The Misnaming of the Crisis
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version with critical reviews
The technology “Support Crisis” is misnamed. In fact, the misnaming of
a very real crisis exacerbates the issue. It exacerbates it because it
implies that the problem reflects educations’ inability to meet the expanding quantity
of faculty’s unmet needs when the real crisis is rooted in the ways our
institutions and faculty perceive and then pursue technology support
needs. We don't need to hire more support professionals. We
need to provide better support for the technology professionals we've hired.
In particular, there is an urgent need for administration and faculty to
reassess their responsibility in this effort if we are to constructively
ameliorate the crisis. This recognition emerges from a close reading of
Gilbert’s (2000) new vision, a study from Wharton (2000), reports from Edutech
(2000) and Educause (2000), and a sample recommendation from a campus strategic
planning effort (2000).
To arrive at an understanding of this phenomenon, it is useful to examine
Gilbert’s “New Vision Worth Working Toward Connected Education and
Collaborative Change” (2000). Gilbert, who has been active for several
years as a leader and advocate for humane approaches for teaching and learning
with technology, calls for “a vision that embraces change, sets a direction
for the integration of new applications of technology, makes the most of the
resources we've already got, and recognizes how important it is to choose a
future based on realistic analysis of where we are, where we've been, and where
we want to go.” At the heart of Gilbert’s “realistic analysis” are
complexities and contradictions that suggest reexamination of faculty roles and
responsibilities as we work toward the “new vision.”
Gilbert identifies the root of the problem: “Most faculty have had very little
training, incentive or opportunities to think about making choices among
different combinations of technology, pedagogy, content, and education
purpose.” Gilbert is perhaps overly optimistic, however, when he
contends that “many” do think about new pedagogies “after” they begin to
use new technology. He says that often faculty who have had “no
intention of changing the way they taught and the way their students learned”
still have been enlightened when “they became aware of…pedagogical
options.” Evidence of that “awareness” in the “many” is not
forthcoming. Gilbert does note, however, that even though Course
Management Systems now make it “ever easier, more popular, and more expected
for faculty members to place some course-related materials on the Web for
students,” he also observes that so far these practices have been “simple
duplications or slight extensions of what was already being done in the
traditional classroom.” The prevailing use of technologies in ways that
merely extend traditional pedagogies, it seems clear, indicates that significant
educational transformation will not come from technology alone. It
follows, it seems to me, that supporting faculty in what they want to do,
particularly those who have “no intention of changing they way they teach or
the way students learn,” does not generally result in the kind of
transformation that justifies the full costs associated with providing that
support.
If supporting technology alone does result in significant pedagogical returns,
Gilbert argues that there nonetheless may be a great deal of potential for pedagogical
transformation emerging from the work of “Compassionate Pioneers.”
Compassionate Pioneers, Gilbert explains, are faculty “who feel a commitment
to help their colleagues learn to use new technology/pedagogy combinations.”
He says, “Compassionate Pioneers can be among the most valuable resources for
change at a college or university. Academic support services often benefit
from the informal efforts of these unsung heroes.” In fact,
“Compassionate Pioneers could be instrumental in aggregating and focusing
those efforts to help avoid some of the wasteful duplication.” Gilbert
also observes that “thousands of faculty members are beginning to build their
own modest course related collections of materials.” But a realistic
analysis also has to note Gilbert’s qualifications in the previous
observations as an indication of what is so far emerginga generally
“unfocused” collection of “duplicate” materials that reflect, again, a
“modest” extension of traditional pedagogies. To the extent
that compassionate pioneers really are “benefiting” academic support
services, their impact, at least as Gilbert envisions the worsening
crisis, is, by his own evidence, minimal. Further, to the extent that
these compassionate pioneers are producing innovative materials, the materials
tend to be more varied in platform and systems requirements than they are rich
in innovation and collegial carryover. Such innovations, therefore,
generally create an added burden for those who are responsible for maintaining
them. Today’s cutting edge, as Ehrmann (2000) explains, is tomorrow’s
legacy. And since the costs of supporting an innovation are roughly equal
to the costs of creating it, this aspect of the “cycle of failure,” as
Ehrmann describes it, finds interesting purchase in the larger context of
Gilbert’s vision of the “Support Service Crises.”
Clearly, the gap between support and expectations, as Gilbert recognizes,
extends well beyond issues of technical support. “Pedagogy experts and
faculty development professionals” and even students have not “nor are they
likely to” reduce the need, as Gilbert identifies it, for more professional
staff. Gilbert laments, “The gap is widening between the level of
support services available and the expectations of faculty members,
administrators and students. With uncommon pessimism, Gilbert concludes,
“The Support Service Crisis is getting worse.”
If throwing a greater and greater quantity of resources at the problem doesn't
solve it, perhaps it makes sense to redefine the problem. Cappelli’s
(2000) study, “Are Information Technology Workers in Short Supply,” does
just that. Cappelli argues that the quantity of available
technology workers is not the problem; instead, “There is a shortfall in the
ability of companies to recruit IT employees, to assess their talent and to make
their jobs rewarding enough to keep them from quitting.”
