This is a printer-friendly version of this month's companion essay. Return to this month's introduction.
This essay examines the relationship between IT education and the needs of a democratic society. First, it reviews the models of IT education which are currently favoured. It then highlights problems which exist with them at the level of the individual student. It then expands on this to ask these may damage democracy in the UK (note that our focus is on the UK, although we hope the debate is relevant to other nations). Finally, it reconsiders IT education in order that some of these problems can be addressed; albeit stressing the obstacles which will have to be surmounted.
In 1970, Robert Wolff [1] suggested that it was the duty of every US citizen to familiarise themselves with the debates within nuclear science: the effects of fallout; the potential efficacy of shelters and government policies for keeping order after an attack; the mentality behind first-strike and second-strike strategies. He suggested that only through doing so could citizens make informed decisions when electing representatives who claimed to hold certain positions. More usefully, they could interrogate them on these positions, when it was the usual desire of candidates for office to gloss over these big questions in favour of more transient, but voter-friendly concerns such as tax and the state of the local train service.
Nowadays we might make a similar suggestion with regard to government policies around the information society. Should we not ask politicians why, for instance, there is such a wide digital divide (whether on a global or UK scale [2], it is hard to dispute that cyberspace and the activities taking place there are essentially the realm of the affluent)? Must we simply accept the overt commercialisation of the online sphere, and its lack of management? Though the supermarket and the library may well be able to live side-by-side online [3], in neither of these buildings would one expect to see a sign for one product or sphere of knowledge, and yet when one arrives there, find something else. But this happens frequently online; in information management terms how can one justify typing www.volcano.com into a browser but then reaching a site for Fox Home Entertainment?
These are just two ways in which our society's technical, political and conceptual relationship with information and information technology should be queried. And it has always been the role of higher and adult education to supply students with the knowledge needed to make such queries. The Dearing report (in section 5.11), as well as acknowledging the obvious need to take account of the concerns of industry, states plainly that the purposes of higher education are also:
Information and communication have vital roles to play in "shaping a democratic, civilised, inclusive society", as this essay will argue (see also this month's supporting essay). Many authors [4] have also recognised IT's pivotal position in the 21st century's global economy. Thanks to both factors, changes wrought by IT are of direct relevance to people's everyday lives. Therefore one would imagine that these issues would form an integral part of IT education (particularly, but not only, in universities).
Unfortunately this is far from true. On the surface it appears as if IT provision within the UK education system is in a strong position. IT is a key skill, compulsory at every level. At a time when other disciplines, particularly in the "hard" sciences, are facing cutbacks, IT education seems relatively awash with resources and support. But the current trend in IT education is to focus primarily on "computerised office" skills, often in a standardised package (frequently using external sources such as the ECDL). However, there are several problems with this approach even at the level of the individual student:
These are the problems which afflict prevailing models of IT education at the level of the individual. However democracy is, by definition, a collective endeavour. Why should problems with IT education translate into potential democratic deficits? Let us address that question through brief consideration of some social and political theory.
The work of the German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas is important here. Habermas is far from an easy read, even for those with some prior knowledge of political theory. Nor are his theories immune from criticism [7]. However, two important ideas drawn from his work will help illuminate our argument.
The first is that of the the public sphere. This is basically used to describe arenas in which political and social debate takes place amongst the "general public". Newspapers, community organisations, neighbourhoods, even public houses are included within the public sphere. The ideal is of active citizens using the informational resources of the public sphere to formulate individual and collective opinions and, in turn, acting as a democratic counterweight to the more formal policy-making of governments.
However, in his book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (published in English in 1989), Habermas describes how an active public sphere, through which individuals could freely debate political issues, is transformed into a "manipulated public sphere in which states and corporations use 'publicity' in the modern sense of the word to secure for themselves a kind of plebiscitary acclamation". [8]. Advertising, public relations, "spin doctoring", the transformation of broadcast and news media into big business; all retard the public sphere's ability to act as a genuine conduit for (undistorted) "public opinion".
