This post is a bit of a rambling response to this article http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/22/college_students_test_drive_the_apple_ipad, written for a research project on iPad’s of which I am a part.
There’s a fairly limited notion of what student production is all about in this article. I find this concerning, because it reveals both a simplistic belief of what educational administrators hold school to be all about for students and, perhaps, a passive view students have come to have of themselves as learners. It seems here that production is about writing undergrad essays and little more; that is, doing the labour of the academic institution in a strict sense. Student production, then, exists alongside the forms of university production, like that of educator/professors, academic support workers, rather than as part of the broader society as a whole. Indeed, it may even exist below rather than alongside, given that the latter are paid for their work, while students – even with scholarships – are left with debt or at least poverty.
I don’t mean to sound cynical: obviously this is a form of work students are willing to gamble on, believing that what they put in will turn into what Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital,” the capacity to earn higher wages and more advanced social status through the acquisition of knowledge and understanding. What I am concerned about is the way the nature of this production process is represented. Students are being represented doubly as consumers, and not really as producers at all to the extent that the accumulation of cultural capital appears summative – conferred ultimately and finally by a degree – rather than ongoing and continuous. Let me explain what I mean.
Essay writing is essentially a cliched, albeit useful, productive task. It typically generates no new knowledge, and is essentially a formality to academic ascension, a product that is consumed by professors in return for a grade students consume in return. At best in this schema, students learn to master some of the tasks and techniques of their trade, acquiring a kind of formal cultural capital: a letter grade or, eventually, the degree designation of their field. At worst, it impresses upon them the idea that enough practice of this sort will actually prepare you for the dynamism and unpredictability of the real world. This is a dangerous and sad view of education for anyone to hold. Certainly essay writing is but one possible form of disciplinary learning; there are many others.
Perhaps I’m being overly dramatic, but I feel education should be, and occasionally IS, about so much more than this manner of production, as if for a text-based, tradition-bound social order. Anyone who has had a profound learning moment has been transformed by it; this spirit of change is, in fact, what is at the root of education. Learning is impossible in stasis and fixity, and exists in so many more spheres than can be captured exclusively in scientific or literary writing (…he says as he writes his blog post…). Besides, we’re all already in the world, living its contradictions and challenges, engaging in real interpersonal and cultural situations – relationships with consequences, of course, both good and bad. To misrecognize this actuality is doing a disservice to all those involved in university learning.
I do realize that this is an article about iPads in college/university, so pardon me if you see what I have so far written as a digression (or even as a diatribe). However, it’s more fundamentally an article about technology meshing with a social institution; about a relation between humans and their world that is far older than the novelty of the iPad might first suggest. This narrative unfolds rhetorically something like this. First, a process of dichotomization is introduced: the iPad is a consumption device; it produces far less well. Then there’s a kind of humanization or anthropomorphization of this claim: in universities, students consume and produce, particularly in a written, text-based modality. Finally, there’s a normalization of it all: students can use the iPad to read course texts and access academic (and non-academic, another dichotomization) sources, but not for producing conventional written coursework with ease. At each stage, in short, assumptions are made about the nature of undergraduate work, about what students are capable of doing and thinking, about how students are apparently distinct from “regular” people and their learning more generally, about what relations we should have to our technology, and many more.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m pointing out, except a general concern about how the relation between an iPad and undergraduate education is structured in such narrow terms in this article. Such a view is stultifying, personally and socially, even if it is commonsense or just common. You might think I’m just making mountains out of molehills, but I don’t think so (even though I may be reacting to the article a little too harshly). Perhaps I’m arguing that what often seems to be the horizons of learning are actually mutable: that taking the iPad out of the classroom and into the world (theory about service learning might provide a few good examples here) could change what knowledge is; that using an iPad to demonstrate what a technique actually looks like, in practice, could foster a different understanding of theory; that incorporating an iPad into groupwork – as more than just fancy chart paper – could deindividualize and collectivize learning. If so, then perhaps what I’m also saying is that the impetus cannot come from the technology alone, iPad or otherwise. It must also come from the human side – students, schools and programs, and their relations to the world beyond the walls of the academy.
thinking practice 