanical reproduction that transformed the sphere of art radically, affected the sphere of education in smaller, more superficial ways. The possibility to print
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textbooks in multiple copies did not make lectures obsolete. And despite the early belief in the transformative capacity of educational film and television, their application in the sphere of education remained limited and contained within a few specific delivery formats. We believe the impact of these earlier reproduction technologies was limited because they never promised a solution to the interaction problem. In the case of the printed textbook, what reaches the reader is quite evidently the text only. Broadcasting a recorded lecture, while allowing a glimpse of the personality of the lecturer (divested of her aura), cannot accomplish the ritual work necessary to fully involve the listener in the occasion, or the translation work linking abstract ideas with concrete experience and the textual with the living. Some limited involvement and connection can be accomplished in the broadcast media, but only at considerable cost. Thus, these technologies are ascribed secondary functions in the practice of post-secondary education – those of carrying and delivering content that is further interactively processed in the classroom. As for the rest of the interaction forms institutionalized by the university, the technologies of print and broadcasting have had close to nothing to offer. The role of the university professor remained intact in the face of the text-reproduction technologies. Scholarly texts and educational films shown in the auditorium or on a designated TV channel functioned as a supplement to the lecture and other face-to-face interactions. Importantly, the professor remained the author, the animator, and the principal of his/her lectures and his/her overall university course. And that was so because of the necessary component of professor-student interaction that was believed to be central to the development of students’ minds. The university remained the meeting place for professors and students, the setting where printed texts, films, lectures, and discussions were mixed together systematically to produce the authentic experience of the university course. Thus, the university course, the central unit of post-secondary education, is understood as a complex structure comprised of textual and interactive components, designed and animated by the professor and representing his/her intellectual product. This product, analogous to the lecture, is inseparable from its author. And while the textual components may stay the same over a certain number of re-plays, the interactive ones are always different, responding to the different student audience and the changing features of the local and global situation. The Age of Electronic Interaction With the advent of the technologies of electronic interaction, the question of whether the interaction component of post-secondary education could be automated, or technologically simulated began to emerge. One can recall the discussions of the late 1970s and early 1980s provoked by the experimentation with tutoring computer programs. “Will the teacher be replaced by the computer?” was a question persistently haunting these debates. The new generation of information and communication technologies raised these replacement hopes and fears to a qualitatively new level. The interest in the possible application of these technologies in the sphere of post-secondary education is related to developments in the broader social and economic context. On the one hand, the dynamics of the job market have provoked greater demand for post-secondary education among people of all ages, including those in need of re-training. On the other hand, education has been conceived—mainly by the high-technological industries—as a yet-unutilized terrain for capital expansion and growth (e.g., Schiller, 1999). Put together, these two interrelated trends have generated the search for new and more efficient forms of supply of education to a larger consumer market. The similarity of this situation with the one analyzed by Benjamin (1968) is striking. At the beginning of the 20th century, technologies of mechanical reproduction were utilized to meet the increasing demand of “the masses” to “bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly” ( p. 223) and to participate in the world of art. This greatly increased mass of participants, according to Benjamin, produced a change in the
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mode of participation, quantity transmuted into quality (see p. 239). The corollary of this process was the subsuming of art into the capitalist market, the commodification of its works and the alienation of its authors’ labor. Contemporary technologies of electronic interaction demonstrate the potential to precipitate similar transformations in the field of education. For the first time, the university course—this complex and indivisible work of post-secondary education—seems to be separable from its human author and animator—the professor—and mountable on an electronic carrier. The meeting of bodies and faces—students and professors—seems to be non-inevitable. Interaction between expert (or somebody convincingly acting as such) and learner, as well as among learners, is now possible at a distance through computer and video conferencing. Accordingly, the university as a meeting-place becomes non-essential. A new, technologically intensive, and expert-labor sparing educational scenario—one that is purportedly more efficient—is starting to take shape. In this still mostly theoretical scenario, a host of star-professors produce full-fledged post-secondary courses— lectures, demonstrations, exercises, assignments, etc.