When I deposited my dissertation on Online Writing Instruction and the economic and labor issues connected to it last Summer (July 2019), I opted to delay database availability to have time to publish the data. Unfortunately for us all, the time of that research came suddenly and without warning. Not that I think folks are clamoring for my dissertation specifically, but while I continue to work on those pubs with the data, I have decided to post some excepts here to, if nothing else, comfort myself that I am circulating the work that may make a difference to someone else out there. May any reader here find some solace, clarity, or inspiration in these words.
The following is the conclusion of my last chapter (results of my third and final empirical component of a study of two different Online Writing Classes at two different institutions) and the conclusion of my dissertation itself, edited for clarity and context.
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5.3 Broad Conclusions
The relationship between teacher and students is the biggest difference-making factor in this inquiry. Teachers, regardless of experience level or expertise at teaching online, lament the design of LMSs for some reason or another, ultimately because they are more effective information platforms than communication platforms. LMSs could be improved, but the most efficient way to improve OWI and OE, based on this inquiry, is to enhance the relationship between teacher and student and improve their ability to interact through dialog. LMSs, as circulation platforms, contribute to this, but one-to-one communication modes are ultimately more effective, based on teacher testimony and student surveys.
Part of why communication between teacher and student is so effective is because it teaches the knowledge-making steps of DIKW (Data>>Information>>Knowledge>>Wisdom) through practical mentoring and collaborative problem solving between the teacher and student in accordance with Merrill’s (2002) five principles of Active Learning: 1) students perceive a problem, in their work or in their access/comprehension of the class, 2) communication between teacher and student assesses and invokes past experiences of each other to determine the specifics of the student’s inquiry (as opposed to general principles in mass communication), 3) the teacher models action or advice to the student, which 4) the student must apply on their own, resulting in 5) the student practicing something new based on a relationship that connects it to previous experiences and can be applied in the future.
In practical pedagogical terms, this means that educational resources should be focused on supporting student-teacher relationships in online classes: teachers and students do the labor of ‘online education’ (i.e. teaching and learning), and therefore their labor should be supported as much as possible. The key labor they do, dialogic interactivity, is invisible, so it is not likely accounted for well in measurement metrics. As Clinefelter and Aslanian (2016) report, students need more financial support for education, even if it is online, and Busch (2014) and Hall (2016) find that emphasis on numerical metrics buries knowledge-making relationships with students under verifiable research spread and student evaluations that often function as consumer satisfaction reports1. What is being de-skilled in teaching is dialogic interactivity, and what is being de-skilled in learning is extended thought on problems (because students are pulled in many economic and social directions at once). These other realities cannot be displaced (students will always have lives, research is always beneficial to academic inquiry and pedagogy). Therefore, a readily available and easy to implement solution is to shift funding to education for teacher pay and to students for financial support: both teacher and student will be recognized for the invisible work they must do to succeed in the end, and the increased economic support will ease tension around the other factors that pull them in other directions. This is especially important on the more precarious end of the higher educational spectrum, community colleges, state schools, part time instructors, contingent faculty, and faculty teaching higher course loads instead of being given research time: these teachers and students should have more financial support because it will make much more proportional difference to the quality of work they can do together. Part of what makes John Locke’s tutor-student model both elitist and effective is that the bond of the teacher and student is supported financially and institutionally (i.e. by the place they meet) so that both groups feel security in their work and have less to fear about their future. Teachers andstudents can focus on the work of teaching and learning when their place of work is non-exploitative.
Moving to the broad context of the inquiry, the critical component working against prosperous communication, knowledge-making, and education, seems to be the pervasive market logic that guides its operation over other imperatives. Circulation platforms supercharge the economic experience of information, making information-sharing and knowledge-making seem to be the same as managing supply chain and logistics to have a package delivered on the same day someone orders it. This focus on expediency puts the emphasis on information-as-commodity, with knowledge-making as a second thought. Circulation theory is a very effective lens to critique the market model of knowledge-making by providing insight into the rhetorical processes that transform data into information and information into knowledge, seemingly automatically. DIKW logic has lots of clear utility in explaining how knowledge is made ecologically, and provides a metalanguage framework for disciplines to cooperate.
In practical terms, this inquiry finds that teachers and students both see their relationships with each other as the most beneficial things, and that their relationships are best facilitated by direct communication, which usually happens asynchronously. Based on teacher and student data, this inquiry concludes that students are not satisfied by mere information and want to have knowledge-making skills; students recognize that being critical and skilled at knowledge work is a valuable skill and will pursue it in the venue most cost effective to them, whether that be through formal education or ”free” information markets that push them toward radicalization.
The largest flaw of neoliberal market models of information distribution, knowledge-making, and education are that they produce short-term knowledge, incentivize indirect goals over the stated missions of these pursuits, and rely on asymmetries through the assumption that asymmetries galvanize further market actors. Market asymmetries, in practice, allocate more power to a small group of capital-rich people who fight against relinquishing it. Furthermore, the major social, cultural, and ecological crises we face stem from asymmetries: of wealth, of power, and of knowledge. An increasing amount of data science experts and sociologists2 are laying this at the feet of economic policies that have empowered economics over democratic will. As with all these asymmetries, the problem is not a lack of enough to go around, it the lack of a mechanism to equitably distribute it. Public institutions should reinforce the public’s claim to things like knowledge, and online education represents a unique opportunity to extend knowledge-making and mentorship to people living their lives in situ, to network together their places and problems, and to move beyond classrooms.