Cappelli’s study casts a light on many issues that impact the supply of
technology workers, including immigration policies, the disinclination to hire
older workers, the risks of retraining workers in ways that often enable them to
leave for better opportunities elsewhere. He points out that “the number
of workers who quit the programming field every year, for example, exceeds the
number of new programming jobs.” He adds, “It’s peculiar to have a
field that’s thought to be so hot, yet where so many people are leaving in
droves.”
Still, the emerging and most compelling point Cappelli’s study makes is that
IT workers are often “poorly managed,” that their jobs are “ill-designed
and boring,” that frequently IT workers find themselves working “in
isolation on fragmented tasks that do not allow them to see the larger purpose
of a project or to interact with other people,” and that, finally, “Many
employers treat IT employees poorly and undervalue their contributions to
companies.”
Cappelli argues that it is “premature” to call, as many companies do, for
colleges to “churn out more IT-trained people in less time” or to “expand
immigration to attract foreign IT workers.” He suggests we also consider
redesigning IT jobs. “The shabby treatment of workers contributes to
high turnover rates and can lead to higher costs, since IT workers may demand
more wages in exchange for doing tasks that offer few rewards of other kinds.”
Cappelli’s analysis of IT workers in industry comes home to education in a
recent report from Cornell to Educause (2000) that acknowledges the drain of IT
professionals who are leaving higher education. The report identifies
several dimensions of the problem, including the fact that “priorities are not
set based on good stewardship of overall resources, but based on "prima
donna” and "squeaky wheel" standards. The report concludes:
“Climate issues, more often than salary, seem to be the precipitating factors
for staff leaving Cornell.”
Even more pointed, a recent Edutech (2000) report says:
- “Perhaps most disappointingly for IT, cooperation in staffing has also
been very difficult to advance. . . . End-user support positions are
inevitably tied to direct relationships with the people they serve. Faculty
and administrative staff have both insisted on near-captive relationships
with IT staff.”
The disturbing implications of this “climate” of “near-captive”
servitude, embedded in and probably even encouraged by the unfortunate
“support staff” designation, are baldly revealed in a recent communication
circulated to a planning committee in which a professor asserts, “We need to
focus on faculty services. I would like [a central unit] to serve faculty
desires whatever they may be” (Anonymous, 2000).
Of course such a position belies obliviousness to the rationale and the movement
toward student-centered learning. It belies, at best, a haphazard and
capricious approach for allocating scarce resources in a time of harsh, public
scrutiny. And it reveals, acutely, the missing ingredient in Gilbert’s
analysis and call for more coordination and collaboration of support
services--an expanded vision and appropriate incentives for increased faculty
responsibility. Specifically, the lack of informed and truly
compassionate administration and faculty who recognize that education now
requires a new, broader team of professionals working together points up, by
contrast, the ugly underbelly of the “support service crisis”the dominance
of a small but squeaky, prima donna ivory caste, the purported purveyors
of life-long learning, who insist on approaching the process of teaching and
learning with technology as if they have little of value to learn from
educational research let alone the peons who ought to be content pulling their
wires or putting a little flash in their animations. Until that aspect of
the vision is embraced, we should not be surprised by the continuing exodus of
professionals who have been charged with serving a too often contemptuous
faculty (use the back door when you leave, please). Nor, by extension,
should we be surprised to be impacted by other tell-tale signs of the ivory
caste who are no more inclined to listen to their students than they are their
IT colleagues. Now as budgets shrink and expectations in all quarters
rise, we all have to sort through this crisis, by any name, and address the
persistent legacy of a small but potent crash of cantankerous scholars who favor
those automated aspects of instruction that exacerbate the truly problematic
distance in education and who find little enthusiasm for the prospects of new
partners and pedagogies that require they relinquish their stage and, instead,
listen and learn from their students’ unique, if more and more remote and
disengaged, voices.
Anonymous. (2000). Personal Communication. Available
E-mail: browng@wsu.edu Message:
Weaknesses.
Cappelli, P. (2000). Are tech workers in short supply? CNET
News.Com. Retrieved October 5, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2880309.html?tag=st.ne.1002.bgif.ni
& http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/whatshot.cfm
Educause. (2000). Information technology professionals at
Cornell: Is there a "Brain Drain"? Retrieved December 19,
2000 from the World Wide Web: http://cithr.cit.cornell.edu/ITHR/BrainDrain.html
Edutech International. IT in the consortium setting (2000,
October). (Volume 16, Number 7). Bloomfield, CT: Author.
Ehrmann, S. (2000). Technology and educational revolution: Ending
the cycle of failure. The TLT Group Website. Retrieved November 12,
2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/V_Cycle_of_Failure.html
Gilbert, S. W. (2000). A new vision worth working toward:
connected education and collaborative change. The TLT Group Website.
Retrieved October 6, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.tltgroup.org/gilbert/NewVWWT2000/^NewVwwt2000--2-14-00.htm