FORUM: FOCUS

Networked Pedagogy: Some Misperceptions

ROBERT HAUFTMAN Professor and Coordinator of Reference

St. Cloud State University

Computers have altered many forms of social interaction and they have had an especially broad and determining influence in the educational environment. When personal comput- ers first appeared, primary and secondary school administrators were eager to incorporate them into the educational process, media labs, and classrooms. When Apple offered vari- ous models at great financial savings, few could resist. The trend slowly worked its magic in higher education and computers became an integral part of the college and university curriculum. Many years ago, an eastern university required every entering freshman to have a personal computer. Information technology is now an indispensable adjunct, whether it is needed or not. Networked interactions are merely the latest development. The Internet offers students and scholars a diverse array of services, some helpful and some det- rimental, some free and some exorbitantly priced. Those administrators and faculty mem- bers who make choices that affect their constituencies and, through peer pressure, other institutions often give long term effects little thought. They are caught up in the moment, the exaggerated claims, the astonishing results, and everyone is thus swept along despite the occasional negative voice that cautions that problems are in the offing. There are five major services that the Internet provides. In every case, the positive and useful aspects are accompanied by detriments.

5 MAJOR SERVICES THAT THE INTERNET PROVIDES

1. Email

The Internet is most frequently utilized as a personal communication conduit. It is analogous to the telephone, except that people use a more primitive and cumbersome means of interacting with each other. Email is beneficial because it at least appears to be

Direct all correspondence to: Robert Hauptman, Professor and Coordinator of Reference, St. Cloud State

University, St. Cloud, MN 56301.

The Internet and Higher JMueatiun l(3): 23 l-234 ISSN: lo%-75 16 Copyright Q 1998 JAI Ress Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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cost effective and thus administrators, faculty and students can easily bombard each other with vast quantities of information. And this is precisely the problem. A high percentage of those who drop electronic notes to others would never actually write a real letter. And much of what they have to say (and which they foolishly share with everyone for some inexplicable reason) is not worth communicating. Thus the unwary and the unprotected are forced to waste their time reading or at least glancing at vast quantities of garbage. Addi- tionally, these messages as well as student papers composed in the context of this medium are riddled with organizational ineptitudes, grammatical errors, and stylistic infelicities. It is just too easy to quickly type a note and push the send button, again and again, so that the unprotected receive the same material more than once. And because of system anomalies, the same communications can reappear days or months after they have been deleted. The garbled messages that often accompany email are apparently an acceptable aspect of the new technology, although even the aficionado cannot decipher them. Email communica- tion is negatively altering the ways in which educators and students interact with each other. The general level of articulation and expression is declining and email is partially responsible for this. A final point that is usually ignored in the open academic environment is that these are unsecured systems and anyone who really wants to can access other peo- ple’s messages.

2. Catalogs and their Progeny

Twenty years ago, library catalogs began to appear online. These were localized: either in-house or small networked systems within a region or state. They were autono- mous, that is, not amalgamated with other systems, since there was no viable infrastructure available for such interconnections. When the Internet offered its services, the administra- tors of these on-line catalogs decided that using the Internet as a conduit would provide external users an inexpensive way of accessing the cataloged and ancillary material from anywhere in the world. They jumped at the opportunity to disseminate their wares. Many academic libraries have accommodated themselves to this trend. Few empowered aca- demic administrators have considered the detrimental possibilities. These autonomous systems, many of which worked extremely well, with few crashes and little or no lag time between request and response, now suffer from local, regional, and national server crashes, cut fiber optic cables, and inordinate periods of lapsed time between request and response. Using these inefficient catalogs during peak Internet usage periods is extremely frustrating, since so much of one’s time is wasted staring at an intransigently static screen. A major set of server crashes will incapacitate a single catalog or many systems across the country. And this is much worse than the uninitiated might think. Once again, because it is so con- venient and useful to mount ancillary databases on the catalog or to access external files on the Internet, most academic libraries are moving away from CD-ROM and hard copy indexes, both of which they may cancel. When the files contain the full-text of some of the material that appears in the indexed periodicals, the people in charge, astonishingly, often opt to cancel the magazines and journals to which these indexes ostensibly lead. In the near or distant future, this shortsighted approach may have catastrophic effects on both local service and scholarly research possibilities.

