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State of the Society
Report for FY 1997 - Janelle Walter, Chair, Board of Directors
Advanced Information Infrastructures: The
Human Interface
Virginia Moxley, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, College of Human
Ecology, Kansas State University
The Internet as a Practical Problem:
Empowerment in the Electronic Global Village
Marsha L. Rehm, Associate Professor, College of Human Sciences, Florida
State University
Choreographing Teaching in the
21st Century
Elizabeth Larson, doctoral student in Curriculum and Instruction, College of
Education, Kansas State University
Building a User Friendly Environment: The
Challenge of Technology in Higher Education
Virginia L. Clark, Dean and Professor, School of Education, College of Human
Development and Education, North Dakota State University. Gregory F. Sanders,
Associate Dean and Associate Professor, School of Education, College of Human
Development and Education, North Dakota State University. Ronald M. Stammen,
Associate Professor, School of Education, College of Human Development and
Education, North Dakota State University
Conducting Research on the Internet:
Potential, Concerns, and Reflections
Steven M. Harris, Assistant Professor, Department of Human Development and
Family Studies, Texas Tech University. Charette A. Dersch, doctoral student,
Marriage and Family Therapy, Department of Human Development and Family
Studies, Texas Tech University
Model for Distance Learning Using Advanced
Information Infrastructures
Joan Laughlin, Associate Dean, Graduate Studies and Research, College of Human
Resources and Family Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Computer Mediated Interaction in a Distance
Education Course
Carolyn S. Wilken, Director, Galichia Institue Institution for Gerontology and
Family Studies and Associate Professor, Family Studies and Human Services,
College of Human Ecology, Kansas State University
Editor’s Message
Dorothy I. Mitstifer, Executive Director, Kappa Omicron Nu Honor Society, East
Lansing, Michigan
Kappa Omicron Nu FORUM, Vol. 11, No. 1. Editor: Dorothy I. Mitstifer. Guest Editor: Virginia Moxley. Official publication of Kappa Omicron Nu National Honor Society. Member, Association of College Honor Societies. Copyright © 1999. Kappa Omicron Nu FORUM is a refereed, semi-annual publication serving the profession of family and consumer sciences. The opinions expressed by the authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of the society. Further information: Kappa Omicron Nu, 4990 Northwind Drive, Suite 140, East Lansing, MI 48823-5031. Telephone: 517.351.8335 - Fax: 517.351.8336.
*This message was delivered to the Leadership Conclave, Dallas, Texas, August 9, 1997.
It is my pleasure to report on the state of Kappa Omicron Nu. This message will tell you why I am impressed with the dynamics and vibrancy of the Honor Society.
Our governance structure involves continuous strategic thinking and review of policies to assure that the programs and policies remain relevant and responsive to member input. The policy handbook describes the chair as presider of board meetings and Conclave, liaison to the Constitution Committee, ex-officio member of all committees except nominating, and leader of the organization on behalf of members. This means that in all things I represented you. In order to measure progress it is good to remind us all of the purpose of the Society. The mission of Kappa Omicron Nu Honor Society is empowered leadersin family and consumer sciences. The ends that provide focus are planned to create empowered leaders. The language of these statements lies in the current governance approach the Board has adopted to govern this organization. Policy Governance® focuses the Board on the mission and policies that guide decision making for Kappa Omicron Nu. The Board, including the Executive Director, makes decisions on ends policies to achieve the mission:
Among the strategies to achieve these ends are the recognition and award programs. Awards totaled almost $55,000 in this fiscal year.
- Sylvia Asay - University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Andrea Clark - University of Alabama at Birmingham
- Jessica Mills - University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Sharon Nickols-Richardson - University of Georgia
- Pauline Samuda - University of Maine
- Jonathan Sandberg - Kansas State University
Society publications included four Dialogues and two FORUMS. Future issues of FORUM will feature “Legacies for the Future,” “Making Community,” “Leadership: Up Close and Personal,” and “Advanced Information Infrastructures.” Calls for papers for two collections of essays have been distributed: “Reflective Leading in the Public Interest” and “Toward a Theory of Family Well-Being: #2.”
Kappa Omicron Nu joined the information age and the World Wide Web. In 1996 members could tap into KON’s Web site <http://www.kon.org> and e-mail the national office. Other enhancements are contemplated.
Membership continues to grow. In 1996-97, 2768 new members were initiated. Our membership acceptance rate of 57 percent compares favorably with other honor societies, but the Board is not satisfied with this statistic. Active life, alumni, and campus members in 1996-97 totaled 13,000+, including more than 4500 gift memberships to recent grads. Members over time total almost 113,000. Although renewal efforts are extensive, active membership retention is lower than desired.
A membership survey appeared in the February Dialogue. Results of the survey indicated that the number one benefit of membership was to broaden horizons. Next in value were “stay well informed about critical issues” tied with “renew my commitment to excellence.” The top resource was scholarships/fellowships/grants, followed by Dialogue and Kappa Omicron Nu FORUM.
Terms for national officers coincide with the calendar year, except Student Representatives who serve from one conclave to the next. Board members whose terms will expire in 1997 were Janelle Walter, Chair and Merry Jo Dallas, Vice Chair for Finance.
The Society was served by our standing committees. Sincere thanks to the following committee members whose elected terms expire at the end of 1997: Editorial, Gwendolyn Newkirk and Francine Hultgren; Nominating, Betty Church, Charlotte Edwards, and E. Katrina Rivers.
Committees provide a valuable governance function and assist the organization in achieving its mission. Committees for 1997 included the following members: Awards I, Barbara Amundsen, Geraldean Johnson, Lynette Olson, and Mary Rainey; Awards II, Gwendolyn Paschall, Deborah Fowler, Jane Reagor, and Marilyn Swierk; Awards III, Virginia Clark, Kathleen Bands, Beth Goudge, and Virginia Vincenti; Constitution and Bylaws, Kaye Boyer, Karla Hughes, Susan Poch, and Mary Pritchard.
Kappa Omicron Nu has continued to collaborate with Phi Upsilon Omicron in the Coordinating Council of Honor Societies (CCHS). In addition to sponsoring the undergraduate research paper competition, CCHS presented the Graduate Program Showcase at the AAFCS Annual Meeting.
As part of the Leadership Academy, Kappa Omicron Nu joined with the Coalition for Black Development in Home Economics, the Council of Administrators of Family and Consumer Sciences, and the Family and Consumer Sciences Administrative Leadership Council to sponsor a preconference workshop at the 1997 AAFCS Annual Meeting. The “Taking Charge of Change” workshop featured the Reflective Human Action leadership model. Fran Andrews and Dorothy Mitstifer conducted a workshop, “Making a Leadership Community,” at the international meeting of the Society for Nutrition Education in Toronto.
This Conclave, held August 7-10, 1997 at the DFW Hyatt Regency, Dallas, Texas, features “Leadership for the New Millennium” workshops in two tracks: students and professionals. Members who contributed to programming were Wilma Griffin, Frances E. Andrews, Virginia Clark, Mary E. Pritchard, and Gladys Gary Vaughn. Student Board Members Elizabeth DeMerchant and Scott Ketring complete their terms at this Conclave. The following Student Board Members will serve until the 1999 Conclave: Norene Cochran of East Tennessee State University, Carrie J. Fuller of Bradley University, and Kevin M. Taylor of University of Maryland-Eastern Shore.
Financially speaking, the fiscal year was changed to July 1 - June 30; therefore, in order to change from the previous September 30 closing date, the 1997 report represents a nine-month transition year. One of the Board’s main concerns is that membership benefits have been a priority to the detriment of creating a general fund reserve large enough to maintain current programs in harsh economic times. In other words, benefits have outranked cash reserves. The endowed funds and restricted funds are well protected with a balanced mix of equity and income investments.
9/30/96 |
6/30/97 |
| General Fund |
General Fund |
| $ 54,232 |
$ 56,323 |
| Restricted Funds |
Restricted Funds |
| $307,980 |
$336,927 |
You can be proud of the great care and vision that drive all those who serve Kappa Omicron Nu. And the Society is to be commended for its unselfishness and desire to contribute to the welfare of the profession. In summary, I am pleased to say that our vital signs are very good; our prognosis great.
Exponential growth in the capacity of informational infrastructures during the past decade has vastly increased the ability to distribute and access information. This paper explores how advances in information technologies have impacted the everyday experiences of the people who use them. Information technologies have rearranged time use, neutralized geography as an asset (or liability) for workers and learners, and ratcheted up expectations for instantly available customized information.
Much of human progress has come about because someone invented a better and more powerful tool… Informational tools are symbolic mediators that amplify the intellect rather than the muscle of their users. —Bill Gates, 1995.
Human beings have a need to communicate. Throughout history, human communities have developed languages that enabled community members to share information. When these languages came to exist in written form, asynchronous communication occurred, and human communities shared innovations and traditions across time and place. However, until the invention of the printing press in the mid 15th century, the process of sharing was difficult, expensive, and slow. The printing press transformed human communication because it could reproduce written information more easily, at less cost, and at greater speed than scribes could.
Human communities continue to search for ways to share information across time and place in ways that are easy, inexpensive, and instantaneous. Advances in information technologies in the latter half of the 20th century are vastly more significant in terms of information growth and transfer than the printing press was in the 15th century. When the printing press was invented, few people could read. When the networked microcomputer was introduced, the population of the world was mostly literate and poised to capitalize on information exchange.
The decade of the 1990s has been a transformational time for information growth and transfer. The growth in information and its accessibility has changed work, education, and family life. This growth has been fueled by advances in information infrastructures.
U.S. households have chosen the networked personal computer as the appliance of choice for the decade of the 1990s. The broad diffusion of personal computers assures consumer demand for products which drives the development of new and better hardware, software, networks, and technological services.
The memory and processing capacity of personal computers is growing exponentially. According to Bill Gates (1995), since the mid 1960s the capacity of computer chips has doubled every 18 months and this rate of growth will continue for another twenty years. The consequences of exponential growth are such that if Gates’ prediction holds true, twenty years from now computer transactions will be 10,000 times faster and what now takes a day will then take fewer than ten seconds.
The bandwidth connecting computers is expanding to allow for faster transmission of digital data. Transmission speed is not especially critical for transmitting print information to a few computers, however the transmission of images and video to vast numbers of information appliances will require broad band widths.
Software has been “dumbed down” at the user interface and “smartened up” in work capacity. Because new software is relatively easy for experienced computer users to learn, they tend to load lots of programs on their computers which drives the demand for computers with increased storage and operating capacity.
In historical context, I expect that the decade of the 1990s will come to be recognized as a time when asynchronous human communication shifted from paper to electronic media. It will also be known as a time
This paper will discuss changes in information infrastructures that have occurred during the last half of the 20th century. It will focus on the human interface—how people have experienced these changes—during the decade of the 1990s.
I am a rather typical professional user of electronic information infrastructures. As such, I have chosen to provide the following case history of my personal “coming on line.” In compiling this case history, I came to the following understandings.
Today, using the internet and a personal computer at home and work seems so natural that I cannot imagine life without my personal networked computers. Yet as the case history illustrates, most of my life was spent without a computer at my fingertips. This look back has enabled me to see that as soon as I upgraded a computer or a software program, I forgot about the limitations of the previous one and so I discounted the advances in capacity even while I was avidly using them. Because of this ability to discount advances, much of the change has been invisible to those of us experiencing it.
Throughout much of the 1990s I have felt as if I were not sufficiently competent to manage computer communication as well as I wanted. I would put off upgrades because I did not have time to learn to use the new and improved equipment and programs. I would attend training sessions and leave convinced that I was technologically inept. I watched my children develop computer skills by playing and realized that I reached adulthood in the only generation in human history to learn an entirely new and constantly changing communication medium in adulthood.
Just as quickly as communications technology advanced, expectations for it advanced. These expectations assumed that the human users of the equipment were as adaptable as the equipment itself. This has rarely proven to be the case. Having the human capacity to create an instant response to an inquiry is quite different from having the technological capacity to do so. The output from the human brain has not experienced the exponential growth that output from information technology has. For many practical uses, computing capacity has outpaced our ability to benefit from the speed. It has not however outpaced the growth of our impatience. We continue to redefine “instant.”
The following timeline is provided to illustrate the extent of change in information technologies that mid-career professionals have experienced in their work lives. I have inserted major milestones in computing technology as they happened. I note that the early milestones did not have the immediate consequences for my work that recent milestones have had.
1967 - Kansas State University had one main frame computer primarily used for data management. Data to be inputted were carried to the computer for entry by an operator. As an undergraduate student, I enrolled in a computer programming course. Keypunched assignments were given to an operator and were run sometime within the next 24 hours.
Early 1970s - E-mail was first used for academic information exchange (Harasin et al., 1996). This use appears to have been the exclusive domain of researchers in the natural sciences. The earliest adopters were defense contractors because the military developed the first network.
1972 - Intel released a microprocessor chip (Gates, 1995). Few people other than Bill Gates and Paul Allen noticed.
1975 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed Microsoft, the world’s first microcomputer software company (Gates, 1995).
1977 - I employed a typist who used an electric typewriter to type the final draft of my doctoral dissertation. Computers were still mostly mainframe management and analysis tools. They were not being used for word processing.
1982 - IBM Personal Computer is marketed with MS-DOS operating system (Gates, 1995).
Mid 1980s - Universities and businesses began to invest in personal computers for use in word processing and data management.
1984 - Apple Computer released the Macintosh, the first microcomputer with graphical interface (Gates, 1995).
