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When a revolutionary education tool comes out that supposedly makes use of "new technology," it's usually focused on text--images--static archives put on the Internet and labeled innovative. Popular tools for teaching are centered around the idea of "convenience" and "speed." Products such as Blackboard and MovableType offer educators a text based classroom on the screen, with supplementary materials for creating the familiar in virtual territory. These are not revolutionary materials, they are old tools in new packages. It is true that the Internet offers unprecedented access to information and tools for expediting once tedious exchanges thereof--but is that all that can be accomplished with this new technology?
The introduction of any new technology into the education environment can be met with suspicion: “Writing destroys memory and weakens the mind, relieving it of…work that makes it strong. Writing is an inhuman thing.” Plato quotes Socrates expressing this sentiment where Socrates condemns the idea of recording thought on paper as a devaluing of thought itself. There is in itself an irony to the recording of this statement: while Socrates did not commit his thoughts to paper, his student did it for him. McLuhan takes these thoughts on the change writing produces further: “Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog” (Medium 48). In writing on the changing of culture, Steven Johnson claims that: “At the threshold points near the birth of any new technology, all types of distortions and misunderstandings are bound to appear—misunderstandings not only of how the machines actually work but also of more subtle matters: what realm of experience the new technologies belong to, what values they perpetuate, where their more indirect effects will take place” (211). Johnson’s statements apply to the book that so threatened Socrates (if, indeed, we are to take Plato’s word for it) centuries ago. Books are technology, as strange as it may seem to make the claim: after all, the book is the province of dusty libraries and the shelves of academia, and we accept it into our lives without questioning it, without pausing to wonder what is at work in these volumes of coded messages and carefully aligned narratives. It does not threaten us; it requires our engagement and our interaction to have any existence (Birkerts 122). The book is static, open to our own timing and involvement, the turning of pages creating a linear narrative we progress through at our own leisure. The book is safe, familiar, academic. |