These processes form part of the public sphere's colonisation by large bureaucratic organisations in the state and corporate spheres. Colonisation is the second important idea to be drawn from Habermas's work [9]. Ideally, all human beings are involved in a continuous process of production and reproduction of the lifeworld (which for our purposes here can be treated as a similar, although broader and more sophisticated, version of the public sphere - although this is a great simplification of Habermas's work). We do this by continually creating and adapting values and beliefs, coming to understandings, participating in social networks and freely forming our own identities and outlooks on life. These all bolster our more direct political involvement in public spheres.
However, colonisation involves the wielding of money and power to overtly influence or steer these processes towards strategic, self-interested goals. Although the increasing complexity of society requires a certain level of administration in order to function, Habermas believes this has gone too far. The manipulative practices already mentioned are actively removing the "general public"'s ability to self-determine the conditions under which their present and future lives will be lived. Examples of colonisation could include:
"Our economic and political elites think that most issues are beyond citizen competence. Their specialised knowledge requires our silence; self-directing citizen action is deemed impossible or dangerous.... It is only when citizens ask the power holders to engage in justificatory dialogues -- What reasons can you provide us with that justify our exclusion from dialogue? How can you justify your claim to have a superior conception of the good? -- that possibilities for developmental citizenship open up."
Education is an important means through which the lifeworld/public spheres are continually reproduced. If the needs of money and power are too strongly applied to education this risks turning it away from its ideal aim (to provoke enlightenment and understanding) and wholly orienting it towards pragmatic concerns such as the "needs" of industry. Learning for its own sake becomes devalued. This is totally against the vision of educators such as Eduard Lindeman who argued that the main, indeed, only justifiable purpose of education was to teach critical thinking. This would hardly be done by standardised curricula imposed by the very institutions (government, business) against which most critical thinking would be directed. Rather, it could only come from the bottom, by people working out for themselves what they wanted educating about.
Realistically, most educational practice is somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Educators should not ignore the pragmatic needs of students who wish to acquire skills relevant to future careers - nor should one fall into the trap of seeing all such skills as somehow "undesirable" from a democratic point of view. This kind of simplistic argument does more harm than good. But IT education has problems even approaching the sort of educational practice suggested by Lindeman and others [12]. The next section of this article discusses why this might be and what the consequences are.
Habermas's idea of the public sphere is regularly cited in discussions of "cyberdemocracy" (see http://www.sunyit.edu/~steve/abstract.html, for example). Particularly in the early- to mid-1990s, many commentators believed that IT and the Internet could help push back the colonisation of the public sphere. Why was this the case?
One element of colonisation is when access to information and decision-making is restricted. For example, information may be withheld for reasons of "national security" or "competitive advantage". Even when it is available, substantial fees may be levied on those who wish to access it; still more produce it. The broadcast and newspaper media are far from freely accessible, and unless a political issue is "media-friendly" (e.g. is sanctioned by the PR industry, leaked from 10 Downing Street, involves violence or is associated with certain celebrities) it will often be ignored.
In contrast, the Internet was seen as a means by which some of these obstacles could be sidestepped. Information on the Net is "slippery" [13], and therefore harder to control for political or business reasons. In addition, systems such as Usenet, chat rooms and other "bulletin board" systems were considered as revitalising the idea of free, undistorted public spheres in which people could debate with their peers.
In Hafner and Lyon's history of ARPANET, the ancestor of today's Internet [14], there is a strong sense that the early Net was built through collaboration and mutual aid. Many of the important systems and standards were proposed, constructed and maintained from the bottom up; in other words, by their users. Most bandwidth at this time was being used for peer-to-peer communication and debate (usually about the Net itself, though not always), and commercial exploitation of the network was not permitted. From a perspective like this it is perhaps unsurprising that many subsequent assessments of the Net's impact on the democratic public sphere were positive.
These tendencies should be noted, as they have had some impact upon political activity. But they are far from representing a widespread revitalisation of the public sphere. In the first place, Usenet is (despite the great amount of sociological literature devoted to it [15]) a minority pursuit: at best a distant third in popularity behind E-mail and the WWW amongst Internet systems. The "virtual communities" within it are fragile beasts, easily marginalised and often disrupted by "trolling" and "flame wars" and full of little more than trivia. (A critical analysis of Usenet and computer-mediated communication more generally will be the subject of a future issue of the Tangentium.) Also, as Stephen Lax [16] writes: "...the problem with democracy is not, and never has been, a deficiency in the quality or quantity of information or debate." Governments have always published reams of information, much of which was unused even before the advent of the Net.
