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Transforming Higher Education

October 15, 1996

Kathy A. Fitch

Essay #1

Transforming Community

At our first class meeting, one of the participants observed that whenever transformation is on the horizon, people neatly and predictably divide themselves into three groups: leaders, followers, and nay sayers. It strikes me that those of us who most fervently wish to embrace technology’s power to transform the institutions Rheingold lists might begin by rejecting this "lead, follow, or get out of the way" mentality. After all, most of us regularly, if rather reluctantly, switch categories, and the most passionate leaders are often erstwhile nay sayers (and vice-versa). In fact, these three responses to change might more accurately be described as recursive developmental stages than as rigid categories. Perhaps, then, our question should not be "How can we lead reluctant communities toward change?" but "How can we redefine community so that we envision ‘nay saying’ not as stubborn, unreasonable resistance to change, but as both the welcome precursor to change and the ‘incisive critique’ it so often is?"

I still remember my very first personal computer. By today’s standards, it was simplistic--a small monochrome monitor, two side by side 5 1/4" disk drives, and no internal memory. Looking back, I’m struck by how far computer technology has come in the scant fourteen years since that rudimentary machine graced my desk. I’m also struck by how far I have come. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I regarded that first computer with utter suspicion. After all, I was an English major, not one of those pasty faced computer nerds running around with stacks of punch cards muttering something unintelligible about BASIC and COBOL. Certainly, I thought it was generous of my father to outfit me with the latest toy, but clearly he did not understand. Writing was a spiritual undertaking, you see, meant to be accomplished with pen and paper. In fact, parchment and stylus would probably have been preferable, if only they weren’t so hard to come by. One might grudgingly allow for old-fashioned typewriters of the sort hard-bitten newsmen were always hunching over in those black and white movies like The Front Page, but this monstrosity with its dizzying array of function keys and its dehumanizing air? Not on your life. Probably, my father was hoping I’d fall in love with the machine and switch to a more lucrative major--maybe even end up marrying one of the pasty faced crowd, but his little ruse was not going to work on me. To put it bluntly, I was the most strident nay sayer of all.

So, what happened? How did I go from wondering if I would really be expected to dust that intimidating machine to wondering why the Power Point slide-show I embedded as an icon in my networked English 101 assignment simply wouldn’t run? For me, the answer was--and remains--community. As a twenty-year old English major, I knew no one who routinely used computers. They were the stuff of dystopian science fiction and robotic corporations, at once frightening and dreary. The few times I did sit down to try to figure out the machine, there was no one to turn to for help. Making an overture to a Computer Science major was out of the question, not only because I couldn’t speak their mystifying language, but also because I wasn’t quite sure where to find one. Back then, once an undergraduate declared her major, she had little opportunity to fraternize with students from other disciplines. In short, I either had to plow my way through all of those thick manuals on my own, or give up in despair. For nearly a year, I chose the latter.

Soon, however, there were inklings of change. The Modern Language Association published its own word processing software, Nota Bene. Both theoretical and practical professional journals began publishing articles on computer assisted research and composition. The library mothballed card catalogues in favor of inter-library research networks and CD-ROM’s. Computer labs were installed in the dorms. Freshman, regardless of their intended majors, began arriving with computers of their own. Computer majors began to strike me as quietly intelligent rather than pasty faced. Gradually, there were more and more people to turn to for help and to compare notes with, and it was that sense of community--my first rudimentary experience with a computer "network"--that led me to confront and ultimately overcome my computer phobia.

That it was a phobia I have no doubt. At the time, I wouldn’t have named it so, but in retrospect I see that my supercilious attitude (a true English major refuses to interact with soul-sapping machinery) was designed to conceal my fear. Growth always hurts, of course, but isolation magnifies the pain. Alone, I was stuck in a classic approach-avoidance dilemma, for as reluctant as I was to brave the computer on my own, I was equally intrigued by and attracted to it. Plus, I was loathe to let it stymie me. After all, if the techno-nerd crowd could master the thing, surely it couldn’t be that difficult. At last, in the company of colleagues, I could abandon resistance. Finally, I could confront, debate, and even embrace the possibilities of this transformation.

Resisting, confronting, debating, and embracing are not, however, lock-step stages. Over the last seventeen years, I’ve cycled through them all more times than I can count, and I fully expect that cycling to continue. Because transformation is continuous, I must routinely pit my desire to hold on to the comfortingly familiar against my desire to evolve. It is a crisis every time, but one that I weather both more rapidly and with more equanimity these days, both because I’ve had lots of practice, and because I never weather it alone. Our e-mail system is a perfect example. First, it meant I had to learn to negotiate yet another software system. Then, I discovered how much easier it is to operate a Windows system than a DOS based system, and became a devotee, even buying Microsoft Office for my home computer. Next, I entered a skeptical stage. Why was I wasting my time paging through all of this junk mail? If I had to scroll through a hundred names (conservatively) before I even managed to locate the text of an e-mail message, then how important could that message really be? Why weren’t we using bulletin boards for notices of the public variety? Further, who were these conspiracy theorists gumming up the works with their half-baked ideas, and why didn’t they know better? Never a fan of committees spawning endless subcommittees and task-forces, I nonetheless briefly toyed with the idea that we really ought to convene a committee whose sole purpose it would be to develop a college-wide "netiquette" policy. In that weak moment, I would even have agreed to chair the darn thing. Now, I’m somewhere between enthusiasm and guarded optimism. E-mail allows us to stay in contact with both students and colleagues, even when we must go days or weeks without seeing them, and it prevents fruitless rounds of phone tag. In the hands of thoughtful users, it can change the nature of our communication, leading to long, deliberative exchanges that become a kind of multiply authored text. Plus, I think that we are gradually getting better at using the e-mail system responsibly. Still, duplicate electronic and paper messages could drive a girl to distraction, and lately I find that my office hours fly by before I’ve managed to complete even half of what I set out to do. So, I’m a skeptic, but not a cynic. I’m growing, but still fussing a bit about the inevitable discomfort growth entails.