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3. Commercial Databases

Just a few years before the fist online catalogs became available, the earliest commer- cial databases came online. DIALOG, for example, provided primitive access to databases in hundreds of disciplines and fields. One made an appointment with a searcher, discussed the topic and search strategy, and the professional did the work. The results were often printed off-line and then mailed to the library. This system is still operative, but now DIA- LOG and many other vendors come to us over the Internet. Users continue to pay high usage charges for these services. For online library catalogs, their ancillary indexes and commercial databases, the Internet is a conduit-one that increases accessibility and broadens the scope of interconnectivity, but it is merely a new means of transportation for pre-existing entities.

4. The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a different story. Here a vast storehouse of new and often interactive material is presented, either free of cost of for a fee. None of these home pages or databases were available just a few years ago because the Internet, in its current form, did not exist. The information that is made available by individuals, organizations, and commercial enterprises varies in usefulness along a very broad spectrum. Some of it is extremely reliable, valid, and helpful. Some, on the other hand, advocate the egregious trash that the educational process attempts to obviate. The simple truth is that a very high percentage of the same material is easily accessible in reference books, monographs, indexes, and periodical publications. The Internet is just a convenience-for those who prefer computers; for those who do not wish to leave home; and for those who may be inca- pable of using traditional sources because of psychological or physical impediments.

5. Listservs

The listserv, the scholarly version of the bulletin board, is another major innovation whose great potential is almost never realized. So many people have so much to say that little of significance manages to work its way through all of the dross. Even those techno- philes who once spent many hours interacting in appropriate disciplinary forums, are now disenchanted by the return on their investment. It takes too long to read and to respond to these innumerable postings, the value of which is questionable. Long-winded diatribes and ideological propaganda may alienate even the technologically sympathetic. Richard Abel (1997) is one of the few critics who takes this position: “Few [fora and bulletin boards] contain any significant amount of comment more worthwhile than the gossip traditionally exchanged over the back-yard fence” (p. 74).

CONCLUSION

The Internet provides services and access so radically different from anything that has pre- ceded it that it is quantitatively and qualitatively unique. Academic applications are unlim- ited; they range from straightforward data and information access to pedagogical protocols in language, literature, mathematics, and biology to geographic information systems (GIS), whose complex nature requires sophisticated training. Instructors and students will accom-

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modate themselves to these necessities and master them, even when they are countetpro- ductive. As Gene I. Rochlin (1997) points out, when there are problems, it is up to the user to make adjustments to the unalterable external entities: “Adapt to the system and its rules. Learn the Interface. Get a bigger, faster computer, or a Macintosh (they are cheap)” (p. 36). Ethical training and considerations, censorship (even in the university environment), pri- vacy abrogations, advertising inundations, fraud, and viruses, worms and other detriments are all ignored in favor of convenience. This attitude will come back to haunt us when the entire enterprise crashes and we are forced to completely rebuild the infrastructure. This is not an apocalyptic augury, but rather a realistic fear that some pessimists manifest when- ever the masses agree too readily on a superficially enticing agenda. As many scholars have observed, the future of a technological innovation is unpredictable. The people who create it quickly lose control and it maps out its own destiny. Paradigmatic of this are auto- mobiles, airliners, or computers-all of which have positive and negative effects on indi- viduals and society. One of the frequently touted benefits for the educational process is that the Internet makes it possible for more people to access more information with comparable ease. What is often conveniently ignored is that without training in real critical thinking skills and evaluative methods, these students will grow to maturity and full-citizenship graced with beliefs founded on vast quantities of misleading or false data and information that derive from the arbitrarily chosen Internet sites upon which they happen to stumble. We have been seduced and are now convinced. But we must exercise judicious care lest we find ourselves abandoned.

REFERENCES

Abel, R. (1997). The Internet: Some unintended consequences. Publishing Research Quarterly (Spring), 73-77. Rochlin, G. I. (1997). Trupped in the net. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.