—that become loaded on a powerful electronic carrier, for example a CD-ROM. An army of less qualified (and low-paid) tutors acts as mediators between this material and the students through computer-mediated communication in the cases when such mediation is considered necessary. Ideally, students can learn from their computer screens alone. In more interactive versions, students can have electronic access to their peers, tutors, and even the expert (course author) through electronic mail and video and/or textual electronic conferencing. This is the vision of online education that, some believe, can undermine the institution of the traditional university. The institutional structure that will be more appropriate for supporting the new technologyintensive practice of education delivery will be comprised of courseware factories where selected experts will produce educational materials for the video camera and the computer screen. Their audience, the student consumer, will be beyond their reach. The mediated professor will have no opportunity to adjust to this audience’s personality and particular situation. Instead, these professors will be compelled to respond to the reaction of the market and the strategies of their industrial management. Finally and definitively, the product of the professor’s labor will turn into a commodity produced for a vast anonymous market, detached from the traditional context and the interaction ritual of teaching. The professor’s job will cease to have the characteristics of a vocation and will become no different from the job of the factory worker – alienated, quite possibly de-skilled, and subjected to management from above. David Noble (1998) has provided us with a detailed projection of this ominous future in his “Digital Diploma Mills.” In this widely discussed article, Noble argues that the distribution of digitized course material online and the push towards online instruction represents an effort to commodify and automate higher education led by purely commercial interests on the part of university administrations and corporate profiteers. Noble charted the fault lines in the battle over higher education and registered the early manifestations of faculty and student resistance. Agre (1998) has suggested that, if this educational supermarket scenario indeed materializes, the assembling of a degree program from courseware available off the shelf will have to involve a centralized administration looking after the content of courses, the accreditation of programs, and the testing of students. This, Agre believes, could lead to the standardization of curricula and a shift in the locus of control from faculty to administrators. It becomes clear that, indeed, a new economic model of education emerges under the guise of a new technological model (see Feenberg, 1999a). But what is the actual relationship between the new technologies and the capitalist mode of production that is being foisted upon university education in their name and with their help? Does the application of electronic technology necessarily bring forth the new profitoriented economic model of post-secondary education? Or are these technologies a vehicle that the architects of the commodified education model have been waiting and searching for? Is it possible to separate the two models? If we assume for a moment that such a separation is possible, then we can

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begin to explore the opportunities for shaping and applying the new technologies of electronic interaction with alternative educational values and goals in mind. Electronic interaction in the educational sphere does not need to be reduced to the for-profit exchange of educational commodities envisioned by commercial players. As Kellner (2002) has pointed out, a critical theory of technology should also see how media and technology “could be used, and perhaps designed and restructured, for positive purposes . . .” ( p. 3). Thus, our attempt in this article is to formulate a stance that takes faculty and students beyond resistance and urges them to reclaim the technologies of electronic interaction. An immense and Unexpected Field of Interaction Let us go back to Benjamin once again in order to see where the positive alternatives might lie. Benjamin’s dialectical framework highlights the multitude of legitimate pedagogical claims that can be and have been laid on the new information and communication technologies. Opposition to the capitalist exploitation of these technologies should not consist solely in rejection and resistance. The creative involvement by faculty in the utilization of the new technologies in ways that intensify human interaction represents another legitimate alternative to commodification and automation. Benjamin’s analysis of film prompts us to consider contemporary university professors’ and students’ right to access, authorship, and voice in the new webs of electronic interaction (see Benjamin, 1968, p. 232). The Web now provides us with ways to represent links between objects in our environment and to build knowledge about them in new ways. It has definitely enriched our field of perception by making us more aware about interrelations among seemingly independent entities, as well as about the inexhaustible variety of perspectives on any single issue. This variety has had a well-recognized shock-effect on the cognitive frameworks of the inexperienced explorers of the Web, Usenet, and Internet chat rooms comparable to the shock effect that film had on the senses of early viewers. And of course, we can repeat after Benjamin (1968) that this shock, like all shocks, should be cushioned by a heightened presence of mind, by a greater effort to make sense of the world in all its complexity. As for interaction proper, an immense and unexpected field has been opened by the new technologies within the sphere of education. Our lecture halls and our classrooms, our offices and hallways appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the Internet and burst this close and familiar world asunder “by the dynamite of the tenth of a second” of electronic exchange. And should we be disturbed by the fact that now “in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris”, we can “calmly and adventurously go traveling” (see Benjamin, 1968, pp. 236 – 237). The Grassroots Version of Educational Electronic Interaction Modern readers