This essay was presented on July 21, 2016 as part of my Qualifying Exams for my PhD in the Environmental Psychology program at the Graduate Center, CUNY.  Some Rights Reserved (see Appendix A).

Educational technology, also known as “Ed Tech”, refers to the technologies used to support learning in higher education. In recent years, Ed Tech has been heralded as a disruptive force, an innovative solution, and a transformative possibility for universities (Carey, 2015; Christensen & Eyring, 2011; Bowen, 2015; Bass, 1998; Groom & Lamb, 2014). Disruptive Ed Tech trends, exemplified by the MOOC craze from 2008-2012, postulated that technology could replace traditional university structures and curriculum with “unbundled” online courses and digital learning opportunities that would expand access to higher education, reduce student debt, and decrease institutional costs (Carey, 2015; Craig, 2015; Pappano, 2012). Though MOOCs didn’t live up to the hype or end “the university as we know it” (Harden, 2012; Carey, 2012; Watters, 2012; Bowles 2014; Chafkin, 2014), some individuals contend the commotion they did cause marked the beginning of larger changes to come in higher education. (Lucas Jr, 2013; Christensen & Weise, 2014).

Theories of “disruptive innovation” propose that “if [universities] cannot find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions, they are doomed to decline”(Christensen & Eyring, 2011). The promise of “innovation” suggests that universities can flourish if they resolve inadequacies and funding issues by adopting business-like, streamlined operating models (Bowen, 2015). Innovative uses of technology such as adaptive learning platforms claim to “atomize” the role of the professor and “personalize” the educational experience for each student through the development of mechanized, often proprietary, software programs (Fain, 2014). The disruption and innovation narratives echo and support the neoliberal rhetoric and policies that currently pervade higher education.

Since the 1980’s, public funding for higher education has decreased dramatically; many large public universities now attribute less than 10% of their budgets to public funding (Fabricant, 2014). For example, between 2009 and 2014, The City University of New York’s (CUNY) publicly funded budget was cut by half a billion dollars (Fabricant, 2014). Drawing attention to serious funding issues throughout the CUNY system, David Chen’s recent front-page article in the New York Times’ Sunday Edition declared “Dreams Stall as CUNY, New York City’s Engine of Mobility, Sputters” (May 26, 2016). The article highlighted how issues experienced at CUNY represent “a funding crisis that has been building at public universities across the country”. Federal and state economic austerity policies have undermined higher education’s mission to support ordinary Americans and have destabilized the populations universities once supported (Fabricant, 2014; Selingo, 2013). Reliance on private revenue to replace public funding, commonly in the form of tuition, requires students and their families to subsidize the costs of public higher education by accruing debt to cover tuition fees that have risen steadily for the last two decades (National Center for Education Statistics).

Since their inception, American universities have matured from simple institutions into complex, highly structured, secular organizations (Rudolph & Thelin, 1962). Historically, each iteration of the university has claimed that the education it offers puts the matriculant on the path to a successful life, however interpreted by that institution in its time and place. The American university system we know today was shaped by several important federal legislative decisions in late 19th and early 20th centuries (Kerr, 1963; Fabricant and Brier, 2016). The infusion of public funding stemmed from concerns about potential economic and political unrest; higher education opportunities were developed as a public good to help stabilize the country (Brier, 2016). As a public good, higher education was designed to provide individuals with social mobility and access intellectual opportunities while also developing an educated populace ready to uphold American democratic ideals and expand American capitalism by joining the U.S. labor force. (Brier, 2016; Fabricant and Brier, 2016).

In recent years, withdraw of public funding and increasing privatization of higher education has resulted in the corporatization of the university. Corporatization employs market ideology and managerial discourse to stimulate “revenue enhancement and cost containment” in order to resolve issues in the university (Bousquet & Nelson, 2008). In a corporate university, a culture of academic capitalism encourages market behavior as the path to success, creating a casualized and stratified workforce (Bousquet & Nelson, 2008). Labor and governance issues incite tension between administration and faculty. The “mantra of excellence” promotes neoliberal metrics and accountability measures to gauge success, which hinges on operational efficiency, cost-savings, and vocationalization of the curriculum. (Bousquet & Nelson, 2008; Aronowitz, 2000). This vocationaliztion of the curriculum stifles academic freedom in favor of a curriculum determined by market demand.