1985 - I returned to KSU as Associate Dean of the College of Human Ecology. Some staff and even fewer faculty members had computers on their desks. For the next decade, the need to provide distributed computing to all faculty and staff drove financial decisions, and faculty and staff were alternately stressed either by lack of access to sufficient computing capacity or by lack of personal capacity to use what they had access to.
1989 - KSU began to provide electronic mail training for faculty. The course material had limited value for me—there were few other users to send mail to. I opened my electronic mailbox biweekly and rarely found a message.
1990 - I purchased my first home computer—a Macintosh LC with pull down bars and screen icons. The primary uses for the computer were word processing and children’s homework. Microsoft released Windows 3.0—the first graphical interface for DOS-based computers (Gates, 1995).
1993 - The University opened new networked public computing laboratories, one of which was located in the College. These laboratories were not (and still are not) staffed. For the first two years, faculty members officed near laboratories became de facto lab assistants as students sought technical assistance with the equipment. Within two years, however, students sought support from peer users of the laboratories, and this has proven to be a satisfactory solution.
1994 - Human Sciences administrators in the Great Plains area met to form a distance education alliance. In 1994, distance delivery modes used by participating universities were designed for in-state audiences. Initial inter-state offerings were by videotape and telephone conferencing. Although universities could deliver courses on the Internet, most potential students lacked the computer and network acess to receive them.
1995 - Bill Gates reported, “Now that computing is astoundingly inexpensive and computers inhabit every part of our lives, we stand at the brink of another revolution. This one will involve unprecedentedly inexpensive communication; all the computers will join together to communicate with us and for us. Interconnected globally, they will form a network, which is being called the information highway. A direct precursor is the present Internet” (Gates, 1995). The College created a Local Area Network for the building and hired a full time network supervisor. The supervisor has been upgrading computers and wiring and peripherals full time since then. All rooms in university residence halls were equipped with two Ethernet connections to link student computers to the university server.
1996 - I replaced computers at work and at home due to “social obsolescence” of previous computers. According to Tenner (1997), social obsolescence, the inability of a computer model to run new releases of important software efficiently, often occurs within a year of purchase. Local Internet access reached the rural telephone company that serves our household. We subscribed. The college offered its first courses delivered entirely via the Internet. For the first time, all entering KSU students were assigned an e-mail address at preenrollment. The university published its first campus directory of electronic mail addresses. Average daily electronic mail transmissions handled by the university server increased 400% from April 1995 to April 1996 (CITAC, 1998).
1997 - I began to teach in one of the university’s high technology classrooms. Palm top computers provide instant analysis of student responses. Networked classroom computer provides access to the Internet and is equipped with Power Point software. In-class activities are supplemented through a listserve.
1998 - Networked computers are the status quo for businesses and households in the United States. The Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (IDEA) has become a virtual team that collaborates regularly on distance education and technology issues. Home pages accessed electronically are the information source of choice for prospective students and the public. Newsletters are being reformatted for electronic rather than paper delivery. Students at KSU are expected to be computer savvy when they arrive. KSU students in off-campus organized living groups that install T1 lines have direct access to the university server.
The advances during the past decade have had major impacts on our work and on our daily lives. For the most part, these impacts have been positive ones. Topping the list of positive impacts is the time and geographic freedom that new information technologies have provided. These advances in technology have also had unintended negative impacts which should be recognized and managed better.
Technology does not create time, it simply rearranges it’s use. In some ways, asynchronous communication is more demanding in terms of time management than synchronous communication. For instance, when a faculty member initiates a course for asynchronous delivery via the Internet, the faculty member’s planning and development time is “front loaded.” No longer does the faculty member experience the adrenaline high of last minute preparation for the day’s class. Instead, the faculty member must engage in a thorough planning process long before the first class is available to students. The sequence of development changes when the entire class, not just the class period, must be ready for launch at one time. If the course has previously been taught in the traditional classroom, the delivery format must be converted from a predominantly verbal format to a highly visual one. Because copyright laws are far more stringent for materials being electronically reproduced than for materials shown in a classroom, permission to use words and images must be secured from the creator of the materials and cataloged. In addition, electronic reproduction, just like paper reproduction, requires that all materials derived from other sources be cited. Again, arranging and cataloging these citations requires much more thorough documentation than faculty members are accustomed to using in preparing for classroom delivery. The time payoff for faculty members, if it exists, will only be realized during successive offerings of the course.
Students, too, have time challenges in the use of asynchronously delivered instruction. Students who enroll in distance education courses delivered via the Internet choose this delivery technique because it offers perceived freedom of time and place. However, students who most want this time freedom tend to be time constrained by ongoing roles and responsibilities. Distance education students are challenged to divert time from urgent daily activities related to work and household responsibilities to the less urgent, but important, need to learn course material. The human tendency to respond to urgent activities before less urgent but more important activities is well documented. Universities have found that the completion rate for students in distance education courses is low (Cornell, 1997). To motivate students to allocate sufficient time to the course, instructors must employ management techniques such as setting deadlines that increase the urgency of completing course work.
Good teachers engage both the intellect and the emotion of the learners. The Internet’s primary uses are for information (which feeds the intellect) and for relationships (which feed the emotion). Good pedagogical techniques will provide opportunities for developing student-teacher and student-student relationships as well as providing information that advances knowledge.
Advanced information technologies provide a geographically neutral location for the creation and distribution of knowledge (CITAC, 1998). The sense that geography is neutral in working relationships and information creation/transfer is new. In 1977, Tom Allen, MIT professor, reported that the “radius of collaborative colocation is small. People aren’t likely to collaborate often if they are more than fifty feet apart (Lipnack, 1997).” Twenty years later, Allen’s world is a distant memory because of the impact of information infrastructures that neutralize geography. Collaboration with colleagues in other locales via virtual teamwork is almost as easy as collaboration with a colleague next door.
Individuals are not bound by geography in the way they were. However, they continue to be bound to geography by things that matter to them—families and communities that provide stability and meaning to life. They expect that these entities that make life meaningful for them will be accommodated by technology that brings information and services to them where they are. It remains to be seen whether technology infrastructures will reduce or increase human migration patterns. Indeed, if people are not required to move to the job, but can bring the job to them, some will use new decision-making models based on personal quality of life measures to determine where to live.
A decade ago, as knowledge professionals began to realize the potential of networked information technologies, the prevailing assumption was that these technologies would somehow make our work easier. This has not happened. Although work has been profoundly changed by information technologies, it has not been simplified. Tenner (1997) reports that computerization has helped reduce rather than promote the amount of time that professionals spend performing their highest and best work. Professional time, according to Tenner, has been diverted into providing peer technical support, learning key boarding and editing skills formerly performed by support staff, and adapting (continuously) to technological advancements.
The transformations in information infrastructures have and will continue to create opportunities and challenges for workers and businesses and families and communities. Our experiences so far may lead to better adaptations and more reasonable responses as these transformations continue. The papers in this journal describe some lessons learned about information infrastructures that are reshaping our sense of community, the way we work, and how we access and provide information.
Should this publication be read a decade from now, readers are likely to be amused by our lack of technical sophistication and the limits of the information technology that supports our work. As information technology continues to advance, some challenges faced by current users of technology will fade and new ones will emerge. I expect that one ongoing challenge will be to meet the ever growing expectations of workers and learners for instant, easily accessed, easily shared, and easily understood customized information.
CITAC. (1998). Information technology progress and plans. Manhattan, KS: Kansas State University.
Cornell, R., & Martin, B. (1977). The role of motivation. In B. H. Khan (Ed.). Web based instruction (pp. 93-100). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.
Gates, B. (1995). The Road Ahead. New York: Viking Penguin.
Harasin, L., Hiltz, S., Teles, L., & Turoff, M. (1996). Learning networks. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Lipnack, J. and Stamps, J. (1997). Virtual Teams. Reaching Across Space, Time, and Organizations with Technology. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Tenner, E. (1997). Why things bite back: Technology and the revenge of unintended consequences. New York: Random House.
As a new information and communications system, the Internet poses a practical problem that demands reflective and critical thinking on the part of individuals and families. This article explores how the Internet can empower individuals and families by enhancing autonomy, offering opportunities to contribute value in an ever-changing world, and facilitating relationships among diverse individuals. The article then argues that not only must we critique information flowing through the Internet, but we also must reflect upon its power as a metaphor and structure that shapes the way we view knowledge and human beings. Finally, suggestions are made for family and consumer sciences professionals including: helping families gain access and skill with the Internet, facilitating dialogue about how the Internet shapes everyday life, critiquing human consequences, and conducting related research.
“Here we sit in the Information Age, besieged by more information than any mind can handle, trying to make sense of the complexity that continues to grow around us” (Wheatley, 1994, p. 145). The Internet is a revolutionary phenomenon that enables millions of individuals across the globe to access, exchange, analyze, and create vast amounts of information. As a major factor in the information highway, the Internet is a vast network system that processes data and information between innumerable sites in the virtual electronic world called cyberspace. Because the Internet “personality” has been characterized as everything from free and egalitarian to wild and anarchic, it is no wonder that it has generated tremendous excitement, promise, and fear in the popular imagination (Burstein & Kline, 1995).
Most thinkers who contemplate the sheer amount of information, escalating rates of knowledge production and change, and immediacy of world-wide communication made possible by technologies like the Internet agree that the quality of everyday human activity is impacted (Postman, 1992; Webster, 1995). As Seel (1997) points out, new information technologies provide tools and ways of thinking that shape every aspect of our lives:
Taken as tools, they assist one in specific tasks associated with study, communication, or leisure. But taken as a whole technology, a unified world of systematic processes, they come to dictate one’s perception of reality and to dominate every sphere of life. (p. 25)
The Internet is one of the major technological systems currently changing how we define knowledge, personal value, and social relationships (Postman, 1992; Webster, 1995).
As it becomes a more common aspect of everyday life, a practical question arises concerning what to do about the Internet in terms of “solving problems of the family” (Brown, 1980, p. 101). As Lewis and Gagel (1992) warn, “Technological literacy has economic, political, moral, ethical, ecological, and indeed even psychic or spiritual aspects” (p. 135). Technologies like the Internet can be used for enlightenment or manipulation, for social cohesion or social fragmentation (Brown & Baldwin, 1995; Postman, 1992; Webster, 1995). Thus, the Internet becomes a significant practical problem requiring reflective thought and emancipatory action. Critical questions must be addressed such as: How does the Internet shape the self and society? How can we shape the Internet with justifiable values and meanings?
The challenge for family and consumer sciences is to continue our long tradition of empowering individuals and families to create human significance (Baldwin, 1996; Brown, 1980; Brown & Paolucci, 1979; Vaines, 1993) within a complex and sophisticated information environment. The overall purpose of this article is to critically explore the Internet as a practical problem related to individual and family empowerment. After a brief definition of the Internet, the article first examines how it can positively shape individual and family life. Second, it critically examines problems both directly related to the Internet as a tool and the more subtle consequences that arise as the Internet becomes a new structure and metaphor guiding thought and action. The last section suggests ways that family and consumer sciences professionals can take leadership in helping families engage in technical, reflective, and emancipatory action regarding the Internet.
The Internet was launched in 1969 by the Department of Defense to ensure that information essential for national security could continue to be distributed if any part of the system failed. In the 1990s the Internet evolved into the largest public electronic “superhighway” connecting over 20 million computers all over the world (Wresch, 1997). Poole (1997) likens the power of the Internet to the quickness and complexity of a global sized brain:
Messages in the form of electromagnetic pulses flash simultaneously and ceaselessly in all directions. Axons and dendrites are equivalent to network systems—computers and transmissions media. The neurons are equivalent to people who are drawn closer and closer together into a global community where every individual depends more and more on everyone else. This is the stuff of science fiction, yet it is becoming a reality today. (p. 210)
This global super brain provides an estimated billion users with the information offered by 13 million “hosts” (including governments from the White House to local agencies, businesses of all sizes, universities and schools, and individuals). Because the Internet enables people to communicate with each other through a variety of electronic mail and discussion group options, it has also been likened to a global village or virtual community (Poole, 1997; Wresch, 1997).
The most popular “highway” on the Internet is the World Wide Web, which combines the interactivity of video games, the information of text, and the aesthetic appeal of graphics and video (Poole, 1997; Seel, 1997). Individuals and organizations can relatively easily and inexpensively create their own sites for the Web with one or more pages of visual and textual information—an appealing option that currently prompts an addition of 5,000 new Web pages each day (Wresch, 1997). All in all, the Internet is truly a remarkable world filled with information and open to imaginative possibilities for education, entertainment, and communication.
At the same time the Internet presents a new tool to improve lives, it clearly poses a practical problem about “what to do” with the informational possibilities offered and how to use it for personal and social empowerment. As Shor (1992) reminds us, “Problem-posing goes deeply into any issue or knowledge to indicate its social and personal dimensions” (p. 43). Although the Internet poses new and still-to-be judged influences, this section explores some of the emerging views on the likely positive and negative consequences on individual and family empowerment.
Empowerment can be broadly viewed as the full development of human potential (Baldwin, 1990). Empowered individuals take steps to understand, define, and act upon their personal and community needs (Baldwin, 1990; 1996). As noted by Baldwin (1996), technical action can be taken to improve some aspects of well-being, and, in that sense contribute to empowerment. Individuals have always used technologies to improve and make the most of their lives—making life more efficient, safer, and more interesting, or in other ways facilitating the achievement of goals. We use calculators to ensure accuracy and save time, the telephone to communicate, and television to gather news and to relax. In much the same way that we have benefited by learning to use other available tools, we can develop Internet competence and technical skill to find new information pertinent to our lives and communicate with others about common needs.