From my admittedly biased and limited standpoint, College of DuPage has, so far, been wildly successful in creating the kind of physical community that fosters transformation. Every desk computer, every networked lab, every e-mail account, every voice mail box, contributes to the kind of information sharing that I yearned for when that first hulking computer seemed to glint menacingly at me years ago. By information sharing, however, I mean neither the "how to’s" of electronic communication nor the actual content of the messages we send. Rather, I refer to our ability to compare notes about using our new technology effectively, efficiently, ethically, and wisely. As much as I admire the pioneers of technology-supported learning, I have often been disturbed by their tendency to focus on instructional strategies rather than learning.. Certainly, I can embed a Power Point slide show into a networked English 101 assignment--I might even be able to figure out how to make it run, eventually--but why do I want to do that? Will it enhance learning? Shouldn’t I be careful not to simply relocate old teaching tools (e.g. lectures, handouts, transparencies) into this new medium? Doesn’t a new medium call for new genres? After all, I don’t want to be like those early filmmakers who simply parked their cameras in front of the stage and started recording. Just as the language of stage drama differs from the language of film, so must these new learning tools demand a language all their own. Have we begun to formulate that language? Does it have a discernible grammar? Such are the questions I struggle with now.

That the Chinese character for "crisis" translates literally as "dangerous opportunity" is one bit of linguistic trivia that has always appealed to me, for it neatly encapsulates an elemental truth. Change, no matter how deliberately undertaken, is always disconcerting. Little surprise that psychologists count marriage and birth, two of life’s most joyful events, among the most stressful moments in an adult’s life, and little wonder that we so often resist the painful evolution that any change entails. Still, to reject change entirely is to miss the opportunities that accompany its dangers. In marriage, we sacrifice a bit of our autonomy for the reward of intimacy. As parents, we sacrifice everything from sleep to silence for the reward of watching our children develop into healthy adults capable of forming intimate attachments of their own. All worthy endeavors, including teaching and learning, involve similar sacrifices. When students fuss at us about the difficulty of an assignment, we don’t automatically replace it with an effortless task, one as easy for them to complete as it would be for us to evaluate. Instead, we honestly commiserate. Yes, thinking and writing are hard. Yes, growth hurts. Undoubtedly, the promise of growth makes the inevitable discomfort worthwhile.

Undertaken as a community, change is both easier and harder. Easier because we have a network of colleagues, including students, to turn to for support and advice. Harder because each member of the community evolves at his or her own resolutely unique pace. One way we can ease the discomfort particular to community-wide transformation is by resisting the urge to affix each other with rigid, limiting labels. Simultaneously leader, follower, and nay sayer (though I dislike that last term, preferring Taylor’s "incisive critic"), I fit neatly into none of the categories with which I began. I doubt that anyone does. Catch me telling the story of that first computer, and you might mistakenly stick me with the critic label. Watch me facilitate a network conference, and you might too quickly dub me a leader. Listen to me bemoan e-mail abuse, and it’s back into the critic category I go. Notice me listening intently to a colleague or a student describing an approach or application I hadn’t thought of, and I’m suddenly a follower. Who is to say which is my dominant mode? Like most of us, I am all and none of these things. To me, each of these stages is equally symptomatic of change. Conversely, change depends upon the coexistence of each of these stages. I’d worry if our discussions about transformation produced the kind of universal enthusiasm and obsequious agreement that are the hallmarks of mindless, stagnant obedience. Leading, following, and critiquing are all vital, interdependent components of transformation. The leader in me gets frustrated when critics slow progress. The critic in me observes that icebergs, plodding pace notwithstanding, managed to create some pretty impressive mountains--besides, in the grand scheme of things the ice-age was only the blink of an eye. The follower? She looks on approvingly, wondering what kind of change this productive tension will lead to next.

Those of us who are part of academic communities in general, community colleges in particular, are more fortunate than we generally realize. Regardless of our specialties or disciplines, we all hold "community, democracy, education, science, and intellectual life" dear, and we all know and care deeply about technology’s potentially overwhelming impact on our professions. We begin, then, with the kind of common ground that would be tough to create from scratch. To build on that foundation, we must come to accept that "enthusiasm," "incisive criticism," and everything in between can and must coexist if our community is to be transformed rather than splintered by the impact of technology. When we are able to be equally guided by the leader’s pioneering spirit, the follower’s willing tentativeness, and the critic’s provocative misgivings, then we will truly be a transforming community. I, for one, will be happy to lead, follow, and critique our progress every step of the way.

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