Critics argue that disruptive and innovative Ed Tech entrenches this corporatization and the power relations it creates within higher education (Watters, 2016). Disruptive and innovative Ed Tech relies on ideas that “originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business” (i.e. education) (Lepore, 2014). Technology that makes education mechanized, cost-effective, and market-oriented upholds “the demands of politics and power much more often than they reflect progressive pedagogical concerns or teachers’ or learners’ needs” (Watters, 2015). Mechanized and adaptive learning opportunities do not allow for collaborative and participatory practices that exemplify public life. Moreover, these methods overlook the social and contextual aspects of student learning. How can educational technologies and curriculum development resist corporatization and promote academic freedom while also preparing students for life outside of the university?

Viewed as a multifaceted, context-embedded, situated, and social process learning takes place across various levels of time, space (Lave, 1996; Gutierrez and Rogoff, 2003; Wenger, 2011; Looi, 2001). From an ecological perspective, learning and development are interrelated, social processes guided by interaction with knowledgeable adults and capable peers in multiple, varied settings (Vygotsky, 1978). In this view, learning often happens outside of formal learning environments and is situated in communities of practice, where individuals learn informally from those around them and come to “know” through participation in everyday practices (Lave, 1996; Wenger, 2011). Participation allows individuals to engage in social and cultural practices to co-create knowledge and recognize that knowledge is situated within lived, subjective everyday experiences (Haraway, 1988).

If we take learning as a social, situated process it is important to recognize that we live in a period of pervasive technological and informational evolution that has created a networked and interconnected social structure (Castells, 2009). Currently, networked technologies and the digital spaces they create facilitate many of our everyday social and cultural practices and act as a structuring entity of everyday life, including the life within the university (Gibson, 2010; Jones, 2013; Hayles, 2006). For Dewey (1896), process and product exist in a transactional relationship that shape one another (Brinkmann, 2011); the environment, including technology and its affordances (Gibson, 1979), shape what goes on in social and cultural life. Engagement and interaction with the surrounding environment, including technologies, shape and reshapes the environment and the individual.

The educational technologies used by faculty and students cannot be understood as separate from the physical university environment and the administrators, faculty and students who use them. Digital tools, online platforms, software, networked devices, and proprietary programs, are not a set of disparate objects but rather, function as agentic actors within the university, “participant[s] in the course of action” that act to “modify [the] state of affairs” (Latour, 2005). Educational technologies afford the creation of mediated spaces for communication and collaboration, connect individuals across space and time, and extend institutional practices into new spaces for interrogation.

Along these lines, Groom and Lamb (2014) claim that educators can “reclaim innovation” by moving away from corporate, proprietary uses of educational technologies to embrace the open web in support of collaborative and participatory teaching and learning. This reclamation draws on historical uses of networked technology, including the first MOOCs, that were premised on open communication, distributed content, and shared knowledge creation (Downes, 2008; Berners-Lee, 1989). According to Davidson & Goldberg (2009), educational technologies can assist in transforming the university into a networked and dynamic learning institution with new structures of organization and knowledge that serve the needs of a 21st century population. However, like higher education, over time networked and educational technologies have also faced increasing privatization and commercialization. Aronowitz (2000) contends that dismantling the corporate university requires critical scholars to create spaces for faculty and students alike to question the purpose of the university and “produce new forms of governance and of learning” (2000). As an actor embedded within the university system, Ed Tech functions through administrative decisions, and faculty and student use and could assist in dismantling the corporate university.

Moving beyond thinking of Ed Tech as a set of digital objects/tools with no agency, educational technologies provide affordances that faculty and students engage with to develop networks of mediated spaces within the university, extending institutional space into the digital realm (Knight, et. al., 2009). Physical and digital spaces represent different locations of institutional life and practices. This prompts consideration of the platforms and technologies provided by the university and how students and faculty engage in these mediated spaces to facilitate learning. How might the mediated spaces created by Ed Tech assist in the production of “new forms of governance and learning” as suggested by Aronowitz?

The platforms and technologies within a university shape the possibilities for teaching, learning and engagement in public life, opening or closing various avenues of connection, communication, and governance. If a public university relies on privatized, contract-provided learning management systems (Arnow, 2013), what affordances do these spaces provide for public life? What affordances within mediated spaces make them public and allow for equal participation in institutional practices? How do administrative decisions and faculty and student use of mediated spaces resist or entrench the corporatization of the university?