Yet, the Internet differs from other technologies in its “potential to transform our lives” (Poole, 1997, p. 211). Options such as the Internet give individuals unprecedented autonomy to meet unique wants and needs (Elkind, 1994). Never before has one single technology enabled us to shop, go to the movies, get up-to-the-minute news, make and enjoy friendships, engage in discussions about issues, conduct research in libraries, and gather a wide range of information on any interest or need—without leaving home. As Burstein and Kline (1995) point out, the personal choices are unprecedented for a technological phenomenon:
Perhaps the most important quality of the Internet is that it is the most dynamic and wide-ranging interactive mass medium in history. You decide what you want to do on it, when you want to do it, whether you want to do it alone or with others, and so forth. Interactivity, of course, is a basic premise of all Info Highway projects—you wouldn’t want a highway where you couldn’t choose your own route and destination, after all. (p. 105)
If empowerment is enhanced with more autonomy and self-direction (Brown, 1993; Baldwin, 1990), the Internet can provide a valuable tool for individuals, families, and communities.
One of the more obvious benefits is that individuals and families can find a panorama of informational choices that reflect particular needs, special interests, and unique hobbies. Information quickly accessible over the Internet can help us grow as individuals and families by building opportunities. “Combing through this constantly changing information, [we] can determine what choices are available and what resources to rally in response” (Wheatley, 1994, p. 91). Interactive information experiences can enhance understanding of personal needs and prepare families for upcoming challenges (Garmer & Firestone, 1996). When new information found via the Internet is imaginatively connected with ideals, goals, hopes, feelings, and values, individuals and families can change their lives for the better.
Empowerment is enhanced when families gain a more reflective and holistic understanding of their own lives rather than becoming overly dependent on experts (Brown, 1993). The Internet allows individuals to build their own expertise. Ordinary people can research libraries and informational sites and compare online advice given from a number of perspectives. Individuals and families can exchange practical ideas and join online discussions with “kindred spirits” who have similar situations or interests. The Internet enables information-gathering across the world without traditional barriers of distance, time, and sometimes cost.
Empowerment entails the development of creativity (Rehm, 1989; 1993), personal voice (Giroux, 1988), and other qualities related to the active construction of one’s own experience and social context. The Internet can provide ordinary families with new opportunities to become what Freire (1985) calls “subjects” of their own lives rather than “objects” used by others. As a tool for “creative play,” the Internet can become an important venue to resist entrenched and oppressive ways of thinking (Stivale, 1997). The Internet can potentially nourish imaginations and deepen emotional commitment to visionary ideas (Garmer & Firestone, 1996). Individuals and families can join discussion groups around social issues, publish their own work, or inform others about home-based businesses and grassroots action groups (Garmer & Firestone, 1996). “What we can imagine can thus guide …our technology to generate something that makes the world closer to our heart’s desire” (Egan, 1992, p. 166).
More specifically, the Internet disembodies the mind from gender, class, ethnicity, and other characteristics too often used to marginalize and discriminate against people (Morgaine, 1993; Shor, 1992). Most physical disabilities are rendered irrelevant (Kato & Hackman, 1997). Because individuals “represent” rather than “present” themselves on the computer, Wilbur (1997) suggests that we are “encouraged to consider the hardiness of our concepts” (p. 7) over any physical biases. The Internet increases the power of individuals to insert their voices and ideas into the public arena of cyberspace—and be judged according to the merit of their ideas.
At the same time that individuals and families can empower themselves by using the Internet, a democratic society grows as each individual begins “constructing one’s voice as part of a wider project of possibility and empowerment” (Giroux, 1988, p. 64). Dialogue within an engaged community has potential to deepen levels of mutual understanding about information, draw individuals into more active social roles, and generate creative possibilities for action (Baldwin, 1996; Helgesen, 1995; McLaren, 1991). Each person’s voice is valuable and essential for the “critical diversity” that is needed to raise important questions, notice oppressive power relations, critique social conditions, and reach new levels of consensus and understanding (McLaren, 1991; Vaines, 1993). Like waves spreading across a sea, information becomes richer and more empowering as people share diverse perspectives (Helgesen, 1995).
If “Profuse links are the defining characteristic of the Information Age” (Lipnack & Stamps, 1994, p. 157), then the Internet offers profuse opportunities to participate in a global dialogue. Perhaps the greatest benefit of the Internet is the opportunity to create widespread interchange of ideas and build far-reaching relationships among diverse people over the entire world. As Lipnack and Stamps (1994) imply, people can enter a global conversation that makes the world more of a community.
Something entirely new is wrapped around our planet—a way for one person to communicate with many at a very low cost, regardless of where they are in time or space. Spontaneously and with little planning, a global conversation and an information freeway have erupted in less than a decade, making next-door neighbors of people in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Bangalore, India, and Johannesburg, South Africa. (p. 157).
As Baldwin (1996) notes, democracy requires responsible individuals who are prepared to subject their beliefs to public critique and participate in the collective control of social life. All people who can get online have, at their fingertips, the power to enter a new social arena for dialogue. “The ‘magic’ of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of the participants” (Poster, 1997, p. 211). The Internet can bring together ordinary individuals to exchange ideas about political issues. Individuals can state opinions and request feedback to grow in social understanding. They can participate in moderated discussions in which everyone in the “audience” can “speak” and add to public meaning. Schools, business people, professionals, workers, or researchers can conduct projects with groups from across the world—sharing interests and problems and generating new ideas as a global team.
Importantly, “The technology network supports the people network” (Lipnack & Stamps, 1994, p. 158). As hooks (1994) claims, empowerment takes place as we step across traditional confines and boundaries to carve out new possibilities:
In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. (p. 217).
With “near primitive conditions of a frontier” (Wilbur, 1997, p. 8), the Internet is just such a world without boundaries. Individuals can overcome physical limits, and online communities can evolve in grassroots fashion to address almost any human challenge.
Although we now have a new tool to greatly enhance our ability to meet personal, family, and social needs, the Internet demands a critical perspective. As Seel (1997) cautions, “We live in a world where technology is taken for granted. Nothing has greater power over our lives than when we are unaware, unquestioning, and uncritical” (p. 21). The Internet is gaining at least a degree of power over our lives, and this section critiques some related concerns. Some concerns relate to the more obvious need to question the quality of information flowing within the Internet and the need to ensure equitable access. Other concerns are more subtle in the way the Internet provides an entirely new metaphor and social structure that highlights speed, distance, and anonymity—exerting powerful consequences on the way individuals think and the way society structures interactions.
Empowerment includes freedom from biases, compulsions, hostility, self-doubt, lack of understanding, and unreflective acceptance of ideologies (Morgaine, 1993). However, because there are so few “real world” consequences to Internet behaviors, biases and habits can be sustained with the practice of seeking out only information which conforms to stereotyped or rigidly safeguarded preconceptions (Poole, 1997; Seel, 1997; Wresch, 1997). “The Internet and new technology are not the source of our nation’s problems—they merely add new and sometimes troubling dimensions to the problems we already face throughout society” (Burstein & Kline, 1995, p. 111).
For example, pedophiles and child pornographers lurk online in effort to entice children into dangerous conversation and action; militant groups publish materials promoting “cyberhate” or actual tools of violence; “cyberaffairs” blossom online; verbal harassment occurs; and misinformation abounds on every issue from dieting to child raising (Stivale, 1997; Foster, 1997). As a world that is totally free of censorship, “People can, within the confines of law, distribute whatever they want in the way of text, still images, and video” (Poole, 1997, p. 214). The Internet itself is so compelling to some people that they fall victim to a new dependency, cyberaddiction.
Whereas some individuals take questionable liberties with newfound freedom of the Internet, others do not have the opportunity to even try to benefit from Internet information and communication opportunities. Unfortunately, information systems are not equitably distributed in society, and many families are likely to suffer marginalization because they do not have access to the same information and computer opportunities that are available to others (Baldwin, 1996; Freire, 1985; McLaren, 1991). The Internet is already a “significant site of cultural transformation and production in its own rite” (Porter, 1997, p. xvii). People who do not have easy access to computers, knowledge of the Internet, and related technological competence miss out on these opportunities to actively participate in the transformation of culture.
A less obvious challenge to empowerment is the way a technological society redefines the very nature of knowledge about the person and social relations (Green, 1984). According to social critic Neil Postman (1992), we are becoming a “technopoly,” loosely defined as a society in which technologies monopolize and become the ultimate standard for our thought and action. The Internet as a metaphor for life highlights immediacy, intense variety and options, skill, entertainment, and anonymity. As Postman warns:
New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop. (p. 20)
Creative autonomy, intellectual depth, and dialogical development of meaning are fundamental to empowerment (Morgaine, 1993; Rehm, 1993; Vaines, 1993). However, the Internet can undermine the development of these reflective abilities. Technologies such as the Internet can “come to dictate one’s perception of reality and to dominate every sphere of life” (Seel, 1997, p. 25). Because information comes to us quickly “one screen” at a time, we come to view the “best” knowledge as that which is packaged into lively, entertaining and instantly gratifying forms. Individuals can become unthinking consumers of the electronically-produced meanings flowing over the Internet. They can become beguiled by sophisticated images, leaving little desire to creatively grapple with complex issues (Baldwin, 1996; McLaren, 1991; Webster, 1995).
Even before the Internet became available to the general public, Green (1984) warned that a technological mindset leads individuals to expect that we can find a tool to quickly solve every problem. We impatiently look for technological solutions rather than undertaking the time for pride in craft, reflective human interaction, and critical struggle. As Postman (1992) observes, successful use of the Internet and other technologies often depends more on skill than on ideas. Because the Internet environment is multilinear and encourages the continual shifting of attention, it changes our very view of personal success (Tabbi, 1997). We are even likely to equate efficiency and technical skill—the ability to “surf” from site to site, enter a newsgroup, or “log on” to a discussion to find immediate answers to narrowly-defined problems—with moral goodness (Green, 1984). Individuals in the future are likely to strive to attain the valued traits—aiming to be quick and efficient rather than reflective and painstaking.
Baldwin (1996) claims that empowerment depends on the development of mature identity associated with reflectiveness, self-understanding, and critical awareness of external reality and possibility. Indeed, whereas we used to assume that identity evolved and developed within real contexts, the constantly shifting world of the Internet challenges existing notions of both reality and identity. Virtual reality and information experience is much more ambiguous and open to fantasy than is physical, tangible experience. “Many computer users seem to experience the movement ‘into’ cyberspace as an unshackling from real life constraints—transcendence rather than prosthesis” (Wilbur, 1997, p. 11). An Internet-based identity thus is fluid, represented by words rather than actions or gestures, continually experimental, and potentially fragmented and confused (Foster, 1997). The individual on the Internet also works alone without tangible social context. This type of autonomy can disintegrate into self-absorption without fear of social critique and grounded consequences (Seel, 1997).
Particularly troublesome to the formation of identity is the way that young people are being shaped by the Internet. The entertainment and information options of technologies like the Internet “support, enhance, and increasingly define their identities” (Seel, 1997, p. 17). There is danger that young people can become so intent upon exciting and multiple information experiences that they fail to become involved in the situated, grounded experiences necessary to learn how to make reflective, creative, and wise choices (Baldwin, 1996; Brown & Paolucci, 1979; Brown & Baldwin, 1995; Rehm, 1993). Because the Internet makes it relatively easy for creators of information to mass-produce hidden agendas, distort ideas, and manipulate receivers (McLaren, 1991; Webster, 1995), impressionable youths are vulnerable to uncritical acceptance of oppressive ideologies.
Also troubling is the potential effect of the Internet on the relationship between individuals within a society. Social empowerment demands that we clarify information, contrast multiple perspectives, discover common ground, reflect on ideas, and define shared visions as we interact and form relationships with each other (Brown, 1993; Vaines, 1993). We build traditions and social strength by enacting ideas and assessing the consequences. Yet the Internet makes it especially easy for individuals to distance themselves from the contextualized dialogue that raises new ideas, challenges our biases, and eventually leads to synthesis of new ideas and social commitment. Elkind (1994) argues that new technologies create social fragmentation.
One of the many ironies of the postmodern world is that, with so many sources of information and avenues of communication available at our fingertips, we run the risk of a loss of community, of a shared view of the common good. (p. 25)
Such detachment from a community leads to a number of negative consequences: impoverished social imagination (McLaren, 1991), loss of socially shared and creative meaning (Polanyi & Prosch, 1975), diminished sharing in decision power (Baldwin, 1996), and forfeiture of the security that comes with membership (Green, 1984). Such detachment from the concerns of others can further support manipulation of thought and distortion of human relationships (Baldwin, 1996; McLaren, 1991).
Empowerment ultimately occurs when we set forth a project that captures the social imagination and act to transcend existing realities (Freire, 1985; hooks, 1994). Social imagination grows as dialogue reflects “how community life should be constructed around a project of possibility” (Giroux, 1988, p. 72). Although the Internet enables the growth of “virtual communities,” Poster (1997) maintains that public talk is “confused and complicated by the electronic form of exchange” (p. 209). The very features that redefine personal identity—experimentation, fluidity, fantasy, and anonymity—also redefine the nature of community and society.
If individuals can represent themselves in multiple and even conflicting ways over the Internet, the nature of public interests and ideas will also be viewed as multiple and conflicting. This flux leads Poster to argue that “consensus is denied in the arenas of electronic politics” (p. 209). Because the Internet public sphere is virtual, it offers multiple representations of a plurality of worlds; the Internet simply does not have the capacity to facilitate or even allow stable societal norms. Lockhard (1997) contends that the Internet addresses the “desire for community rather than the difficult-to-achieve reality of community” (p. 224) and enables more political voyeurism than activism.
