A Google search on "teaching with technology" returns 208 million hits. (This gesture can now replace the classic incipit of the Freshman essay--"Webster's Dictionary defines 'technology' as...") At a literal level, "technology" could be considered infrastructure: email systems, servers, the very stuff of the information-sphere. These are not my subject. "Instructional Technology" pertains to teaching and learning, but this distinction offers little clarity. If there is a problem with technology, it is not ultimately one of computing resources, hardware or software. The problem is the discourse, and the way it inflects and even distorts the way we think about pedagogy.

Nothing provokes more anxiety, enthusiasm or derision in faculty. Why? Why do institutions throw fistfuls of finite financial resources at technological solutions in search of problems? Why buy (or require of) everyone a laptop? Why buy students at a small liberal arts college a video iPod, where it's no more than a five-minute walk from bed to classroom? Why do we speak of "technology" as though it actually means something? Is it computer literacy? Course management systems? Online interaction in various forms? Technology unfortunately means too little and too much simultaneously. "Technology" is a hollow shell of a concept laden with external baggage, most of it unnecessary.

I have watched and participated in instructional technology since I began using the web and networked computing classrooms in the 1990s. I spent eight years working with teaching and technology initiatives for a non-profit consortium of colleges, and at institutions large and small. I have seen the technology change a good deal, but the discourse surrounding it has hardly changed at all.

Part of the problem is that there is a neo-conservative article of faith that holds that "technology" will solve all the social, environmental and fiscal problems we (that is, unregulated market economies and American unilateralism) have created. "Technology" in education can take on disturbingly similar evangelical, even transcendentalist tones that ring hollow when compared with lived experience. Part of the problem is that some academics perceive that the injection of technology into education means a Gatesian brave new world where teachers will ultimately be replaced by software and hardware vended by Microsoft and its allies. Or perhaps worse, "technology" evokes an information-sphere dominated by an inescapable Googlian web whose algorithms filter the informational life of every citizen based on personal data we voluntarily provide. The price of this Faustian bargain: a delusive godlike apprehension. But if there is one thing gods lack, as every undergraduate reader of Homer can tell you, it is a sense of personal responsibility. It is not that these dark outcomes are impossible; we appear to tumble helplessly or deliberately toward them with every passing year. To both undermine and illustrate this concept: Google "Epic 2014" and watch the video presentation those terms locate. Just as neo-conservative thinking consistently fails to factor in unforeseen consequences, so much of the current discourse about technology in education fails to ask about the unintended consequences of our investment in resources such as course management systems (CMS). To paraphrase Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth: Old teaching habits + Old technology = Predictable results. Old habits + New technology = Unpredictable and even undesirable results. Technology, unfortunately, has become too closely identified with large systems sold by large vendors at exorbitant prices, and a lack of systematic reflection about what habits need revision.

Technology can produce an anxiety over technical obsolescence, often expressed as frustration about the pace of change in operating systems, commonly-used software packages, and particularly course management systems. Institutions, in search of alternatives to the major platform Blackboard/WebCT, experiment with or adopt open source technologies. Faculty often feel as though they have made a major investment in "learning" and using a particular platform, and resent the switch. This concern over obsolescence often manifests itself keenly in faculty outside the sciences who have observed the rise of electronic texts and networked information; they sometimes decry what they see as the demise of print culture, and its human networks of gatekeepers, editors, and the practices of print-based research. The anxiety over the continual entropic obsolescence of technology is in part an anxious misapprehension of their own looming, spectral obsolescence.[1] Scientists, however, seem either to roll with it, or roll their own. They tend to understand that while technology changes, the disciplines abide, but not unaltered.

The rise of technology in education has analogues in other domains as well. In 1982, Neil Young made an album called Trans--variously hailed as Young making great leap forward in electronic music, or a tiresome exercise undertaken just because he could. Trans carries both inspired and insipid tracks, but on the whole it feels like someone saying "Look! I'm using technology!" We haven't progressed much beyond the "Look!" phase in instructional technology. Young, however, moved on to make a lo-fi rockabilly album the next year.

* * *

Technology at its best essentially means collaborative, networked communication. Technology is now inherently social. Teaching and scholarship has always existed within a broader context and longitudinal traditions that value public discourse, even among small groups of specialists or communities of practice. Technologically-enhanced teaching or scholarship should not always be sequestered behind the login page of a CMS, nor should it fail to situate itself within what could now be considered a broad (if not long) context of similar efforts which are still available online, and which continue to grow. We no longer need to reinvent wheels, but that should not stop us from expressing our unique perspectives on our areas of study.