Accounts such as Hafner and Lyon's, and Rheingold's [17] clearly suggest a countercultural aspect to the Internet's early days. Yet one can also take a different perspective. The information society, and the spread of the information technologies on which it depends, has not been provoked by some grass-roots push for "more democracy" or a revitalised public sphere, but by a capitalist system which sought new markets (and marketing methods) and ways of co-ordinating its production processes on a global scale [18]. Note that it does not seem to matter whether one views these developments with an approving or disapproving eye; few dispute that they have been the main motivation behind the rapid spread of IT. Like most if not all new technologies, IT was developed to preserve and enhance existing structures, not to change them.
IT is popular amongst large, bureaucratic organisations because it makes many processes more efficient. In large organisations this is understandable. But (and this is a feature of modernity, not just of IT) these large organisations seek to impose these conditions of efficiency in areas where it is less appropriate: viz, the lifeworld and public sphere. This is the best and simplest summary of the process of colonisation. IT is not disseminated because of its usefulness for electronic debate or the autonomous production of information. "Cyberdemocracy" comes to mean not peer-to-peer collaboration via communications networks but merely the electronic vote, a technical fix for a perceived "defect" in current democratic practice, designed to bolster the existing system rather than change it. Electronic voting slims down and speeds up the process of taking decisions, rather than making it somehow more involved and therefore, more participatory and democratic.
We have a situation, therefore, where IT could be used by individuals and small groups in autonomous, self-directed ways. But mostly it is not. Rather, IT systems, standards and policies are decided upon at the highest levels and then imposed on the general public.
Is it possible to revive possibilities for autonomous, democratic applications of IT in preference to the standardised, "office skills" approach? This is vital if Dearing's previously-quoted hope for education (producing citizens who can contribute to a genuinely democratic society) is to be fulfilled.
The first aim should be to break an emphasis on mere access to information through IT. Access is important, but if it becomes the only thing which matters, IT will turn into little more than a glorified television system, used to transmit information (in the most trivial sense) to the passive masses. A 1999 paper from the Cabinet Office, Modernising Government, significantly demonstrates this (emphases added):
"The information age should increase the choice of how citizens and businesses receive services, not restrict it.... We will develop targeted strategies to ensure that all groups have proper access to information age government."
What, though, of the autonomous production of information, and the ability to criticise what one is given and debate it outside of the standard democratic channels (which nowadays have been reduced to little more than 12 votes in a lifetime)? A true public sphere is not passive, it is active. Information can and must be used in ways that might not necessarily accord with the wants and needs of the government or corporations who have the power and resources to control various forms of interaction.
Combined with the need to address the failures of IT education at the individual level (see above), these suggest that a more rounded and potentially democratic approach to IT education would, alongside the "motor skills" [19], cover the following:
In short, IT education needs to move beyond being thought of as merely a "service" subject. It can and should be taught as an intellectual as well as a merely practical subject; and this applies at all levels of education.
Neil Selwyn observes that changes such as this are not easy to achieve in practice [20]. It is true that this kind of knowledge is often absent from teachers as much as it is from their students, and programmes like this may therefore be required in teacher training as well. More significantly, there are immense pressures being placed on educators in all fields to orient their teaching towards efficient returns and/or the "needs of industry". Selwyn has a point, but there are two responses to his (mild) criticism.
Firstly, it is in fact less cost-effective in the long term if students (or employees) are constantly having to re-learn new skills to cope with upgrades [21]. Nor will it help "industry" in the long term if many people enter its embrace with a deep feeling of alienation from IT or, at best, a disinclination to use it in creative ways. Selwyn himself has argued previously that students "must want to use IT (and perceive it as being of real utility) if they are going to develop an effective 'technological literacy' for the twenty-first century" [22]. It may therefore be that although returns on an investment in this form of IT education are more abstract, they are nevertheless still larger than from standardised models.