The ambiguity of “real” personal characteristics and experience also can hide the very issues that call for collective action. The “featurelessness” of individuals on the Internet “denies the diversity of its users” (Lockhard, 1997, p. 227). It is more difficult to address common challenges related to gender, class, or ethnicity when such features are hidden behind the computer, and cyberspace can become “a substitute for the material reality of coexisting and cooperating” (Lockhard, 1997, p. 226). Rather than challenging inequities, the Internet may mirror existing social patterns.
“Thinking about our past potentially helps us have more understanding of why we are doing what we do in our everyday action” (Coomer, 1985, p. 59). Postman (1992) warns that technologies can render history irrelevant because their very attraction lies in their provision of immediate answers to immediate needs and wants. Ideas about what is right, true, just, and beautiful that have produced great cultures throughout history get lost when we live by a metaphor of quick images and short “pages” of the Internet. We come to find that longer narratives, theories, and discussions (about how present situations evolve to reflect relations of power) become unattractive and burdensome in comparison.
As valuable as the Internet can be in finding efficient solutions and enhancing communication, we must recognize its power as a metaphor and structure for living. As such it has power to undermine community dynamics, marginalize those who are unsophisticated in information technologies, and numb creative and moral sensitivity. Certainly, the Internet poses a significant practical problem for families and a need for reflective endeavor on the part of family and consumer sciences professionals.
The Internet is undeniably a part of family life in the world today, and family and consumer sciences professionals have an obligation to help people approach this new technology for empowerment rather than oppression and fragmentation. “Helping families embrace the future is a leadership imperative we can continue to fulfill if we persist in adopting new ways of seeing families in relation to the world and in changing the ways we serve families” (McGregor, 1997, p. 12). We must not only promote Internet skills and knowledge to help families keep up with new opportunities, but we also must facilitate the reflective meanings, dialogue, and critical action needed for empowerment.
“Recognizing the importance of the material elements of family life, we as a profession have focused to a considerable extent on human needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, and on techniques for meeting them” (Baldwin, 1996, p. 5). Family and consumer sciences professionals must continue to seek new technical information resources and use appropriate tools to thrive amidst challenges of the present and the 21st century (Goldsmith & Shelfer, 1996). Because a fluctuating environment demands “constant rebirth of expertise” (Leonard-Barton, 1995, p. xv), each professional first must learn to use the Internet to seek out the particular sources most useful to their own professional roles.
Goldsmith and Shelfer (1996) provide an excellent overview of a wide variety of electronic resources pertinent to family and consumer sciences—including online databases (topics ranging from social demographics to particular ethnic groups), online government documents and university library holdings (topics ranging from health to consumer issues), and electronic discussion groups. All family and consumer sciences professionals can draw on their knowledge of research and practice to develop their own lists of valuable online resources to share with those we serve.
Egan (1992) notes, “Imagination must dwell within rationality if rationality is to serve human life and enrich our experience” (p. 166). Once we identify Internet resources, we must imaginatively explore meanings and implications of information and weave new ideas into practical situations (Wheatley, 1994). For example, the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences at Illinois State University offers a career course on the World Wide Web. This type of course appears to increase communication between instructor and students, student excitement, and individualized learning (Hayden & Ley, 1997). Dietitians, family counselors, consumer advocates, child care workers, textile specialists, retailers, and other professionals and professional groups could offer Web pages and similar interactive educational services over the Internet.
With a core mission to promote family well-being (Baldwin, 1996), we can take reflective leadership (Andrews, Mitstifer, Rehm, & Vaughn, 1995) in initiating dialogues and action groups concerning access of individuals and families to the Internet. Many citizens, schools, and workers are marginalized because they lack technological resources (Elkind, 1994; McLaren, 1991; Green, 1985). As Wresch (1997) notes, states and localities have initiatives to make technological access more widely available. We can lobby to get the Internet available in every school and other public places where people congregate. We can propose “scholarship” or cooperative programs to help disadvantaged families and workers purchase computers, learn the Internet, and afford technical services.
Of course, “For home economists to provide only technical information or to formulate public policy themselves ignores family members’ self interpretations and their need for freedom from internal and external constraints” (Brown & Baldwin, 1995, p. 28). Family and consumer sciences professionals can play a major role in helping individuals and families problematize the Internet and its metaphorical influence on everyday life. If we help families reflect upon how it shapes their well-being, we also help them become architects of their own lives.
We must not allow the excitement of the Internet to overshadow its potential for misuse and even oppression. Brown and Baldwin (1995) warn that the profession historically has overused a technical approach when working with individuals and families, a warning that is especially important in a society where information technologies abound and diverse special interests can be promoted (McLaren, 1991). We must help individuals and families adopt a reflective and critical attitude toward the Internet (Brown and Paolucci; 1979; Baldwin, 1996). Information is never neutral; rather, we must help families become aware that information is “… for those purposes, for those sorts of groups, with those sorts of interests developing” (Webster, 1995, p. 220).
We must help those we serve reflect on the values promoted in Web sites as well as values promoted by the Internet as metaphor—posing questions about meaning and purpose, interpreting ideas, and critiquing consequences on individuals and families. We need to ask questions about how to maintain freedom, justice, responsibility, caring, and vision (Brown & Baldwin, 1995; Webster, 1995) in a world increasingly dominated by technological skills and ways of communication. Critical questions are especially important regarding the Internet: How does specific Internet information relate to examined values and beliefs? What are the consequences of virtual discussions about particular issues? How does the Internet shape our reality and experience? How do we define communities? How does the Internet shape thinking, consumer patterns, and identity?
Information generated from dialogue and reflection becomes dynamic and vital only as people draw it into their situated contexts and develop a sense of membership in a common cause (Green, 1984). As diverse people share multiple perspectives, understanding grows, consensus builds, and creative projects can be generated. “If in the name of diversity, the users of the Internet can justify their essayistic forum as one that serves the public interest in concrete and demonstrable ways, it would represent a step in the direction of an egalitarian public sphere” (Knapp, 1997, p. 194). Family and consumer sciences professionals can provide concrete examples of how the Internet enables individuals and families to address social concerns.
For example, many professionals and families are working together on The Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) to facilitate ways for parents to control the kinds of material children can access on the Internet (Poole, 1997). Family and consumer sciences professionals could facilitate their own specialized critical and consensus-building groups to assess and act upon the full range of Internet related issues. Both electronic and local action groups could form to address concerns such as: ways families can prevent addiction and harassment on the Internet, special needs of women and minorities over the Internet, how the rapid explosion of information affects meaningful family life, and policies to facilitate Internet responsibility.
Chappell (1993) and Elkind (1994) emphasize that we need to pay special attention to the need for a sense of community in an information age that can so easily fragment and isolate us. Perhaps our profession’s greatest strength is our tradition of placing a concern for human significance at the forefront of any social problem. As Foster (199 7) argues, the basic qualities of caring are more essential than ever before.
This spirit of community is essential to the vitality of virtual communities. That which holds a virtual community intact is the subjective criterion of togetherness, a feeling of connectedness that confers a sense of belonging. Virtual communities require much more than the mere act of connection itself. (p. 29)
The spirit of community and belonging is essential to the individuals and families served by the profession. For example, consumers and retailers must work together for a safe, just, and equitable global economy; both youth and the elderly must play active roles to build communities rich in history and possibility. We should work with those we serve in raising questions related to meaning, identity, knowledge, reality, and other issues that keep the spirit of the common good alive in emerging virtual communities.
Chappell (1993) suggests that organizations place the language of relationship in their everyday vocabulary and practice—encouraging talk about family and sharing personal stories about issues of importance to the family. Family and consumer sciences professionals can take leadership in making sure that everyday life beyond the Internet is rich in human relationships and connections. Engaging conversations, spontaneous stories, planned stories, fun gatherings, and celebrations of community can counteract Postman’s (1992) fear that technology will soon provide all social answers. We can counteract the Internet standard of speed and fragmentation by highlighting an equally powerful metaphor that highlights quality, meaning, and relationships—the family.
The Internet offers new and valuable avenues for research. Empirical studies can provide observable evidence (Fanslow, 1989; Zimmerman, 1989) about questions such as: What is the relationship between one’s comfort and skill in using the Internet and one’s sense of autonomy, creativity, or social membership? How effective are particular Web sites in helping individuals and families solve particular problems? What is the relationship between Internet use and children’s cognitive, social, physical, and emotional development? How do families use the Internet, and what are the perceived benefits and problems? How does using the Internet compare with using “old fashioned” methods to solve particular problems?
Hermeneutic studies are needed for deeper understanding about motives, uses, biases, intentions, values, and feelings (Daines, 1989; Hultgren, 1989) related to information and the Internet: How do families come to create meanings for information gathered from the Internet? How do they describe the experience of online communication and information-gathering? How do families interpret the effects of the Internet upon their well-being, freedom, and sense of community? How do social meanings influence the use of the Internet? What is the nature of communication over the Internet? In what ways does the Internet influence the nature of imagination in family life? What are the feelings of families that do not have access to computers and the Internet?
Critical studies are needed to help us “facilitate a free society where people think and talk together about moral questions that affect society” (Coomer, 1989, p. 168). Critical studies could be undertaken to: challenge accepted meanings about information obtained over the Internet and about the Internet itself, reveal power relations and distortions of meaning with various types of information exchange, question the power of families in establishing standards for information, and bring to light ways that families create desired ends concerning the Internet. Critical studies can reveal insights into the ways that the Internet expands or diminishes personal and family empowerment and critical freedom in the social sphere (Strom & Plihal, 1989).
Because the Internet is becoming a valued tool in everyday information experiences, and because it is has the potential to become a potent metaphor and system to guide personal and social life, there is a pressing “need for on-going critical assessment of the role of technology in our lives” (Seel, 1997, p. 29). Insofar as the Internet helps empower individuals and families, we have an obligation to integrate it into our professional practices. But no technology can replace our personal connection with information and with each other.
“What is clear at this stage of the game is that an engagement with virtual community in any adequate, rigorous way will involve us in the painstaking negotiation of a complex field of meanings and associations” (Wilbur, 1997, p. 12). If we imaginatively participate with the Internet and critically reflect on our evolving and complex information environment, we can generate liberating possibilities.
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Emerging instructional technologies have raised student’s expectations for access to and quality of higher education programs. As faculty respond to the opportunities presented by increasing technological capacity and increasing student demands for its full implementation, they are confronted with the need to learn new skills, teach in new ways, and create a different cultural milieu. Choreographing these changes requires that teachers and administrators reconceptualize teaching and eliminate barriers to implementation of technology-based instruction while creating opportunities to use it effectively. Peer coaching enables faculty members to maximize the use of technology to add richness and depth to the quality of course delivery.
Choreograph: to arrange or direct the movements, progress, or details of
—(Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary)
Emerging technology has the potential to be both a blessing and a curse for institutions of higher education. The present system of higher education is being challenged by increased pressures to not only utilize emerging technology but to change its intrinsic culture (Duguet, 1995) in order to respond to student demands for increased access. The pressure to adapt to new and emerging technologies in instruction will not abate; if anything, it will increase with dramatic speed (Cornell and Martin, 1997). Students like the tempo of the new technology and will learn the choreography as the music develops. They are well aware of advancing technologies and are becoming more insistent that they be allowed to benefit from the technology. For faculty, the tempo is unfamiliar and the steps are awkward. Although audiovisuals have come a long way from overheads and filmstrip projectors, teaching faculty are frustrated by the demands of using technology and underprepared to utilize it. The changes that will be required as teaching evolves from a relatively linear lecture format to a spider web process of leading learning may frustrate, alienate, and confuse faculty.
Choreographing teaching in the 21st century will be a complex task. Administrators would be wise to recognize the complexity of implementing technology into mainstream academic programs. Like a dance team, the steps must be learned and time must be given to practice and polish presentations. Anything less, as any performer could attest, results in a poor quality, amateurish production. Improvement of teaching and implementing emerging technology must be evaluated simultaneously to reconceptualize why we teach, how we teach, and what we teach.
Although students are quick to embrace new technologies and alternative delivery systems, institutions of higher education are much more reluctant to change. James & Beattie (1997) observed that universities are typically conservative organizations in which change can be a lengthy process and where academic staff carefully scrutinize new developments. Although faculty does not necessarily fear change, fear is a factor. Tried and true teaching methods, particularly the university lecture tradition, are much more comfortable. A fundamental tension identified by both Cornell & Martin (1997) and James & Beattie (1997) was that faculty were being pressured to provide flexible access for students, to maintain high quality academic standards, and to do both well. Striking equilibrium between these is at the heart of any decision to adopt a new delivery method (James & Beattie, 1997).
One of several challenges to higher education identified by Duguet (1995) is the need to provide good-quality instruction adapted to the 21st century. Quality issues dominate the literature, and it is evident that advantages in terms of access should not be won at the expense of poor quality instruction. James & Beattie (1997) assert that whether mainstream academics will be convinced that alternative delivery methods will be of comparable quality to face-to-face instruction is at the heart of the speed of adoption issue. Dede (1996), however, suggests that institutions cannot afford to wait to develop a plan for implementing emerging technology in a time when the technologies, economics, and public policies underlying all forms of schooling are rapidly shifting. Some standardized plan for innovation can be constructed, Dede (1997) insists, before the access versus quality debate is completed.