of Walter Benjamin’s essay on mechanical reproduction must try to put themselves back into the time in which it was written: when it was still possible to recall a time when mechanical reproductions did not dominate the artistic or creative world, when the world of art was primarily a human/ craft undertaking. The shock of this change, first with movies and then with radio (and later television), is difficult to recapture, given our long and intimate relationship with those technologies in the present. For many of us, the mechanical (and now, electronic) reproduction is the rule, and the “live” performance very much the exception. Interestingly, live performances now increasingly are augmented with mechanical and electronic supplements, which in some cases overwhelm the live performers. Who hasn’t spent a considerable amount of time at a rock concert looking at the (much larger) projected version of the singer rather than attempting to discern what is going on in the distant stage? The one place where we are not yet so jaded is in our educational experience. The live “performance” is still the prototypical classroom scenario. In this regard, we in the beginning of the 21st century are much more open to the kind of insight that Benjamin was able to muster because, for us, education—as art was for Walter Benjamin—is somehow being transformed before our eyes. We notice it because in part it is so dramatic, just as motion pictures, recorded music, and radio were at the turn of the last century. In particular, we notice those aspects of the technical transformation of
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education that appear to break, weaken, or attenuate the connection between student and teacher. The diminished role for face-to-face learning in many computer-enhanced distance learning scenarios strikes us—as motion pictures did earlier generations—as a potential for failure in the aura of the teacher. And with that lessening of the relationship we suspect a withering of the educational experience. In some ways, however, our attention may be misdirected. In this, too, Benjamin’s insights can help us redirect our thinking into those aspects of the transformation that matter, and those aspects that hold hope for recovery or improvement in the relationship between students and teachers. What we mean by this is that those who criticize efforts to mechanize and automate the delivery of educational products may be missing something. In the remainder of our article, we describe some of the ways that we have experimented with alternative scenarios for electronic interaction in post-secondary education. In our work on an undergraduate course in communication, we have attempted to take up some of the challenges presented by the opening immense field of interaction. Similar initiatives have proliferated at numerous universities to the point where it has become almost a norm for a post-secondary course to have a web site. While grassroots innovation by professors and instructors in involving the Internet and the Web in teaching has been widespread, few discussions have occurred with regard to the actual pedagogic benefits of these technologies discovered in the process. In what follows, we recount our own experience not because it is unique, but in order to invite reflection on the meaning and value that the technologies of electronic interaction have for those working in the trenches of university education. First, we experimented with some of the new expressive means provided by educational technology in relation to the traditional format of the lecture. We built on the time-tested technique of creating a common visual object of discussion—analogous to pictures, charts, graphs, etc. shown or drawn on the blackboard—using computer technology. This common object could be placed on the screen during lecture, analyzed and discussed, and immediately after the class, it could be placed on a Web page to be accessed and reviewed by the student audience. The lecture notes were posted initially to the class mailing list, and in later versions of the course, on the Web, for further review and individual preparation. Objectifying our text in this way, we aimed to relieve our listeners from the necessity to capture the unfamiliar content that was ‘delivered’ to them in written notes within the limited time of the live talk. Rather, we believed we could give them the chance to follow and ask questions on the material in-class without taking notes. We also encouraged them to jot down their own thoughts and ideas provoked by the content of the lecture, or in Bakhtinian (1986) terms, their own responding words. In this way, our face-to-face time with the students could be transformed from “content delivery time” into exploration and appropriation time. This, we believe, increased the interactive value of our contact. Although this practice, along with the different situation of listening and involvement it created, was initially startling and even frightening to the students, by the end of the course it was well appreciated. In fact, acceptance soon grew into expectation, with some students requesting that the lecture notes from future classes be made available. It should be emphasized that, in most cases, the lecture notes that went to the mailing list were not a simple reproduction of what we held in our hands during the face-to-face delivery. Small but subtle revisions prompted by students’ questions and reactions during lectures were addressed in this ‘post-delivery’ version. Omissions were filled in and extended explanations of parts that had been received with empty glances were added. This practice, we believe, increased the interactivity of our lecture text. The technology gave us room to better adjust our material to the particular audience and to the local situation. Combining the direct, but momentary, contact with the students with the indirect, but permanently open, electronic communication channel allowed us to upgrade our relationship with an additional feedback loop. We could now respond to their response received during the face-to-face lecture.

