Acknowledgments: Jinx Roosevelt, Josh Reibel, Jo Anne Kleifgen, Maxine McClintock, and K. A. Taipale have commented on earlier versions of this essay, to the benefit of this one. Gwen Solomon's combination of patience and resolve has helped greatly in bringing the work to completion. The overall argument rests on a foundation of project experience using advanced media as means to improve educational practice, and it should serve as a reflective report on the educational implications of these projects--the Dalton School Technology Plan (the Phyllis and Robert Tishman Family Fund), the Columbia University Virtual Information Initiative (the Columbia University Strategic Initiative Fund), the Teachers College/Syracuse University Living Schoolbook Project (New York State Science and Technology Foundation), and the Harlem Environmental Access Project (U. S. Department of Commerce Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program).
1) The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin, 1968), Kaufmann, trans., p. 50.
2) Large-scale digital library projects can seem to be concerns primarily for rarefied scholarship. In fact they are developments of broad public import and care should be taken to widen the constituency for the effort. For a sense of the global participation in developing through the digital library effort consult, for instance, Columbia University's guide to electronic texts on the Internet. A good discussion of issues, current to 1993 and oriented to the Biblioth?que de France, is in R. Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds., Future Libraries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). To grasp fully both the difficulties and the possibilities of digital libraries, readers need sustained engagement with the resources on-line. There is a huge, distributed effort taking place world-wide as libraries and archives metamorphose, the dynamics of which it is much easier to experience than to describe.
3) For reflections on multimedia in a philosophical frame, see Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies: Media Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994). In regard to bringing new media into the realm of random access, it is interesting to follow the range of plug-in programs developing for a web browser such as Netscape.
4) Skeptics who intone that changes in the access to information do not necessarily lead to a better education, and may worsen it by furnishing people with a surfeit of trivia, miss the significant change. The new technologies do not simply enhance information access. They change conditions for participating in the creation of knowledge, the exercise of skill, the work of interpretation. It is not information access but cultural participation that is widening significantly, for better or for worse. This development clearly poses difficulties, but it is a development that is deeply protean in historical character and potentiality. This development is also clearly not new, for participation in cultural activities has already widened discernibly throughout the 19th and 20th centuries with the opening of access to institutions of education. Thus Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure depicts social barriers internalized in institutions, situations, and persons that have become much less rigorous as prevailing norms of experience by the late 20th century than they were in the late 19th. The historical limits to a widening of participation in intellectual activities have by no means been reached. Loosely but suggestively, entertain the following analogy - 20th-century changes in cultural participation are like the 19th-century changes in travel occasioned by railroads, whereas 21st century changes in intellectual participation are like the 20th-century changes in travel associated with the automobile and aviation.
5) Key sources on the history of the telephone as a social construction are Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981); Ithiel de Sola Pool, Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment of the Telephone (Norwood, NJ: ABLEX, 1983); and Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
6) For a good introduction, see The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987). The concept of social construction used in this essay is somewhat broader than the concept used in the history of technology. Steven Lubar's "Representation and Power" in Technology and Culture, 36:2, Supplement (April 1995), pp. S54-S81, is an excellent survey of the relevant historiography. It encompasses the many sides of the problem of making thought actual in the realm of lived life.
7) The work of Max Weber is fundamental to thinking about the social construction of significant historical developments. Paraphrasing Weber's definition of social action, we can say here that the social construction of technologies result because people attach similar subjective meanings to the potentialities they sense in their circumstances and they consequently act independently in ways that conduce to common purposes. See Economy and Society, I:1:a&b, and passim.
8) Nicomachean Ethics, I:2; 1094b24, Ross & Urmson, trans. (On-line: W.D. Ross, trans.)
9) "Pidiendo un Goethe desde dentro" (1932), José Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, IV, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957. pp. 395-420. The methodological lineage here goes back through Ortega, via Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Schleiermacher, to Giambattista Vico. The basic problem is that integral to the human sciences -- attaining knowledge where a separation of knower from known cannot plausibly be made.
10) It is important to test this probe fully in the Socratic spirit. Querying educators and finding the proportion that would nominally agree with the propositions of this probe would tell little, one way or another. Whether or not each person, on serious and sincere reflection, considers it sound is the Socratic test.
11) Theorists have long struggled to make sense of the process by which complex historical developments emerge in history. Rousseau's observations in the Social Contract about how people should deliberate in order to disclose the General Will are highly relevant in considering this process, particularly if one discounts the locus in a cantonal assembly that he used to situate his discussion. See Rousseau, The Social Contract, II:3. Likewise, Reformation doctrines of Grace and Election, understood as a theological construct for describing observable historical developments, merit some reflective attention in thinking about pre-Weberian reflections on the dynamics of social construction.
12) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (2nd edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970) provides an excellent study of these dynamics in the area of scientific practice, as did Alexis de Tocqueville for political practice in The Old R?gime and the French Revolution.
13) Pascal, Pensées, 353, Trotter, trans. English translation on-line in one big Gopher file.
14) Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Book VII, Indenture, Carlyle, trans. (revised).
15) George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy (1923, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955). Translations of Max Weber's speeches on "Politics as a Vocation" and "Science as a Vocation" are in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
16) Let us use the term "enlightenment" in a very broad sense to direct attention to developments rooted in Renaissance and Reformation, passing through the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and sweeping through the age of democratic revolutions, imperialism, and the global warring, hot and cold of the 20th century. In this sense, the enlightenment involves the historical construction of modernity, in particular the construction of secular cultures, scientific and technical reason, industrial economies, nation-states, democratic polities, bureaucratic management, systems of public health and education, massive cities, and global transportation and communications.
17) Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams gives an extended meditation on the historical relativity of educational attainments and the terrible cost of remediating their debasement. "The picture of Washington in March, 1861, offered education, but not the kind of education that led to good. The process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, helps nothing. Washington was a dismal school. . . . Not a man there knew what his task was to be, or was fitted for it; everyone without exception, northern or southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public. Lincoln, Seward, Sumner and the rest, could give no help to the young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand million dollars, more or less, north and south, before the country could recover its balance and movement." Henry Adams, Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education (New York: The Library of America, 1983), pp. 818-9. As the scale of human action increases, with irreversible global effects unfolding over decades and centuries, the human costs of historical remediation can now far exceed those on which Adams reflected.
18) Religious cultures might seem far more powerful, measuring the matter by numbers of professed adherents, even in this supposedly secular age. Nominal adherence is not a good measure of historic power, however, as a glance at the historical demographics of the human enterprise will indicate.
19) Kant's stricture in "What Is Enlightenment?" -- "For himself (and only for a short time) a man may postpone enlightenment in what he ought to know, but to renounce it for himself and even more to renounce it for posterity is to injure and trample on the rights of mankind." -- states succinctly this bond between the dignity of the rational individual a/d the rights of posterity. Beck, trans., Berlinische Monatsschrift. Dezember-Heft 1784, p. 490, equivalent to Königliche Preussische Akademie, 7:39.
20) A typical instance of this complaint is C. A. Bowers, The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-Neutrality of Technology (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988).
21) Kant, "What Is Enlightenment?", Berlinische Monatsschrift. Dezember-Heft 1784, p. 481, equivalent to 7:35.
22) The document is in many collections, on-line in English and in French.
23) As early as 1630 in his Great Didactic, Johann Amos Comenius described systems of universal compulsory schooling that he perceived to be potentials implicit in the design of good textbooks and of schools pedagogically adapted to working with them. It took close to three centuries to implement those potentialities in the extended present of print-based educational reform.
24) A major value-added that would continue to differentiate different new organizations would be in the accuracy and competence with which the news was gathered and its accuracy guaranteed.
25) See the discussion of "gaining time by loosing time" in Emile (Bloom, trans.) passim.
26) Constraints in the information infrastructure are, of course, not the only factors leading people to design an educational system around efforts to channel and accelerate the pace of student learning. The argument here, however, is that educational alternatives to such arrangements, although frequently suggested, have never been significantly implemented because the constraints in the information infrastructure have rendered such alternatives impracticable. As those constraints change, the historical verdict potentially changes. Let us put it this way: If, broadly speaking, the introduction of printing in Europe empowered failed medieval heresies to become the dominant theology in major areas of western Christendom and to force deep reform throughout the remainder, so too may the introduction of digital technologies in post-industrial societies empower the failed educational heresies propounding child-centered schools and progressive education to become the dominant educational system in the 21st century.
27) In schools of education, which have one foot in the realm of K12 education and the other in higher education, one of the most interesting cleavages is between those faculty members who adopt as norms of their teaching and advising the norms of higher education and those who adopt the norms of K12 schooling.
28) Such a purpose, making the broad education of the public integral to the imperative of advancing knowledge through research, is fully consistent with the original purposes set forth by pioneers of the modern intellectual enterprise in works such as The Advancement of Learning by Francis Bacon, which aimed to persuade the sovereign of "the merit and true glory in the augmentation and propagation of" learning and knowledge (I, "To the King," 3).
29) There is some danger that digitally enabled innovation in education will bypass schools of education, which are somewhat separated from developments in major research universities (even when functioning as a school within such universities). Much initial pump priming for a changed university role in education has been done by the National Science Foundation's funding of curricular initiatives at all levels, and by and large this funding has gone to state and local school systems or to university projects with roots in research science. It is important that faculty members in schools of education leave their familiar turf and involve themselves in university-wide projects as participants in much more complex development projects.
30) One barrier to these developments lies in the inertia of promotion and tenure procedures, which may channel effort by many junior academics away from working with new media. Perhaps universities should start refereeing contributions to their web sites, not simply to guarantee the quality of research contributions, but also (perhaps primarily) as contributions to the educational effectiveness of the site.
31) In programs such as Archaeotype, developed through the Dalton Technology Project, this pedagogical model seems to work very well as early as the middle grades. See Evaluation of the Dalton Technology Project from a Thinking Skills Perspective by John Black, Clifford Hill and Janet Schiff (New York: CCT, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1993). On-line description.
32) Such services to problem-solving groups in schools may be the response that enables the university to avoid the educational obsolescence anticipated by Eli M. Noam in "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University," Science 270:13 October 1995:247-249. Noam suggests that publishers and media companies will take over the traditional forms of university instruction and academia will find itself without a teaching function. Noam does not take very concrete account of the ways in which familiar instructional forms can metamorphose to take account of new informational conditions. Canned lectures by the putative great teachers of the world may have%far less educative value than timely consultation via video conference with someone over a question of common interest. It is a commonplace in academe that one does not really learn a subject until one has to teach it and a very productive undertaking for undergraduates and graduate students may involve serving as sources of expertise over networks to children and teachers.
33) It is difficult to convey the idea that fundamental potentialities are now different than they have been in the past. Nevertheless it is important to reason out the possibility so that things can be tried that would otherwise be held impossible.
34) The key source here is Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (2nd. Edition, Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990), Nice, trans..
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