A hidden benefit, as technology is incorporated into courses, is the opportunity for faculty to reconceptualize teaching. “The true innovation in emerging technology,” offers Dede (1996), “is the opportunity to redefine how we communicate and educate by effectively using new types of messages and experiences, in addition to exploring technological innovations.” The literature emphasizes that educators have choices in both instructional strategy and techniques, and that technology is only one path to effective teaching. Chickering & Ehrmann (1996) reflect that technology is a major resource in higher education and should be used as a tool in effective teaching strategies. Sherry (1996) adds that “although technology is an integral part of distance education, any successful program must focus on the instructional needs of the students, rather than on the technology itself.” Chickering & Ehrmann (1996), Cornell & Martin (1997) and Sherry (1996) all stress the imperative that as academic faculty adopt technology in their courses, that course objectives, content, and activities be carefully analyzed. When a course is designed for distance delivery, it should be considered as an opportunity to rethink the entire course from beginning to end, addressing not only the methods to be employed but also the content (Cornell & Martin, 1997). Williams and Peters (1997) recognize that rethinking and redesigning instruction takes time and careful contemplation. Reconceptualizing teaching in this manner provides faculty an opportunity to use the technology as a valuable tool in promoting discovery learning and enhancing learning experiences for students.
The possibilities and constraints of teaching with advanced technology are quite different from those used in traditional classroom delivery (Cornell & Martin, 1997). In Closing the Loop: Distance Education and the College Professor, Toombs (1990) challenges the university lecture tradition, where professors are seen as the chief dispensers of knowledge and suggests that, in order to provide optimum learning experiences for students, the instructor role should be to facilitate rather than orchestrate what and how information is acquired. Willis and Dickinson (1997) go so far as to suggest that the more comfortable the instructor is in teaching in a traditional setting, the more difficult it is to face the reality that significant re-thinking and adaptation will be required for effective distant course delivery. Talab and Newhouse (1993) found that many teachers were slow to incorporate new technologies into their classrooms because they perceived their positions as instructional leaders to be threatened. Toombs (1990) states that the authority of the professor has not diminished, but the clarity of the role has become confused and blurred by the transition into information networks. No longer is the teacher “the sage on the stage;” the teacher must facilitate discovery learning for students. Dissatisfaction may arise because personal preferences or assumptions about the role of the teacher are thrown into question. Sherry (1996) adds that for technological innovations to be successfully implemented, the social and political climate of the school must be considered. The climate must reinforce the authority of the teacher rather than undermine it.
How can institutions of higher education ease the tension created by a push for a new educational paradigm which reconceptualizes teaching and incorporates technology? Even a well-practiced teacher, who is at ease with the equipment in the classroom, will require training in order to integrate new teaching strategies with the technology (Sherry, 1996). Administrators cannot expect teachers to feel comfortable with the technology, to use it effectively, and to maintain it as well, without providing them extra resources and time. Holloway & Ohler (1991 ) found that for technology to be widely accepted it must be of value to the user—the student first and the faculty second. There is an ongoing tension between the demands made on faculty by new delivery methods and the benefits that accrue to students. If technology and its related demands do not make the performance of a task rewarding, there is little motivation to accept the technology.
Additional factors influence faculty motivation to implement technology. Beyond change issues that reflect the sentiment, “this is the way it’s always been done, and it’s never been challenged before,” Cornell & Martin (1997) identified several reasons why instructors lack the motivation to implement technology in their classroom: administrative mandate, inadequate time, and lack of incentive. Faculty and administrators alike have identified a number of barriers or “disincentives” (Williams and Peters, 1997) that have these three common themes, which are likely to interfere with the successful implementation of technology.
With stringent guidelines for the university tenure process, many faculty found it increasingly difficult to control the proportion of their time devoted to teaching duties (James & Beattie, 1997). Williams & Peters (1997) suggest that the promotion and tenure process is a strong disincentive for instructional innovation. “If lecture and transparencies produce even moderate success in the classroom, they are the weapon of choice, since they leave more time for publishing and committee meetings” (Williams & Peters, 1997, p. 107). James & Beattie (1997) also found that faculty resented the “research and writing” time lost to them while designing and creating learning materials. Many of the initiatives to incorporate technology into the classroom studied by James & Beattie (1997) were sustained only by the substantial professional commitment of the faculty. When academic staff are well aware of the need to advance their careers on other fronts, such goodwill has limited duration. Although non-tenured faculty are enthusiastic about instructional innovation, full professors are likely to have the luxury of time to redesign courses as well as risk peer criticism (Williams & Peters (1997). Williams & Peters (1997) also found that preferred incentives such as travel funds, release time, development funds, and encouragement from senior faculty or department heads were rarely offered to untenured faculty.
The extensive time needed to produce high quality learning materials, whether printed, broadcast, taped, or computer based, is well known. Williams and Peters (1997) estimate that it is not uncommon for one hour of web instruction to have an investment of 200 hours of design and development.
Because distance education is still fairly experimental, a significant barrier is time to prepare thoroughly. Minimal preparation is a prescription for failure. The medium will fail because instructors and students have failed to do their jobs. Chickering and Ehrmann (1996) challenge students to know the principles of effective teaching and learning and to use them to be more assertive with respect to their own learning. Schrum (cited in Hill, 1997) recommends at least one semester of reduced load to prepare to teach with technology, not only because it is a “prep” for a new course but to gain a comfort level with the equipment and how it works.
Faculty, who often work with limited instructional design and technical support, may not possess the skills necessary to produce high quality instructional materials. Marginal administrative commitment to training, which may include lack of release time or insufficient funds designated for training, sends a message to faculty that the institution does not place a priority on implementing technology with the goal of improving instruction. “Expecting faculty members and staff to be trained on their own time will mean that only those who are truly devoted and already have an interest will pursue training. This approach also fosters a certain resentment on the part of faculty members toward the administration” (Gray, 1997, p. 330).
Although institutions may adequately fund short-term inservice training and resident campus experts to assist, faculty continue to struggle with appropriately timed assistance as they navigate their way through the new technology. Although campus resources may exist at some level, they may not be available when faculty members need them, or faculty may become frustrated with the bureaucracy of a system that provides increased stress, rather than relief. Harisim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff (1996) recognize the lack of timely training and suggest that faculty use a mentor system in order to gain comfort with the technology.
“The most important factor for successful distance learning is a caring, concerned teacher who is confident, is experienced, is at ease with the equipment, uses the media creatively, and maintains a high level of interactivity with the students” (Sherry, 1996, p. 350). Apple Computer (Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow, 1992) found that it may take up to two years for instructors to change their focus from being anxious about themselves, their new physical environment, equipment malfunctions, and student misbehavior to anticipating problems and developing alternate strategies, exploring software more aggressively, sharing ideas more freely, increasing student motivation and interest, and using technology to their advantage. Sherry (1996) also found that the more familiar teachers are with the instructional design and delivery process, the more effective their presentations will be.
Another barrier to implementation is the heavy workloads which are less tolerable if faculty perceive that the intrinsic rewards of teaching are declining or no longer present. Teaching in new ways is generally less satisfying than the old, familiar way.
Faculty who have become skilled in using face-to-face interaction to guide their teaching may become frustrated by differences in student feedback and may even find that teaching performance is undermined (James & Beattie, 1997). Distance delivery deprives faculty of non-verbal cues that allow immediate intervention or expansion of course content. With the use of electronic mail, advocates of distance delivery suggest that the amount of student feedback may actually be greater. Cornell & Martin (1997) suggest that the time necessary for communicating with students will increase disproportionately as compared with time spent in the traditional classroom. And it may take some time to gain mastery in setting a positive tone in written communication without the benefit of non-verbal cues to assist interpretation.
With so many barriers to implementing technology in institutions of higher education, how, then, can the administration encourage its use? If faculty are expected to incorporate technology into their teaching, institutional policies must reward entrepreneurship and innovation. The challenge to teach in new ways, especially using new electronic technologies, brings added pressures (James & Beattie, 1997). Creating an institutional climate that is conducive to innovations in instruction is difficult, particularly in institutions that embrace long-held beliefs and quality assertions about how learning should be structured. Closer examination of the promotion and tenure policies alone may unveil inherent systematic problems that may do more to discourage than encourage innovative teaching, including incorporating technology into the classroom.
The Office of Technology Assessment has found many powerful examples of creative teachers using learning technologies to enhance and enrich their teaching; adoption of innovation depends on the following:
These components are reflected throughout the distance education literature (e.g., Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow, 1992; Dede, 1996; Harasim, et al., 1996; Holloway & Ohler, 1991; Sherry, 1996). The question remains: What is the best way for institutions to facilitate change?
An overriding faculty concern is the lack of training to compensate for their perceived lack of skill and discomfort in utilizing the new technology, and current inservice training models do little to reinforce institutional commitment to technology. Administrators need to carefully evaluate the financial commitment that the institution has budgeted for incorporating technology into the classroom. If the desired outcome of staff development activities is simply increased awareness of a subject, funding might legitimately support the occasional two-hour speaker. However, if the expected outcome of a staff development project is fundamental change in instruction, funding will probably have to be increased to support the amount of training necessary to bring about and sustain the change (Showers & Joyce, 1996). Institutions of higher education will continue to wrestle with provision of timely, relevant inservices that fulfill documented needs of faculty. Perhaps it is time to consider a different method of training. In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge (1990) writes:
Generally, I would counsel against pushing. Usually it is more effective to look for the source of the resistance, either in perceived lack of relevance, fear of failure (remember, we were all schoolchildren once), or perceived threat to the status quo… Many of the best intentioned efforts to foster new learning disciplines founder because those leading the charge forget the first rule of learning: people learn what they need to learn, not what someone else thinks they need to learn. (p. 345)
Showers (1985) has done exhaustive research related to the improvement of pedagogical practice. Introduced as a teaching improvement tool in the K-12 system, peer coaching has been warmly received in the public schools. Peer coaching has a number of elements that make its application a possibility at the post-secondary level; however, its use may be discouraged by the institutional culture itself. Harasim, et al (1996) recommend “the buddy system” to support teachers new to technology in addition to using observation as a tool to supplement inservice training. Also in favor of collaboration, Cornell & Martin (1997) offer the recommendation to faculty to join with others as they learn techniques or to ask for colleague’s insights if they have prior teaching experience utilizing emerging technology.
The techniques employed in peer coaching are, in essence, the same as those recommended for the successful implementation of technology. The purposes of peer coaching (Showers, 1985) are to
Harisim, et al (1996) strongly support the philosophy of peer coaching. “The ability to form peer groups of teachers… who can exchange the lore and wisdom they have acquired from dealing with the subject holds tremendous opportunity for improvement of the educational process” (p. 242). Coaching appears to be most appropriate when teachers wish to master strategies that require new ways of thinking about learning objectives and the processes by which students achieve them. Showers & Joyce (1996) also found that members of peer-coaching groups exhibited greater long-term retention of new strategies and more appropriate use of new teaching models over time.
Peer coaching may have some merit in assisting university faculty in preparing for their changing roles in the information infrastructure. Results of Showers (1985) and Showers & Joyce (1996) studies reveal that K-12 teachers who had a coaching relationship—that is, shared aspects of teaching, planned together, and pooled their experiences—practiced new skills and strategies more frequently and applied them more appropriately than did their counterparts who worked alone to expand their repertoires. Although simple in theory, peer coaching is a complex innovation because it requires a radical change in relationships among teachers as well as between teachers and administrative personnel (Showers & Joyce, 1996). Because of the competitive, rather than collaborative, nature of most post-secondary institutions, a fundamental shift toward the use of peer coaching for faculty development is radical.
In most settings coaching teams are organized during training programs designed to enhance the understanding and use of a teaching innovation. The teams study the rationale of new skills, see them demonstrated, practice them, and learn to provide feedback to one another as they experiment with the skills. Coaching is a cyclical process designed to reinforce and extend training. The first steps are structured to increase skills with a new teaching strategy through observation and feedback. As comfort level and skill develop, coaching moves into a more complex stage: mutual examination of appropriate use of a new teaching strategy (Showers & Joyce, 1996).
Transferring new behaviors into effective classroom practice is more difficult than the teaching process itself. Although all teachers can develop skill in performing a new teaching strategy fairly readily, more complex tasks are mastered only as the skill is applied in the classroom. Learning new teaching and technology techniques is a complex matter that should be provided as faculty need it, and peer coaching has the capacity to be more timely than formal staff development projects.
The greatest hurdle in utilizing peer coaching at the university level may well be overcoming the “prima donna” complex.
One solution would be for faculty members with similar subject course responsibilities to collaborate and pool their expertise and resources. Unfortunately, many faculty members are uncomfortable working with colleagues and are more accustomed to working alone. The current atmosphere in major research universities is still competitive, not collaborative, because promotion and tenure reviews still looks at individual productivity. (Williams and Peters, 1997)
Hill (1997) stresses the importance of planning and preparation, but insists that without continued technological and human-based support throughout the course, it is difficult to maintain momentum and achieve success. Many teachers have difficulty selecting concepts to teach, reorganizing materials, teaching their students to respond to the new strategies, and creating lessons in areas that they have not seen demonstrated directly. It should be clarified that coaching relationships do not involve making judgments about the adequacy of a colleague. Coaching implies assistance and reinforcement in a learning process and is used for the improvement of teaching and mastery of new concepts. In the case of incorporating emerging technology, it is an opportunity for faculty to try out new teaching strategies with the added benefit of having another colleague as both a sounding board and a source for different strategies.