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In addition to providing a method for correcting and compensating for errors in the transmission of information, the opportunity to continue to “speak” to our students after the end of the lecture also gave us the opportunity to reflect on what we had said. This reflection, importantly, was taking place in a semi-public place. The students could watch us as we changed our minds, pursued points further, or added emphasis to new issues. We would like to think that by doing so we allowed students to realize that the appropriation of knowledge is an iterative, on-going activity. We were able to model the behavior of a reflexive thinker, something that is very difficult to do in the time-limited, performanceoriented lecture format or the rigid textbook. The class mailing list was used for another form of interaction that, to our minds, represents a novel genre of educational communication. The students were encouraged to e-mail questions to the instructor after lecture (after all, not everybody’s query can be addressed in the short break, and not every student feels equally confident to ask a question in class). Subsequently, the instructor would respond to these questions personally, or quite often, would write a combined answer to a series of them and post it to the class list. This communication format can be seen as an extension, and maybe even transcendence, of the traditional categories of direct/indirect, individual/group interaction. It created conditions for the group to benefit from the curiosity of separate individuals, as well as for the instructor to multiply the effect of his/her work. In some versions of this course, the class mailing lists or conferencing software have been used for interstudent discussion of the material with or without the participation of the instructor. Electronic discussion among students complementing their face-to-face meetings carries a significant pedagogical potential along with a number of unresolved problems that each instructor has to address with a view to the unique objective and design of his/her course. We will not explore issues in depth here, but would like to include this option in our survey of the new field of interaction emerging in computer networks. For a discussion of this aspect of electronic interaction in the university context, see Bakardjieva (1998), Feenberg (1989), and Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, and Turoff (1995). To hold our course together as a persisting systematic whole and yet to be able to add and change parts of it when necessary, we created and maintained a course web site representing the separate components of the course and reflecting their interconnectedness. We did not apply any ‘course template’ offered on the market. Instead, we designed our site as a true map of our own course structure using generic web authoring tools. Importantly, both on designated pages on the course site and in the Web-versions of the lecture notes and figures, we provided links to sources located outside the local space of our course. In this way, the cognitive space of our course was immersed in the greater knowledge space of the Web. We provided pointers to things connected to what we had said and done in class and noted how they were related to bigger and more complex issues and discourses transcending the virtual boundaries of our immediate focus. Subsequently, the research work that our students did in the course, their papers and projects were written in html format and put up on the Web. The students knew that the product of their course work would be published for the world to see, evaluate and, eventually, benefit from. We would like to believe that this affected their motivation and mobilization. They were acquiring a voice in the scholarly matters covered by the course and were given the opportunity to use that voice to interact with a wide potential readership. Although we did not consider it necessary and meaningful to count the number of hits received by our students’ Web pages, we found ourselves among those who benefited from their research and insights. In teaching subsequent versions of our course, we used project sites created by students in the previous year as sources of information and illustrations linked to our lecture pages. Reflecting on all these new forms furnished by the technologies of computer networking, we notice a complex web of educational interactions emerging. The new technologies, as Benjamin (1968,

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pp. 236 –237) had predicted, allowed us to go traveling and to discover new dimensions of our own classroom and the outside world. We gave the technology tasks that were meaningful to us as teachers and explorers. Yes, we objectified our thoughts in texts, tables, and Web pages. Our course design took the shape of a Web site. But the purpose of this objectification had nothing to do with the creation of free-floating educational commodities. We, the living instructors, remained at the centre of our own work, thus preserving the unity of animator, author, and principal highlighted by Goffman (1981) as one of the essential features of the lecture as a form of talk ( p. 167). We put more hours in our course compared to what we would have done in the traditional scenario, and our teaching assistants spent longer in the lab helping students to acquire Web-authoring skills. We found ourselves compelled to resort to the services or the collegial volunteer help of computer technicians, web designers, and researchers. The students had to do a great deal of work, possibly more than they had bargained for. The intensified interaction between the