Conclusion
A New York Times article (published March 23, 2019) makes the case, as the article is titled, that “Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good,” arguing that it is harder to find parts of life not mediated by screens and that the wealthy horde those increasingly rare opportunities to themselves through their ability to outbid ordinary folks for undivided, usually in-person, human attention (Bowles 2019). The reasoning behind this commodification of screen interaction is that it is cheaper than stationing a human in one place, and one human’s labor can be divided amongst multiple portals if the systems are not automated outright (Bowles 2019). Among the institutions counted as experiencing an explosion of screen-driven service are care-work sectors like schools, healthcare facilities, and social work (Bowles 2019). As the article points out, rich people reject these screen-driven services whenever possible. Whereas owning a computer used to be a sign of affluence and success, being accompanied by a smart device at all times is increasingly something that rich people have the luxury of avoiding. Just as in the time of Locke (the turn of the 17th century), rich capital owners are turning to personal, interactive, and tactile modes of education (Bowles cites the Waldorf School of silicon valley as the most popular elementary school) that emphasize human contact and mentoring relationships between the teacher and student (Bowles 2019).
The ubiquity of technology also makes data collection and advertisement targeting something that disproportionately affects less wealthy people, making them the fuel for the surveillance economy driving commercial production of worldviews in competition for the fate of our collective future (Zuboff 2019). The luxurification of human-to-human interaction has to be reversed3 because it represents the rise of another asymmetry. Based on this inquiry, and others, what students value in an effective OWI instructor is the dialogic interaction they have with them, likely for the same reasons that affluent people cite in seeking to avoid digital mediation: authenticity, attention, emotion, and individualization. Human interaction in online classes may not be less screen-mediated, but by keeping class sizes low, investing financial resources in teachers, students, and the connection between them, and reducing the layers of abstraction they must go through to meet each other, it can still be democratic.
In Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 “Wealth” essay, now referred to as his “Gospel of Wealth,” he sets out a guiding principle for philanthropy: wealthy people must have social and cultural impact on the poor. In Andrew Carnegie’s case, he built countless libraries, a school, and music hall among many other philanthropic projects. In “Wealth,” Carnegie argues that philanthropic projects, such as these, should support cases that “help those who will help themselves,” hence libraries provide opportunities for poor people to gain information that they can self-engineer into a way out of their put-upon lives. The problem Carnegie implies, with this line of thinking and action on his part, is that people suffer under inequality (he starts “Wealth” by accepting that inequality is a fact of life) because of lack of motivation. The people employed in Carnegie’s own mills worked well over eight hours a day for very meager wages. Carnegie’s proposition to these people, in particular, was that they, after a day of back-breaking labor morning to evening, go to a local library and invest their remaining waking hours in reading one of the books available there. There is no doubt that Andrew Carnegie’s libraries, school, and other institutions that make information available to the public have improved countless lives in invaluable ways, but it is also worth wondering if that positive impact might have been accelerated by Carnegie also committing to paying his workers more and reducing their workloads so they had more time to benefit from this availability of information. Similarly, we must wonder if the impact of online education might be accelerated by investing in the humans who do it as much as the technologies that have driven information accumulation, data collection, and social connection.
As long as the levers of control are driven by capital demands, those controlling capital will roll back any reforms that benefit those they do not consider to be themselves. The renewed emphasis on digital and robotic automation in the 21st century—a century also characterized by global conflict, social discord, and ecological crisis at this early stage—likely signals the end of the post-World War II progressive period (such as it was), offering proof that it was an exception in the history of capitalism (the short-term) and of power (history-spanning). Precarious neoliberalism is not an anomaly, it is the norm that preceded the mid-20th century, and seems poised to retake its position. Overcoming these obstacles will require cooperation, technology, and policy that is driven by knowledge-making that addresses these problems in long-term ways. Online education has a pivotal opportunity to be part of networking people together to bring their experiences to bear on how global war, social inequality, and ecological destabilization have affected them, will effect them, and what we can do about it. Students and teachers that appreciate online education appreciate the ways they can invest time and labor in connecting with each other in non-transactional ways, though they suffer the transactions when they are necessary. This lack of cynicism is rare, and it must not become extinct.
References for this Excerpt
Bowles, N. (2019). Human contact is now a luxury good. The New York Times. March 23.
Busch, L. (2014). Knowledge for Sale: The Neoliberal Takeover of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Carnegie, A. (1889). Wealth. from The Gospel According to Andrew: Carnegie’s Hymn to Wealth, HistoryMatters.org
Clinefelter, D. L. & Aslanian, C. B., (2016). Online college students 2016: Comprehensive data on demands and preferences. Louisville, KY: The Learning House, Inc.
Hall, G. (2016). The Uberfication of the University. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Kindle ed.
Locke, John. (1693). Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: Cambridge University Press, 1895 edition.
Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Education Technology Research & Development, Vol. 50, No. 3, pp 43–59
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York, NY: PublicAffairs.
Which admittedly could capture students’ flat reactions to the quality of relationship they have with their teacher, but often do not, partly because they assess class “content” or preserve racial and sexist biases against the instructor, like in Sharing Economy user reviews. ↩︎
Cathy O’Niel, Shoshana Zuboff, Safiya Noble, for instance. ↩︎
Likely through removing incentives to make digital communication an opportunity for data harvesting, increasing investment in social infrastructure, and giving the public more direct, democratic control over institutions. ↩︎