Peer coaching has the potential to add not only just-in-time training for technology, but the capacity to add richness and depth to the quality of course delivery, regardless of delivery method. New technology can be choreographed into familiar teaching strategies. The old familiar dance steps of the university lecture tradition need not be discarded, but paced and organized somewhat differently to reflect the different tempos of emerging technology. Excellent teaching is at the core of effective distance education, just as it is in a traditional classroom. The time has come for higher education faculty to take a dance partner, as well as for administrators to recognize the beauty of form that comes from collaborative efforts to improve teaching. At the heart of the matter is the necessity to re-think promotion and tenure policies that encourage solo achievements and undermine an institution’s ability to implement technology.
This paper was developed as part of a study of instructional applications of computer technology conducted under the supervision of Dr. Virginia Moxley.
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The incorporation of technology into teaching and research is one of the most important challenges for higher education today. The College of Human Development and Education at North Dakota State University has made a special effort to build the capacity for using technology. Case examples of faculty experience with both the internet and interactive video are presented and suggest that there are both frustrations and rewards in using these technologies. As one instructor noted, however, students receiving courses from a distance are grateful enough for the access to be forgiving of the problems with the technology.
In the near future, higher education faculty will not be replaced by technology. However, faculty who cannot use the technology will be replaced. — Anon
Today, university faculty who consider change a challenge would say that we are living in the best of times. Adjectives they might use to describe their work, and the challenges they face each day, might include energizing, fun, and demanding. A large part of the change that all faculty face deals with the use of technology, both for their scholarly work and in their teaching. Classes are delivered with the use of interactive video; syllabi and notes are placed on the web; and professors make themselves available on e-mail for questions around the clock.
On the other hand, many faculty members would consider the climate on campuses today the worst of times! The use of computer technology, video and audio equipment, and even overhead projectors seems to demand that new skills be learned every semester if not more often. Take these changes and add them to the new developments in disciplines, the reduction in number of faculty (leaving everyone with more work to do), the lack of time for learning to use new equipment and incorporate new techniques into classes, and the expectations for production of scholarly work and service in order to earn promotion and tenure. The result is often frustration and confusion.
The assumption is often that all faculty know how to use a microcomputer, especially for simple day-to-day tasks like e-mail and word processing. However, the reality is that many faculty have not had the time and training to develop those basic skills—providing them with the right equipment is a beginning, but providing them with the opportunity to develop the skills to use the technology is critical.
In addition to providing opportunities and resources for learning to use technology, the environment for this learning must be a non-threatening one. Nothing will make an extremely educated and competent person feel more stupid and incompetent than a machine! The following example highlights one faculty member’s recollection of technology training:
I can remember the first computer workshop I attended. I had the luxury of having a computer to become familiar with prior to the first workshop session. However, there were several people there who had never used a computer, and just the task of turning it on was a challenge! One person (who was known as one of the best teachers on campus) had never used a computer and could not keep up with our instructor. Finally she quit asking for help, and she did not return to the second lesson. I have often wondered if that was the end of using the computer for that particular faculty member.
Regarding the need for utilizing technology in education, Weinbach, Gandy and Tartaglia (1984) indicated over ten years ago that in their state, “…because of various constraints involving time, finances and distance, many prospective students are unable to avail themselves of main campus or regional campus offerings. In addition, there are not enough students located in any one outlying area to justify sending faculty to the area for on-site education using the off-campus education model employed elsewhere” (p. 12). Visser (1995) indicated that in order to meet this demand successfully, several ingredients were needed: “Students who are curious and want to learn; teachers who are open to various media to transfer knowledge and skills to students; management [personnel] who are willing to support all this with sufficient money and infrastructure; support and assistance of skilled personnel; good learning software…” (p. 108).
Higher education today is challenged by heavy demands and limited resources. In discussing the need for universities to move beyond “allocating shortages” Twigg (1995) states, “It is time to move beyond the walls of our individual colleges and universities to join forces with other institutions, with corporations, and with public policy makers to revitalize American higher education. Together we can create wealth.” Perhaps most critical, such capacity building will greatly contribute to meeting students’ needs for learning anytime and anywhere.
The challenge for higher education, and specifically for administrators in higher education, is to create a user-friendly environment that provides the tools, training, and support for faculty to use technology and to make wise decisions regarding the use of technology. This manuscript seeks to describe the plan that we have created in the North Dakota State University College of Human Development and Education to make our environment user friendly.
According to Kenneth C. Green, “Technology resources are becoming an increasingly important component of the instructional experience, across all fields and all types of institutions” (1997). Key findings in the 1998 Campus Computing Survey of 571 higher education institutions indicated:
According to Carol A. Twigg (1995), “What was the most efficient way to teach and learn—the research university model of faculty who create knowledge and deliver it to students via lectures—now cracks under the strain of meeting new learning demands. As an old technology, the traditional classroom suffers from severe limitations, in both its on-campus and its off-campus versions. We need a better system of learning to enable students to acquire knowledge. We need to create a support system for faculty who want to teach in this new way” (p. 6).
Faculty have voiced the need for a support system as well. Faculty who participated in a LearnShop sponsored by the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance in May, 1997 indicated in their evaluations that of most concern were issues pertaining to time and administrative support to maintain distance education delivery with technology. The participating faculty indicated they need and want support from their colleagues and administration. The faculty deem it crucial to keep this Distance Education vision alive and want to work together to help students. They indicated that the work effort of students should not be increased but rather enhanced by the computer-based courses. The evaluation also indicated that faculty members who participated in the LearnShop want to work together to share goals and expectations with their peers (Stammen, 1997). This collaborative desire exists among universities and within groupwork teams. Further, it was found that such faculty collaboration encourages and builds on diversity to develop ways to apply technologies with pedagogy. Participants valued their support groups, not only the discipline group, but interdisciplinary faculty groups who share and work to come up with innovative ways to apply technology for education.
According to Al Rogers, Global SchoolNet Foundation (1997), “It is no secret, of course, that one of the biggest failures is the lack of appropriate staff development. And of course, when one talks about technology and staff development, the focus is often on ‘training’ teachers how to use the technology and what is known as ‘how to integrate it into the curriculum’ …in my fifteen years of teaching teachers ‘about technology,’ I have found it far more effective to show teachers how to teach writing using a word processor, rather than teaching them how to use a word processor; how to use a spreadsheet or data base to collect and plot census data as part of a social science unit, rather than how to use the tool; or how to use the World Wide Web to develop incredibly rich professional dialogs between students as Web authors and their audiences around the world.”
Hendrick (1994) stated that “Technological and social change will transform 21st-century institutions from transmitters of knowledge—which characterizes education in highly stable societies—to creators of new paradigms—which is the norm in a rapidly changing society. Education today must, like any enterprise, be a bold or dangerous undertaking preparing individuals for a changing world rather than a world of permanence” (p. 1). Shifting paradigms can truly be a bold and dangerous process. Trying something new and unknown can be extremely frightening, however that is what technology is requiring higher education faculty to do.
In The Paradigm Conspiracy, Breton and Largent (1996) indicate that three things must be considered in shifting paradigms:
Faculty come to the challenge to shift their paradigms with varying degrees of expertise in the use of technology, as well as in their abilities to select appropriate teaching techniques and tools. In considering the above three issues, our group efforts and individual stories serve as markers to our progress.
In August of 1997, faculty in the College of Human Development and Education (HDE) at North Dakota State University (NDSU) completed a Faculty Computing Competency Self-Assessment Profile. The assessment was designed to determine ways to provide support for faculty during the 1997-98 academic year to work toward the College Goal, “Strengthen the capacity of the faculty to incorporate technology into existing classes, or to use it (technology) to better meet student needs.” Results of this survey indicated that some faculty felt they needed training in basic word processing, in using a database and/or spreadsheet, in use of e-mail, in use of Web sites, and in preparing multimedia presentations (see table 1). One faculty member commented, “Having someone available to help me learn how to use technology is important, seeing it at a workshop doesn’t do it for me!”
Table 1: Faculty Computing Competency Self-Assessment: Percent of responses. Need training in:
| Yes |
No |
|
Word Processing |
28 |
72 |
| Database |
49 |
51 |
| Spreadsheets |
47 |
53 |
| |
33 |
67 |
| Web Sites |
44 |
56 |
| Multimedia Presentations |
71 |
29 |
| Creating Web Pages |
61 |
39 |
| Programming |
40 |
60 |
| Statistics Programs |
50 |
50 |
In addition to providing information about the areas where training was needed, the survey also indicated some resources within the college. A total of 22% of the faculty indicated that they were skilled enough in word processing to teach others; 20% could teach e-mail use; 11% could help others use the internet; 10% could help with multimedia presentations; and 5% could help others create web pages.
The real key (and challenge) for administrators in higher education is to create/facilitate the environment so that faculty receive the information in a context that provides experience and with the resources that they will be using to actually do their work. For most, this means determining how to provide help in their office, classroom, or lab when it is needed and makes the most sense.
Several strategies have been identified for use in creating a user friendly (and supportive) environment in the College of Human Development and Education:
Several strategies are being employed to build college capacity in technology use. Goals of the Associate Dean related to technology included: (a) help to build internet course exchanges with other institutions; (b) submit grant proposals to support faculty training in distance education; (c) develop and publish the evaluation of distance learning training; (d) organize a college technology team and report on activities of this group. Each of these efforts are currently underway.
The first internet course received in the college was completed in 1998 for our Hotel, Motel and Restaurant Management program. We did not have a faculty member with the expertise we needed, so we contracted with another institution to deliver the course. Proposals have been developed and submitted for other internet courses and others are in process. Distance education training is being conducted by our own campus experts, and demonstrations of on-campus distance education software have been conducted for the Technology Team. Evaluation of web-based distance learning training has been conducted (for efforts to date), and a report has been completed.
The Technology Team has been actively working on a number of issues. Specific goals of the team include: (a) all college faculty and staff will have a working knowledge of electronic mail; (b) training for Powerpoint presentations will be made available along with direct support to individuals; (c) faculty will have a working knowledge for electronically downloading course lists of enrolled students; (d) faculty will have access to support for Web page development. Progress has already occurred on a number of goals. College personnel have been surveyed and e-mail training has been provided to all staff and faculty who indicated need for help. Faculty also have been informed of the process for downloading class lists and many have used this process. A list of faculty with skills in each of these areas who are willing to provide hands on support to others has been shared across the college. To date, this “one-on-one” training has been extremely successful.
Stories from faculty members about their experiences in utilizing technology point to both the successes and frustrations experienced. The examples that follow help us to learn from experiences and mistakes and inform us about potential uses for technology.
The following are some struggles, successes, and lessons I learned from working with the North Dakota Interactive Video Network (IVN) and the Minnesota Interactive Television Network (ITV):
My first attempts to produce course materials that could be available to students on the web were a failure. When I started, to the best of my knowledge, the only way to prepare web materials was to use HTML. The computer center offered some introductory courses in using HTML, which I took. They gave us the addresses of several web sites that had helpful material to the beginning HTMLer. The problem was time. I spent two days in May just getting one page ready to load into the Web. Then I had to get permission even to try to load the page. I just gave up. I decided that if it was going to take me two days to get one title page ready for the web, my syllabus alone was going to take a month! A hard copy of the syllabus was sitting on my desk. I had 120 copies made and handed them out to the students that fall.
I guess I am competitive by nature. The idea that a computer program and all the trappings had beaten me kept nagging (I keep forgetting that the programs are prepared by people). An inanimate object had me hooked. I kept making the odd feeble attempt to get something onto the Web. Then I heard that Claris Home page was available. The ease, the simplicity, all problems were solved. I had my syllabus ready in Microsoft Word. All that I needed once the software was installed was to cut and paste. The problem is that you can cut and paste if you don’t mind one long paragraph with none of your original formatting.
The first lesson of Claris Home Page is that you must start from scratch and type everything in. Now the real thing is ready to upload. Uploading. Uploaded!
All right, now into the Web and find the page. A screen shows up but there is a message that the URL isn’t available.
Lesson number 2. Once you have one page ready to upload, try to upload it to see if it works. If it does, keep preparing things to upload! It took the “experts” the better part of 8 hours to figure out what happened. Very basically, Claris Home Page will put spaces and other odd things into your document at will.
The Home Page Browser doesn’t pay attention to these freebies, however, the web reads all these additions as foreign language and it won’t load!
Lesson 3. Even with Claris Home Page one needs to have some understanding of HTML so you can take out all the things you didn’t put in. After many hours of high blood pressure, some words actually turned up on the web page. The pictures didn’t but the words did. It took only two or three days to get the figures to show up too. I spent the better part of a month getting the material in place for one undergraduate class. I put up copies of all the pre-prepared overheads I use in class too. There are still things in there that I didn’t put in but I just can’t argue with the computer any more.
I found that there are many advantages to using the web. Students no longer want copies of my overheads. I can correct mistakes in a few minutes. The student can check her/his grades at any computer with Web access. They don’t have to block the hall and try to read the microscopic print.
I did all my overheads for one undergraduate class so that I could present the lecture material using Power Point presentations. I’d say getting the Power Point ready didn’t take any time compared to the Web material. (I am now a much better typist than I was before I started either of these projects so that is a bonus.)
I do not think I would spend my time preparing power point presentations again. They look nice but I ran into too many problems. Half way through a lecture something went wrong and the system crashed. It ate all the material on the disk. I was smart enough to have a back up copy of the disk available in my office, but couldn’t use it until I had backed it up. Now I have two backup copies of any Power Point Presentation. Then the bulb burned out in the projector and that was the end of that lecture. So now I have three disks with the presentations and one copy of acetate overheads. I might as well just use the acetate overheads.