students and ourselves, and between our classroom and the world, improved, we believe (although we know of no reliable way to demonstrate it), the quality of our students’ learning experience. We enjoyed a higher quality teaching experience in which we were able to better read the minds of our students and adjust our work accordingly. In the end, we want to suggest not that technology should be uncritically embraced, but that the instructor/professor should struggle for his/her aura, for the right to remain at the center of his/her own work (and in control of it) with or without technology. Second, where intensification of interaction is involved, one can expect to see increased working hours that deserve recognition. Third, no matter that expressing oneself through the new technologies is bound to become easier and more intuitive, more solid technical and artistic support should be available to instructors/professors in the age of electronic interaction. Many projects are underway at present, bringing technology into the educational experience in a variety of ways. Many of these seek, as we have pointed out, to “optimize” or “rationalize” the role of the professor/student relationship. The belief continues, in some quarters, that this is the type of process that is amenable to industrial-type improvements. The creation of “star” professors, delivered to the home and classroom on electronic media, for example, is a classic example of this kind of thinking. Another direction of automating education has been marked by efforts to create software for automatic essay scoring (Foltz, Laham, & Landauer, 1999) based on a method called Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997). According to a Coopers & Lybrand white paper, the savings in professorial labor that this method promises are impressive: “A mere 25 courses of packaged instructional software could handle 80% of enrollment in core undergraduate courses” (Coopers & Lybrand, 1997, quoted in Feenberg, 1999b). The program has been touted to introduce improvement not only in efficiency, but also in quality compared to the human marker: “‘The program has perfect consistency in grading, an attribute that human graders almost never have,’ said Darrell Laham, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado who helped with the development. ‘The system does not get bored, rushed, sleepy, impatient or forgetful’” (Associated Press, 1999). It would be fair to say, however, that so far many of these attempts have not been remarkably successful (see Noble, 2001). As teachers, we may not want to relate with our students predominantly and/or exclusively at a distance, but even when holding on to the traditional approach, we can relieve the stress of time and distance by employing technology in meaningful ways. This could bring post-secondary education “spatially and humanly” (see Benjamin, 1968, p. 223) closer, as mechanical reproduction did with art, to larger student populations, to those who work and have families, for example. These categories of students could suffer less deprivation in the quantity and quality of their interaction with professors and classmates within an electronically enhanced traditional learning scenario. In the case of our course, we felt freer, for example, in assigning team projects because we knew that our busy students could collaborate (interact) with each other not only in the limited face-to-face time they had in the classroom, but also over e-mail and the Web. In sum, the direction that we suggest for critical and creative thinking and faculty involvement with the new technologies of electronic interaction points beyond the “replacement” discourse: Will professors be
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substituted by CD-ROMs? Will the university as we know it be superseded by digital diploma mills? We believe that faculty can creatively appropriate computer-networking technology with a view to a more widely accessible and more intensely interactive education. Conclusion At the same time as the debates over new technology and education are raging, Web-based course sites and online communication forums initiated and constructed by individual instructors proliferate. As the philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg (forthcoming) has observed, actual online education is emerging as a new kind of communicative practice. A grassroots version of online education is taking shape, driven by the imagination and curiosity of academic instructors who are interested in exploring the publishing and communicative affordances of the Internet. The new medium is being appropriated by these educators in the name of the enhancement of students’ access to up-to-date knowledge, teacher-student interaction, teamwork among students, and many other revered pedagogical reasons. What is the significance of this grassroots practice and its prospect as an alternative model of online education? Academics translating their work into digital space face numerous unclear issues of copyright, ownership, privacy, control, and organization of academic communities. Claims have been made, for instance, that with regard to faculty course materials the first rights belong to the university. University administrations North-America-wide have expressed the belief that, for the most part, the university holds the copyrights for instructional materials created as part of one’s compensated workload (see Noble, 1998). But are faculty members indeed compensated for the additional hours of work, learning, and creativity that they put in their online materials and communication? Some recent discussions indicate that faculty seeking to enhance their teaching with technology face