From this perspective, the material and spatial production and management of institutional space becomes an important aspect of establishing the university as a public good. According to Dewey education serves as a form of community life where students practice fundamental forms of social activity and engage in “a process of living not preparation for future living” (Dewey, 1897). At school students should engage in practices that mirror participation in everyday social life. Education and school are produced through human interaction and engagement in social and cultural practices. In modern higher education, educational technology would be one actor within the university system working to produce the educational experience. Tension arises if participation in these practices is limited and/or controlled by select groups. Certain institutional spaces may afford faculty and students more grounds to resist the corporatization and commercialization of democratic public life by providing opportunities to explore how knowledge relates to power, self-definition, and agency (Giroux, 2004). Pushing back against neoliberal trends within the university requires acknowledging that “control of space is power” and administrative and classroom practices can change the material and spatial conditions within the university (Porter, et. al., 2000). How do investments in Ed Tech and use of mediated spaces promote or deter the “ongoing process of democratization” (Giroux, 2004) in the university? How can pedagogy and faculty development assist in challenging and altering the material and spatial conditions within the university?

Focusing on both the administrative and classroom levels highlights the importance of enacted practices and levels of governance within the university. Administrative decisions matter for determining how Ed Tech will act throughout the university. These possibilities become reality through faculty and student practices in the classroom and mediated spaces in the creation of learning experiences. This raises questions about the associations between administrative decisions and classroom practices. It also raises questions about university decision-making processes and the differing roles that administrators inhabit throughout the university system. How do administrative decisions about Ed Tech shape teaching practices in the classroom and open up (or close down) possibilities for critical and progressive pedagogical practices? How do Ed Tech-oriented decisions and related processes differ when particular administrators or administrative branches of the university are involved?

Public and open mediated spaces would allow students and faculty to engage in participatory and collaborative practices. Through these practices individuals have the opportunity to develop an identity, gaining knowledge of them selves and their situatedness in the world (and the university) so that they can act to further transform it. (Vianna and Stetsenko, 2011). Culturally relevant pedagogies incorporate various “culture[s] in the classroom as authorized or official knowledge” so that students learn to recognize the dynamic social relations in which they are embedded and can begin to understand the existence of varying types of knowledge (Ladson-Billings, 1995). This acknowledges the “intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education” (Dewey, 1938). By engaging in learning processes that incorporate life experiences, individuals are able to question social systems while also becoming productive members of a cohesive social community (Glassman, 2001).

This approach to learning rejects the traditional school-centric focus in favor of examining “the broader life spheres of an individual” to understand connections between spaces, places, and people, including networked relationships between peers, home, school, work, neighborhood, community, resources, and activities (Siemens, 2003; Sheridan, 2015; Bronfenbrenner, 1981; Barron, 2006). This “learning ecology framework” (Brown, 2000; Barron 2006) emphasizes the connections between surrounding physical, social, and cultural environments. Space and learning are intimately linked and “learning that takes place in a particular space…is an emergent property of that space” (Thomas, 2010). Therefore, different learning processes may take place in the classroom and in the mediated spaces beyond (Bass, 2012). How can engagement in mediated spaces best facilitate the learning process and allow students to understand the relationship between “actual experience and education”? (Dewey, 1938) What kinds of educational technologies and mediated spaces afford engagement with critical, democratizing pedagogical practices? How can pedagogical methods both in the classroom and within these mediated spaces draw on student’s networked lives (i.e. their learning ecologies) to facilitate their learning processes?

Students may engage and identify with some spaces more than others. (Tuan, 1974; Altman and Low, 1992). The mediated spaces that students choose to use to navigate and facilitate their learning processes have material, social, economic, and political dimensions worthy of exploration (Manzo & Perkins, 2006). The places students connect with and the affordances of those spaces/places would lend insight into how Ed Tech functions within the university. According to Bronfenbrenner (1981) an individual’s ecological environment contains nested structures that the individual “progressively moves into and restructures” in order to learn and develop. From the microsystem that includes activities, roles, and interpersonal relationships, to the meso – exo- and macrosystems that contain social networks, governing structures, cultural attitudes and practices, an exploration of learning ecologies and associated spaces/places would need to investigate the interplay within and between these systems. A student’s learning ecology would be embedded throughout and within each of these systems and would include the social practices and governing structures produced by the university they attend.