When I lost all the info on the disk in use, I was just going to plug into the web and use the copies of the overheads I had for the students. That wasn’t possible as someone had not left all the bits and pieces with the computer and the cables were missing. Another problem was that there are only a few computers available that we can use for Power Point presentations. I made my bookings in July for the fall semester. Two nights there was no computer available because the person who was to return it didn’t.
It is clear from these examples that time and frustration are major ingredients in the technology mix. We do believe that the needs for using technology outweigh the frustrations and setbacks. Bugs get worked out, and new and improved systems are developed. We learn from each other as we struggle. It is apparent that we are still pioneers, and as such we are struggling to “build the cabin rather than sitting by the cozy fire.”
“What we don’t like we can conspire to change” (Breton & Largent, 1996, p. 39). Based on our experiences to date, we have set a number of goals for the future.
An article in the Dallas Morning News (August 10, 1997, p. 10A), “Senator’s request to use laptop boots up debate,” speaks to how these challenges arise in all aspects of society. It seems that Senator Michael Enzi of Wyoming asked to bring his laptop computer on the Senate floor to take notes. This simple request sparked much controversy and debate. Senator Dianne Feinstein, California, said, “I’m not against computers, but I think they have their place, and it’s not everywhere. When you’re speaking on the Senate floor, you should be speaking from a lifetime of experience, not from what you punch up on a computer.” If senators should be speaking from a lifetime of experience, should professors be speaking from a lifetime of education? What is the appropriate role for technology in higher education? and What are the keys to creating the environment that makes appropriate use of technology possible?
This paper has provided a brief description of our approach to changing a demanding, rapidly changing environment that is often extremely unfriendly to one that is “user friendly.” Maintaining and enhancing this support will challenge all involved, and may also involve debate as each new challenge and change is faced. The following principles are suggested for helping to meet the challenges of technology in higher education.
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Dallas Morning News (1997, Aug. 10). Senator’s request to use laptop boots up debate, p. 10A.
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Weinbach, R. W., Gandy, J. T., & Tartaglia, L. J. (1984). Addressing the needs of the part-time student through interactive closed-circuit television: An Evaluation. Aretê, 9(2), 12-20.
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The Internet has the potential to change the way we conduct scholarly research. Eliminating geographic and prejudicial barriers are among some of the Internet’s claims to fame. Despite its potential, it is difficult to give the Internet an overwhelming endorsement when so many concerns still loom large regarding Internet-based research, specifically data collection. It is possible that as the social sciences transition from a modernist to a postmodernist approach to research that the Internet opens up potential research modalities that have previously been unconsidered. This article reports on the authors’ experience of collecting data via the Internet. Specific concerns and potential regarding confidentiality, anonymity, data security, and methodology are addressed.
Few would deny that the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) have the potential to revolutionize the way people conduct themselves in business, education, and personal relationships. The world has become smaller for those who use e-mail on a daily basis. In television commercials the Internet is heralded as a medium immune to the prejudices which so easily beset humans who cannot get past judging others on the basis of age, gender, or race. Distance Learning Technologies (DTLs) have changed the face of correspondence education. A student in Helsinki logs onto a personal computer and takes a course in Vancouver, Canada while being enrolled in the British Open University system. Clearly, geographic and prejudicial barriers are being broken in education as well as personal relationships due to the medium of the Internet.
We are quickly understanding just how prolific the Internet can be. One such area where the Internet can make a contribution is in research and data collection. This paper briefly outlines some of the ways in which research has been conducted via the Internet, the authors’ own experiences with data collection on the Internet, and the problems and potential of such research.
Most people use the Internet to do research. Probably, the reason given most often for browsing the Web is to find some piece of information (Graphics Visualization, & Usability Center of Georgia Tech, 1997); this is research. However, for purposes of the present article we discuss how the Internet has been used in connection with scholarly research. A browsing of the Web and a review of published material indicates three primary categories of research involving Internet technology: review research, marketing data collection, and participant recruitment projects.
This category includes research projects that access existing information on the Internet. Much like a literature review, this research typically involves collecting information about particular topics found on the Internet. For example, one group of researchers reviewed the content of Internet sites regarding spirituality and transpersonal psychology (Lukoff, Lu, Turner, & Gackenbach, 1995). These authors offer suggestions for Internet based review research as well as the findings of their search. Additionally, their article highlights the ease of conducting a review via the Internet with a popular Web browser, Netscape. They report the results when using the word “transpersonal” on two different Web search engines. One search engine indicated 69 sites with the word “transpersonal” in it while the other reported 134 sites. In addition to reporting the findings of the content, these types of reviews usually include the Internet addresses or URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) of sites that house the reviewed material. There are currently only a few published Internet review studies in peer reviewed journals. The authors expect that these types of studies will grow in number and popularity as people express more interest in trying to find “just the right piece” of information from the Internet.
Internet technology is quickly emerging as a powerful tool for finding and targeting potential customers. Using Internet technology, companies can glean information from users that can aid in market research. Unknown to many Web users, is the fact that information about a user or computer terminal can be routinely collected by “Webmasters” (males) or “Webmistresses” (female) (owners or creators of specific Web sites). A “cookie” or a numeric and text based file housed within a user’s Web browser communicates information to a server or a particular site’s operating system. In other words, your personal computer provides the hosting Web site with information about you. With this information the organization or corporation can more accurately tailor its Web site to specific users. It is important to note that a cookie can only be generated after a user has provided a Web site’s sponsoring organization with specific information such as name, address, e-mail address, preferences for certain products or consumer behaviors, etc. Typically, anytime a user sends information to a Web site it is possible for information to be stored in the cookie file on that user’s hard drive.
Additionally, in this information age, it is wise to know what information you provide by simply accessing the Internet. Most Web sites routinely collect less specific, non-personal information about the people who visit their sites. For example the IP (Internet protocol) address of a computer terminal as well as time and date of login to a specific site are usually recorded. The IP address is a series of numbers that are probably not too helpful in and of themselves, however most computer technicians know how to record an IP address and count the number of times a specific IP address has logged onto their system. Software does exist that can track an IP address and find the location of the computer terminal used to log onto a site.
Other identifying information can be collected such as the name of the domain from which a site was accessed. Domain name (see Table 1) may be another piece of helpful information when targeting a specific population of computer users. Corporations that conduct research about particular consumer habits or consumer interest trends are relying more and more on Internet technologies to provide an edge in market research.
Table 1: Domain Naming Systems
| com |
Commercial |
| edu |
Educational |
| gov |
Government |
| org |
Organization |
| mil |
Military |
| net |
Network Access Provider |
| Two Digit |
Countries (Canada, United Kingdom, Finland, Ireland) |
This type of research uses the Internet as a medium to attract and recruit participants as well as to collect the data for the project. At the time this article was written there were few published papers on the experiences of researchers collecting data via the Internet. One article (Smith & Leigh, 1997) discusses many of the advantages of using the Internet for traditional social science research. For example, one advantage is that it is nearly as accessible as other forms of communication such as radio and television, yet is capable of accommodating several forms of communication in a single medium. For example, unlike radio or television, it can accommodate text, audio material, visual material, video, and live interaction. It also allows one to access geographically remote material and people. This might make it much more practical to conduct cross-cultural research and access material that would otherwise be unavailable. Another article gives a positive review of conducting research on the Internet and its potential for research (Welch & Krantz, 1996). In these types of research projects participants can be solicited via multiple Internet technologies including, e-mail/listserves, electronic bulletin boards, and registration of key words with Internet search engines. Additionally, traditional methods of participant recruitment, such as advertisements in newspapers, as well as trade, academic, or professional journals, can be helpful in enlisting subjects.
These sites typically house a questionnaire or another form of survey instrument that participants use to submit their responses. The participant fills out the questionnaire, usually consisting of a series of check boxes or pull-down menus, and clicks a “submit” button to send the responses to a mainframe or server computer. This type of research is not much different from any other research involving a questionnaire. Researchers must adhere to specific guidelines and protocols to ensure reliable and valid results. Despite the similarities between research conducted via traditional (e.g., pen and paper) means and that conducted on the Internet, there are some potentially drastic differences. Using the Internet to attract and reach participants may be an attractive proposition for many; however, the Internet is not without its problems. The following section highlights the authors’ experience of recruiting participants and collecting data via the Internet.
The authors recently used the Internet for data collection and participant recruitment. The focus of our study was on how mental health professionals view client/therapist attraction. Although departmental support and academic interest for this project were quite high, a thorough analysis of the collected data and the costs involved will help us decide if the information we gleaned from this effort will be as rich as we had originally hoped. Every research project must answer questions about confidentiality, participant demographics, methodology, and appropriate uses of the collected data. However, conducting research on the Internet can complicate the usual concerns and even pose new ones that researchers must address.
Research projects that solicit human participation sponsored by an institution of higher education must pass a human subjects, or institutional review board. These boards assemble and pour over potential researcher designs to ensure that participants’ confidentiality, among other things, will be respected and protected. Participants’ rights to confidentiality and the security of the collected information become very important when conducting research on the Internet. It is easy to make claims of confidentiality on the Internet but may be more difficult to deliver (Bier, Sherblom, & Gallo, 1996). Unlike traditional instruments where raw data can be locked in file cabinets, the Internet’s locking devices may be less secure. Passwords and encryption codes may be broken. Therefore, it would be wise for anyone interested in housing a questionnaire on the Web to implement a method for rapid and secure data transfer.
Perhaps the most prevalent method of data retrieval used is to have the raw data submitted as an e-mail posting. Here, the participant fills out the questionnaire and after submitting the answers, the document is sent to the researcher’s e-mail address. The researcher then transfers the data from a raw format into a database. One of the major limitations of this type of data transfer is that participants’ e-mail addresses are also submitted with the raw data. Therefore, attrition may occur if potential participants wish to remain anonymous and refuse to send their data simply because their e-mail address may divulge their identity.
Another method of data collection allows for the raw data to be downloaded from the Web site and archived in a database housed on a server. The information stays as a file on the server until the researcher is ready to use it. This information is easily converted into an acceptable format for data analysis (e.g., SPSS, Excel, etc.). Furthermore, with appropriate programming, it is possible for the researcher to have access to the data via the Web. This access helps the researcher monitor data collection without having to download the file from the server. One benefit of this method, as opposed to the e-mail method, is that the researcher can view all the data at once, in raw form, as the data accumulates, instead of sifting through multiple e-mail postings. However, it should be remembered that as long as the information is accessible through the Internet it could be accessible to anyone who knows the URL or passwords. To ensure confidentiality and security of collected data, a daily downloading protocol should be enforced and become part of the project. This way, non-research personnel have fewer opportunities to access confidential data. Another obvious way to enhance confidentiality is not to have access to the raw data via the Web.
In addition to confidentiality as a major issue, anonymity can be a double edged sword. The anonymity afforded by the Internet may be a wonderful asset for data collection. Participants may feel more free to answer truthfully without fear of consequences. Conversely, it could be argued that the Internet offers an unrealistic form of anonymity almost to the point where taking on a new persona has not only become commonplace for frequent Web users (Smith & Leigh, 1997) but is viewed as a right the user should be able to exercise at his or her discretion. Recent research indicates that 40% of Web users have provided false information at some time. Additionally, the same study indicated that 14.59% of users indicated falsifying information over 25% of the time (Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center - Georgia Tech, 1997). This phenomenon of taking on a new identity or misrepresenting one’s self is prevalent enough on the Internet that it might skew any demographic information collected. It would be difficult, therefore, to describe with any confidence or accuracy the sample submitting the survey. In defense of the Internet, it should be remembered that lying about or misrepresenting one’s self on traditional instruments is not totally uncommon either.
Another issue related to anonymity and confidentiality is how the researcher targets a specific population to study. With the Internet, as opposed to traditional survey research, where the researcher targets a specific audience and mails the surveys directly to them, anyone could access a questionnaire or experiment. There are few if any reasonable ways of limiting the number of people who can log onto a given research site. One way would be to set up the collection site with a password that is distributed to perspective participants by the researcher. Each participant would have to supply the password in order to complete or send a completed survey. This prevents “surfers,” who accidentally access the research, from submitting bogus questionnaires.
Another option is to have questions in the questionnaire designed to check the type of people filling out the survey. For example, in our project we wanted to target mental health professionals. We included a series of questions whose answers needed to be compatible for the survey to be accepted for inclusion in the final data set. We asked for disciplinary identification and gave forced choice options (i.e., psychology, social work, psychiatry, etc.). In addition to the forced choice question we asked an open ended question regarding the participants’ primary organizational affiliation (initials only). Furthermore we asked another open-ended question about the participants’ theoretical orientation. Therefore, data from a participant who might have responded to the three questions by saying s/he was (1) a psychologist who was affiliated with the (2) APA and used (3) psychodynamic theory was accepted for inclusion in the final data set. Conversely, the data from a participant who responded that s/he was (1) a psychiatrist who was affiliated with the (2) NRA and used (3) quantum physics theory was excluded. Although the questions we used reflect a professional mental health bias, most populations of interest would have specific and unique characteristics that when coupled and assessed together, would adequately screen out participants who were not appropriate for the study.
When data are collected via the Web the number of people who can participate is limited to those who have access to computers with Internet capability. So, who is on the Web? 1997 statistics from United States based Internet and print publications reveal that anywhere from 30 million (Graphic, Visualization, & Usability Center - Georgia Tech, 1997) to 47 million people had access to the Internet (CyberAtlas, September 1997). Additionally, a Business Week/Harris poll of United States Web users indicated that 45% of those on the Web are over 40 years old (as cited in CyberAtlas, September 1997). The average age of the typical user is 35.2 years with only 31.3% of all users being female (Graphic, Visualization, & Usability Center - Georgia Tech, 1997). IntelliQuest (1999) estimates that 80 million people, 38% of the U.S. population over 16, are online. This research firm projects 100 million by 2000. The Yankee Group (1999) concluded that one quarter of U.S. households are online, and by 2000 that percentage will rise to one third. Similar statistics are reported by Nua Ltd. (1999).