problems when applying for promotion and tenure. Despite all the hype, academics have to struggle to receive recognition for their pedagogic innovations involving technology (see Young, 2002). So, what do we, as university instructors, gain and lose when we expand our teaching into digital space? Do we join the brave new world of automated education? Or do we create the groundwork for a great educational community spanning institutional and disciplinary boundaries? Do we become vulnerable to greater administrative control and exploitation, or do we open the ivory tower of the university for wider access and participation? Our aim in this article was not to provide definitive answers, but to draw attention to the insights that can be gained from a time-tested analytical framework – Benjamin’s analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. We can only hope that this approach will summon the experiences of the members of our audience and will become a starting point for a discussion among the grassroots practitioners of online education. COLUMBIA ONLINE CITATION: HUMANTIES STYLE Bakardjieva, Maria, and Smith, Richard. “The Work of Education in the Age of Electronic Interaction.” Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education 2.4 (2002). http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/journal/ejournals/simile (insert access date here). COLUMBIA ONLINE CITATION: SCIENTIFIC STYLE Bakardjieva, M., & Smith, R. (2002). The Work of Education in the Age of Electronic Interaction. Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, 2(4). http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/journal/ejournals/simile (insert access date here). BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Maria Bakardjieva is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. Her research focuses on the interaction between communication technology and society. She is particularly interested in studying the ways Internet use is intertwined with daily practices in various areas of life. She is currently working on projects examining Internet use at home and the
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ethical norms governing online communities. She is also making her first steps in employing and evaluating videoconferencing as a tool for scholarly collaboration and teaching. Her most recent articles have appeared in The Information Society, Ethics and Information Technology, and New Media and Society. She helped with the editing of the volume How Canadians Communicate, forthcoming from The University of Calgary Press. Richard Smith is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Applied Science. He is also the Director of the Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology. He has recently completed research on policy issues for the use of technology in higher education as well as in K-12 schools. At present he is involved in projects that look at the future of Internet technologies from a user experience perspective, “clustering” in the new media industry, and the transition of scholarly communication from paper to on-line environments. AUTHOR CONTACT INFORMATION Maria Bakardjieva Faculty of Communication and Culture, Social Sciences Building 334 University of Calgary 2500 University Dr. N.W. Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2 N 1N4 Voice: 403-220-7730 Fax: 403-210-8164 E-mail: [email protected] Richard Smith School of Communication Simon Fraser University at Harbour Center 515 West Hastings Street, Room 2622 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6B 5K3 Voice: 604-291-5116 Fax: 604-291-5230 E-mail: [email protected] References
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Foltz, P.W., Laham, D., & Landauer, T.K. (1999). Automated Essay Scoring: Applications to Educational Technology. In Proceedings of EdMedia ‘99 [Online]. Available: http://www-psych.nmsu.edu/~pfoltz/reprints/Edmedia99.html [2002, September, 18]. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Harasim, L., Hiltz, S.R., Teles, L., & Turoff, M. (1995). Learning networks: A field guide to teaching and learning online. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kellner, D. (2000). New media and new literacies: Reconstructing education for the new millennium. Paper presented at the California Association for the Philosophy of Education (CAPE) meetings, UCLA, October [Online]. Available: http:// www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/kellner/newmedia.doc [2002, September, 18]. Landauer, T.K., & Dumais, S.T. (1997). A solution to Plato’s problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis theory of the acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review, 104, 211– 240. Noble, D. (1997). Digital diploma mills. First Monday, 3(1) [Online]. Available: http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/ noble/ [2002, September, 18]. Noble, D. (1998). Digital diploma mills part III: The bloom is off the rose [Online]. Available: http://communication.ucsd. edu/dl/ddm3.html [2002, September, 18]. Noble, D. (2001). Digital diploma mills, part V: Fool’s gold [Online]. Available: http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl/ddm5. html [2002, September, 18]. Schiller, D. (1999). Digital capitalism: Networking the global market system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Young, J.R. (2002). Technology in tenure decisions. Chronicle of Higher Education, February 22 [Online]. Available: http:// chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i24/24a02501.htm [2002, September, 18].

Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 2, Issue 4 (November 2002), 1–13 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.2.4.002