Secondly, there is the danger of getting into a vicious circle here. Going only for the easy option is an abdication of responsibility on behalf of educators, and will exacerbate all the problems described in this paper. That something is more difficult is not alone a reason to dismiss it. What needs investigation are the reactions of students to this kind of teaching and the consequences of this alternative model (which skills have been acquired, which are kept longer than a few months after the course of teaching, which are used outside the workplace, and so on). These are long-term projects, but they are essential if we are to gain a full understanding of what IT education could and should be.
Since humans first began communicating with their fellows, the information sphere has been developing. It has always been the task of educators to contribute to the continual production and reproduction of this sphere and of the various information domains which comprise it. If educators absolve all responsibility here to the market or government then the continued colonisation of the public sphere is inevitable. Exerting autonomy and encouraging people to think and act independently -- to become users of information rather than just passive consumers of it -- these have always been, and will remain, political acts.
1. Wolff, Robert Paul (1998). In Defense of Anarchism. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 17.
2. Selwyn, Neil and Stephen Gorard (2002). The Information Age: Technology, Learning and Exclusion in Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 54-7.
3. Gauntlett, David (2000). "Web Studies: A User’s Guide" in Gauntlett, D. (ed.), web.studies: Rewiring media studies for the digital age. London: Arnold, p. 11-12.
4. See, for instance: Castells, Manuel (2000). The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford, Blackwell; Schiller, Herbert (1992), Mass Communications and American Empire, Oxford, Westview.
5. Roszak, Theodore (1994). The Cult of Information. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 91-107.
6. Shenk, David (1996): Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, San Francisco, Harper Edge.
7. For a relevant review see chapter 7 of Webster, Frank (2002): Theories of the Information Society, 2nd ed, London, Routledge.
8. Outhwaite, W. (ed.) (1996): The Habermas Reader, Cambridge, Polity Press, p. 7.
9. See Habermas, Jürgen (1987): The Theory of Communicative Action volume 2: Lifeworld and System - A Critique of Functionalist Reason, Cambridge, Polity Press.
10. Though "shareholder activism" takes place, its successes so far have been limited. It should be noted that most shares in PLCs are owned by "institutional shareholders" such as pensions funds, which are interested only in returns on investments and have little interest in potentially damaging such returns by concentrating on, say, environmental or ethical lapses by a particular company. As accountability for one's actions is an important aspect of democracy, privatisation is thus an element in the intermingled processes which constitute colonisation.
11. Welton, Michael, ed. (1995): In Defense of the Lifeworld: Critical Perspectives on Adult Learning, Albany, SUNY Press, p. 5.
12. Welton's collection (see previous reference) is an excellent starting point here.
13. Moor, James H. (2001): "Towards a Theory of Privacy for the Information Age", in R. A. Spinello and H. T. Tavani, eds., Readings in CyberEthics, London: Jones and Bartlett, pp. 349-359.
14. Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon (1998): Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, New York, Touchstone.
15. Epitomised by Turkle, Sherry (1995): Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York, Simon and Schuster.
16. Lax, Stephen (2000): "The Internet and Democracy", from D. Gauntlett, ed., web.studies: Rewiring media studies for the digital age. London: Arnold, p. 167.
17. Rheingold, Howard (2000): The Virtual Community: Homesteading the Electronic Frontier, 2nd ed., Cambridge Mass., MIT Press.
18. Webster, Frank (2002): Theories of the Information Society, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, passim.
19. Meaning the basic technicalities of IT; manipulating files, using office applications and so on. In no way do we suggest these should not be taught. Not only are they pragmatically useful for students; they also provide students with valuable experience of ways in which the computer may shape their work, rather than the other way around. Let it be stressed, therefore, that the suggestions in the text are of teaching elements which should lie alongside these motor skills, not replace them.
20. Selwyn, Neil (2003): "Why students do (and do not) make use of ICT in university", collected papers, Finding Common Ground: IT, Dearing and Democracy in the Information Society, conference at the University of Leeds, 9/7/03, p.19. [return]
21. Kotamraju, Nalini (1999): "The birth of web site design skills: making the present history", American Behavioral Scientist, 43/3, pp. 464-74.
22. Selwyn, Neil (1998): "What's in the Box? Exploring Learners' Rejection of Educational Computing", Educational Research and Evaluation 4/3, p. 209.