Understanding how mediated spaces function to support student learning would require an institutional analysis of material and spatial conditions, looking at how the mediated spaces students incorporate into their learning ecologies facilitate their learning processes (Porter, et. al.; Grabill, et. al.; Barron, 2006; Brown, 2000). Bronfenbrenner’s nested ecological structures provide a starting point for situating the student, faculty member, administrators, and educational technologies (i.e. the actors) within the university system. In the case of CUNY, a hyper-local understanding of students’ situatedness would acknowledge their diverse and urban location. According to Proshansky (1974), a large urban university will differ from a smaller, rural school in complexity and structure. In an urban university a highly complex hierarchy of administrators, faculty, staff, and an ethnically and socially diverse student population is organized in a spatially constricted university bureaucracy held together by impersonal social relations. Though it may differ from non-urban, less complex institutions, student expectations for an effective learning environment at an urban university remain the same, “they hope it will be functional, attractive, and meaningful” (Proshansky, 1974). According to Proshansky, in order to create an effective learning environment, an urban university would need to provide the students with places that afford privacy, so that students have space to think and be alone, and a sense of territoriality so that students have some ability to create and manage their own space. How might mediated spaces provide students with privacy and feelings of ownership over their own space?

Decisions made by university administrators and faculty, teaching and learning practices, and university culture shapes the spaces where students learn and interact. An ecological analysis of the university and it’s mediated spaces would require a methodological institutional critique that examines both the administrative and classroom practices enacted within the university to resist and alter the ongoing processes of corporatization (Porter, et. al., 2000). This critique would aim to change the university structure by focusing on material and spatial conditions and practices within the university (Porter, et. al., 2000). Local, micro-level material and spatial analyses view the institution as “an entity composed of its own set of physical resources, procedures, and people…physical entities…embodied in buildings and other uses of space” and incorporates technology not as a deterministic force but as a “dynamic process of development” (Grabill, et. al, 2003) Institutional space extends into the digital realm created and managed by the university and online spaces serve as the institutions “public digital face” because “the interface is fast becoming the primary cultural form of the digital age” (Knight, et. al., 2009). Interfaces used for teaching act as electronic contact zones that can (re)produce or resist dominant cultural tendencies and therefore become complex political landscapes (Selfe, Selfe, 1994). From this angle, creation and management of mediated space is an important aspect of that space and related to how the space acts within the fabric of the university. This situates Ed Tech as an important actor in the resistance to ongoing corporatization of the university and restoration of higher education as a public good.

In summary, higher education has become increasingly corporatized. In many instances, the use of educational technologies to support learning has mirrored these neoliberal trends. If meant to serve as a public good, the university should engage with educational technologies that uphold this mission. This requires a reconsideration of how educational technologies act within the university system through the mediated spaces and affordances they provide. This reconsideration would address how educational technologies and mediated spaces participate in the university system to support student learning, curriculum, and pedagogies. This requires recognizing Ed Tech functions as an actor within the university to resist ongoing corporatization and work toward restoring higher education as a public good.

If dismantling the corporate university requires critical scholars to create spaces for faculty and students alike to question the purpose of the university and “produce new forms of governance and of learning” (Aronowitz, 200), mediated institutional spaces would play a role.. A multi-tiered institutional analysis would need to consider macro-level administrative decisions associated with the function/use of educational technologies down to the meso-level of connective classroom practices and pedagogies that utilize meditated spaces to reach into micro-level aspects of students’ learning processes that are distributed through networked learning ecologies.

 

Questions

On resisting neoliberal trends:

  • How could educational technologies and curriculum development resist corporatization and promote academic freedom while also preparing students for life outside of the university?
  • How might the mediated spaces created by Ed Tech assist in the production of “new forms of governance and learning” as suggested by Aronowitz?

On promoting the university as a public good, modeled on and for public life:

  • If a public university relies on privatized, contract-provided learning management systems, what affordances do these spaces provide for public life?
  • What affordances within mediated spaces make them public and allow for equal participation in institutional practices?
  • How do administrative decisions and faculty and student use of mediated spaces resist or entrench the corporatization of the university?

On the control of space as a form of power and agency:

  • How do investments in Ed Tech and use of mediated spaces promote or deter the “ongoing process of democratization” (Giroux, 2004) in the university?
  • How can pedagogy and faculty development assist in challenging and altering the material and spatial conditions within the university?

On the connection between administration and classroom practices:

  • How do administrative decisions about Ed Tech shape teaching practices in the classroom and open up (or close down) possibilities for critical and progressive pedagogical practices?
  • How do Ed Tech-oriented decisions and related processes differ when particular administrators or administrative branches of the university are involved?

On mediated spaces to facilitate learning:

  • What kinds of educational technologies provide affordances for critical, democratizing pedagogies?
  • How can engagement in mediated spaces best facilitate the learning process and allow students to understand the relationship between “actual experience and education”? (Dewey, 1938)
  • How can pedagogical methods both in the classroom and within these mediated spaces draw on student’s networked lives (i.e. their learning ecologies) to facilitate the learning processes?
  • How might mediated spaces provide students with privacy and feelings of ownership over their own spaces?

 

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