A recent article by Gary Brown in Educause Review notes: "...the availability and readiness of a technology--however useful it might seem--does not ensure the readiness among those who use and might benefit from the technology." CMSs offer multiple networked communication tools but studies show that they are used by a small percentage of instructors. Most use it as shovelware. The CMS just becomes a "courier system for content and grades,"[2] while the more interactive and social features--journals, threaded discussion, chat--go unused because a) there are better alternatives for this sort of thing already out there or b) that kind of interactivity is foreign to the pedagogy of many faculty. The CMS ends up being a shoebox--a place to put stuff for the kids that is soon forgotten. I have a lot of experience with both shoeboxes and CMSs. I have yet to encounter a shoebox that was worth six figures, or required two or more FTEs to maintain it. Our use of CMSs "fails to leverage the social and burgeoning aptitudes of learner, fails to harness the power of collaborative learning and peer critique...,"[3] and we become, by our failure to understand the potential of the medium, that which we claim to oppose: purveyors of a standardized, homogenized curriculum that is dictated not by states, but by the structural requirements of a particular software package. Try lecturing for a semester without Powerpoint and see what happens.

We have mistaken technology for an end in itself based on its propensity to black-hole cash, its supposed cultural centrality stemming from the 1990s tech boom, and the rise of the Web as a mass medium. Techne is craft, technical skill. Faculty and students should be less consumed with focusing on the techne of technology, and more upon episteme, and the social production of knowledge. Such a shift would require that, until the MySpace Generation enters the academic pipeline, or until basic computing and a rudimentary knowledge of the most common computing languages (PHP, for example) become expected norms of literacy, we foster applications that require minimal investments of time and energy to become useful. Social networking applications such as Flickr, Facebook, and various weblog engines have made online publication and interaction almost as simple as it ought to be. Higher education could take a look at what people use willingly online, and reflect. Not all CMSs are bad, and not all uses of them are bad. At large institutions, with large lecture sections of fifty or more students, a CMS can offer an economy of scale for distributing materials, linking to external resources, and also a locus of interactivity in various discussion tools. But this is not the only way, and I would argue, not ideal for the smaller classes commonly found in liberal arts institutions, not ideal for courses that require more critical thinking, writing, discussion than memorization, recapitulation, and application of techne, or skill.

I recall an incident from Commuter State College circa 2002, where I once worked. A technologist recounts faculty complaints: "I am not being paid to do technology"--when in fact faculty were often lured with generous stipends to learn the rudiments of a course management system so simple, middle schoolers use it every day without any training. Our boss, an energetic 30-year veteran faculty member who was constitutionally averse to nonsense replied: "Those are people who will not make it, and will not get tenure." I had to stifle myself: Those are exactly the people who will get tenure. The decision-making for tenure has largely been outsourced to the print-based academic journal publishers and presses, and new models of scholarly publishing go largely unrecognized (again, outside the sciences).

Is this as it ought to be? Good writing or good science is good writing or good science, whether on parchment, paper, papyrus, hypertext or pure code. Yet, we accept that different media make different messages, and that the differences matter. If scholarly output and student work make use of the network of networks, that use must also be self-conscious and self-critical. When the discourse of technology becomes a discourse of networks--be they textual, data-oriented, or geographical information systems--and when a consciousness of the layers of networked communication infuses all educational endeavor, "technology" will cease to be an appendage to "teaching," or something extra-pedagogical.

Technology's essential meaninglessness is not a lack, but a proliferation of contextual meanings, a different definition for everybody: whatever wasn't around when you were born. This temporal consciousness now reveals itself in anxiety over digital natives (the coming influx of college students who were born after the advent of the Web), and digital immigrants (supposedly anyone over the age of 28). The real meaning of "technology" for teaching should be focused on a set of practices and a discourse surrounding the use of computer-mediated (desktop, laptop, handheld) networked communication. The real work of technologists ought to be the study and enabling of networked learning, networked scholarly communication, networked electronic publication, networked art and science.

Notes

[1] See Finochra Long, "Technology as Monumental History" in Breen, Conway and Macmillan (eds.) Technology and Transcendence (Columba, 2007), 82-102. I am particularly indebted to Kathleen Fitzpatrick's work on notional technology, obsolescence and anxiety. See http://plannedobsolescence.net.

[2] "Out of the Cabbage Patch." Educause Review, May/June 2007, 80-81. Available online at http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0738.asp?bhcp=1

[3] ibid, p. 80.