It is important to realize that housing a project on the Web may be a barrier to participation for those who have few economic resources. The Business Week/Harris poll indicated in 1997 that 82% of Web users had incomes of at least $25,000 dollars a year. IntelliQuest (1999) reports that income levels and education levels have been coming down. But the concern still stands that whole, large populations may never have a chance to respond. Furthermore, a certain “type of person” is selected who may not necessarily represent the population to which the findings of the study could be generalized (Swoboda, Muhlberger, Weitkunat, & Schneeweiss, 1997). The specific type of person who will fills out a survey on the Internet is at least one who is not computer or technology phobic (Hewson, Laurent, & Vogel, 1996). One of the biggest potential advantages to Internet solicitation of participants is that the researcher may tap into a more broad national and even international audience of potential participants. Pen and paper instruments are typically only mailed to a very specific, limited audience.
For our project we posted the same call for participation to listserves that cater to mental health professionals. We found these listserve groups by conducting a simple search on the Internet (Keywords: Mental Health Listserve). These lists were operated by individuals who ranged from being very receptive to less enthusiastic about our research. We made sure to explain the nature of the project as well as the fact that it had already passed a Human Subjects Review Board. Some of the lists required us to be members of the list before we could post anything.
To attract an even larger population we advertised in professional trade journals and newsletters targeted toward mental health professionals. These classified-type advertisements are costly, and we discovered that the responses to the printed advertisements did not make a noticeable increase in the overall sample size (completed surveys). However, the print media advertisements may have contributed to an increased “hit” rate (number of people who actually log onto the site) at our Web site. In the end, we concluded that soliciting mental health professionals via trade journals created a greater expense than it was worth in terms of generating participants.
In “computerese” anyone who logs onto a site is referred to as a client. Theoretically, there are all types of clients. The “thin” client, however, is a user who has the bare minimum of computer resources with which to interface the Internet. Obviously, every researcher must decide to whom the research is targeted. When collecting data via the Internet, deciding who can actually interface with your site is another important issue. For example, if a project requires participants to be exposed to any audio, video, or still life photographic stimuli, there is a chance that eligible and willing participants will be excluded simply because they do not have the latest technology on their Internet compatible computers. For this reason every researcher must decide well before the project is up and running how comfortable they are with defining the “thinness” of the clients or targeted participants. Our project serves as an example.
The portrayal of most ethical dilemmas in therapy involves the use of text based stimulus scenarios. However, we know that in many instances video offers a more realistic portrayal of what may actually happen in a clinical situation. Therefore, we saw the inclusion of a video stimulus as an important part to this project. We knew however, that many people would not be able to access the video clip simply because they were not technically outfitted to do so. We were aware that attrition would occur because of this but really had no idea as to the extent. In a sense, we determined that the thin client or the user/participant with the lowest technological capabilities would have to be able to view and hear the video clip in order to fully participate in the research. We defined the thin client by the medium we used to depict the stimulus. If we had used a text based scenario we would have defined the thin client much more broadly, or given access to a greater number of people.
Defining the thin client for our project as someone who needed the technology to download and view video had a tremendous impact on participant recruitment. Soon after going on-line and having the project running for three months we noticed a curious trend in our participation rates. To track participation we had three different counters installed into the Web site. The first counter tracked how many people logged onto our site. The second counted how many people actually went from the introduction page to the questionnaire. The third counter tracked how many people actually submitted the completed questionnaire. After three months of being on-line we counted 310 people who logged onto our data collection site. Of these, only 120 decided that they would either be interested in completing the survey, or had the technology requisite to participate. Of these, only 41 persons actually completed and submitted the questionnaire. Depending on how we define participation rates we had either a 13% or 34% response rate. Optimistically, we like to argue that because only 120 persons actually chose to go to the questionnaire page that our response rate should be 34%. However, we cannot ignore the possibility that several interested people went to the home page with the intent of completing the instrument but decided not to participate for a number of reasons, therefore, a participation rate of 13% might be more realistic.
Once consideration has been given to questions of demographics and confidentiality, one must consider how the methodology of a particular study would be enhanced or compromised by conducting a study via the Internet. Methodology becomes a particular concern where high degrees of control are required. In traditional experimental or quasi-experimental designs where the participant is exposed to a stimulus, the researcher has total control over length of exposure, quality of exposure (i.e., photographic quality, touch, etc.) location of exposure (does it matter if one views the stimulus at work, home, library, etc.?), number of exposures, and time of exposure in reference to other parts of the experiment. On the Internet the researcher loses control of these variables.
In our project the participants were required to download and view a seven second video stimulus. It was our hope that the participants would only watch the clip once. However, we had no control over how many times the clip was viewed. Furthermore, we had no way of knowing that the quality of the video clip was the same from one participant’s computer to the next. If our study depended on exactness of stimulus delivery, it would be very difficult to ensure it via the Internet.
Critics to Internet research could argue that we have simply taken an old research paradigm and applied it to a new medium without thinking about the methodological and practical implications. To this, we counter that the entire field of Social Sciences seems to be caught in a transition (Burman, 1996; Gergen & Thatchenkery, 1996; Levin, 1991). In the past, research paradigms called for tight control of an experiment as the only valid and reliable method of arriving at scientific knowledge (Campbell & Stanley, 1966). Recently, however, there seems to be a trend away from the use of quasi-experimental designs in social science research as more qualitative, ethnographic, and less rigidly structured projects are used to answer social questions (Burman, 1996; Jacobson, Mulick, & Schwartz, 1996; Reid, Robinson, & Bunsen, 1995). This may reflect the transition from a modernist approach to scientific inquiry to a more postmodern paradigm (Gergen & Thatchenkery, 1996).
The technology of the Internet may help social scientists bridge the gap between the modern and postmodern worlds. If the Internet represents a new communication modality, it may be instrumental in broadening our concept of research as well as the way research is conducted. So, although it may be difficult to accommodate the modernist paradigm of experimental research in many cases, the Internet may be able to accommodate a variety of postmodern research pursuits. We may be in the process of discovering this potential. For example, new programming languages are being written specifically for computerized online social science research (Pallier, Dupoux, & Jeannin, 1997). Additionally, the field of education is currently developing new teaching paradigms to accommodate teaching via the Internet (Songer, 1996). It is highly probable that the Internet is so new that we have not yet established the most efficient or effective way to conduct research with it, nor have we adequately assessed the potential that it offers researchers. If we are in the midst of a technology and paradigm shift, we encourage researchers to realize that just because we have a new medium with which to conduct research does not mean we must adhere to a new paradigm, nor does it mean we discard the old one. Somehow, for a while, the two must co-exist until we become more clear on how to use this medium appropriately for research purposes.
One might think that any type of survey research, regardless of topic, would be well suited for delivery via the Internet. In fact, a general rule might be that if you can collect self-report data via pen and paper instruments you could just as easily do so over the Internet, and it may even cost less. This assertion remains to be validated. In contrast, it probably can be said, with some confidence, that research projects involving a high degree of stimulus control are not suited for delivery via the Internet. Too much variability currently exists between users, computers, and access to the Internet to ensure a tightly controlled design to yield valid and reliable results.
Our experience with data collection via the Web has, at least, been an education. We know that by putting our instrument on the Web, we have accessed persons in other countries that we never would have been able to reach with a standard method of distribution. Conversely, we know that we have excluded a number of people simply by housing the survey on the Internet. This may not necessarily be a bad thing. It may simply be something we need to acknowledge when discussing the results of our study. Using the Internet to recruit research participants is therefore, a double edge sword. What can be gained from reaching a global population may come at the expense of excluding the large number of people who do not have access to the Internet. Self-report surveys may be best suited for adaptation to Internet data collection procedures. In the future, if we were to recruit participants via the Internet for a quasi-experimental project and were interested in accumulating a large sample in a short period of time, we would be wise to use a text based stimulus scenario. Incorporating a video segment, as we did, or even an audio file as a stimulus, places far too many restraints on potential participants. This may change as more and more people gain access to the Internet with higher powered and more sophisticated computers.
We encourage others to consider housing their surveys on the Internet. The concerns, potential, and experiences we mention in this article come from our desire to understand the usefulness of the Internet, our naiveté at conducting this type of research, and our willingness to challenge the status quo. More participation is needed to make the Internet a viable research tool. We recommend further cross-modal research projects that include data collected from both print and virtual media so that threats to and concerns of reliability and validity can be addressed and reconciled. Finally, we encourage others to publish scholarly articles, not simply on the findings of research conducted on the Internet, but equally important, on the process of conducting this type of research.
The authors acknowledge the support of the College of Human Sciences at Texas Tech University and the Faculty Development Grant (no. 0096-44-0535) that supported this project.
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The information infrastructure has been used to facilitate any time, any place learning, by maximizing student-to-student interaction, student-to-faculty interaction and student-with content interaction in University of Nebraska’s Interdepartmental Human Resources and Family Sciences Master of Science degree program. Emphasis is placed on effective instructional design rather than on the technology tools used to deliver education. Since inception of the program in 1994, thirty-five students have completed the M.S. degree, without needing to come to campus, by using satellite down-links, VCR tapes, email, faxes, telephone bridges, and the Internet for teamwork and discussions. Effective uses of mixed media require faculty to redesign courses using instructional design based on models of experiential learning. One unanticipated spin-off of the successful extended education teaching is that many faculty chose to adapt this instructional design to their on-campus classes. The conversation about instructional design and good teaching has enriched the college through the resultant emphasis on teaching and has provided an appropriate balance with discussions about research and outreach.
Any time, any place learning using information infrastructures has changed students’ expectations of access to education. Many examples of classrooms without walls and campuses without buildings exist (The Western Governors’ University and the University of Phoenix); however, one of the dangers in using mixed media to deliver instruction is getting caught up in the technology toys. Extended educational delivery is not about using computerized teaching tools or multimedia software to replace instructors and classroom teaching; rather it is about using instructional design to incorporate technology as a means to provide access to education for underserved persons, including adult learners.
Competition and campus mandates will push and pull many institutions into using information infrastructures to provide access and to serve the educational needs of both on-campus and off-campus learners. Faculty who are preparing to teach extended education courses often raise concerns about being technology-literate enough to teach in the distance education environment. Yet, more important than full understanding of the information infrastructure is understanding how to use technology to achieve the goals of the learner and instructor, in the context of the content and the objectives of the course.
Without effective instructional design, technology-assisted distance education can be disastrous: students surfing pages on the Internet using the mouse button like a couch potato uses the remote “clicker;” or a video of the professor as a talking head (a la Max Headroom). Lectures may not be the most productive learning environment. “In the average lecture, the instructor delivers about 5,000 spoken words, of which students record only about 500” (Oblinger & Rush, 1997, p. 10). “Research on the effectiveness of lecture does not support it as the best method of developing learner competencies of critical thinking, problem solving, and lifelong learning” (Oblinger & Rush, 1997, p. 9).
Technology-assisted instruction is more effective when faculty switch roles from functioning as transmitters of information to becoming designers of learning environments and experiences (Angelo, 1997). Research shows that in most classrooms, interactions between faculty and students are limited to a few individuals. “In classes under 40 students, four or five students dominate the interactions” (Oblinger & Rush, 1997, p. 10). “Experience decisively shapes individual understanding” (Ewell, 1997, p. 4) in learner-centered classrooms. “Educators… combine… theories of different learning styles and student-constructed knowledge with the theory of practice-centered learning. Instead of being passive recipients of knowledge, we now consider students capable of constructing their own knowledge with guidance from the teacher” (Berge & Collins, 1995). The overarching goal of involving the learner is to focus the responsibility on the learner. “How many times do you hear faculty fret, ‘I have so much content to cover’?… Why do we assume that it is the faculty member’s responsibility to cover? Why not set objectives for the students and let them explore and drive their own learning? The technology exists that will enable them to do so” (Hooker, 1997, p. 27).
For students, knowing how to learn is the important priority, and faculty can take on the roles of coaches, guides, and master learners. The question is one of how to improve learner productivity (Hooker, 1997). Active learning works best when learners are presented with a compelling problem that requires reflection and have opportunities for interaction and support (Ewell, 1997). “The critical factors in learning are… stimuli, responses, feedback, and reinforcement. A stimulus is provided, usually in the form of a short presentation of content. Next, a response is demanded, often via a question” (Reeves & Reeves, 1997, p. 60). Learners should reach metacognition; that is, achieve awareness of objectives, develop the ability to plan and evaluate learning strategies, monitor their own progress, and adjust self-learning behaviors (Reeves & Reeves, 1997, p. 62) to accomplish learning.
The Graduate Faculty of the UN-L College of Human Resources and Family Sciences have adopted active or experiential instructional design for distance learning classes. The integral parts of this instructional design model are: (a) learner-centered objectives, (b) brief presentations of content, (c) activities or experiences that use that content, (d) reflective analysis or synthesis of generalizations that reinforce that learning, and (e) assessment of student outcomes to ensure that objectives have been attained. This is an iterative cycle, where the current learning builds on the previous learning. Learners explore relationships, make connections, and participate in application experiences, thus increasing the likelihood of retention.
The challenge for faculty, then, is to focus on development of “content-rich” learning experiences, rather than focus on full and complete understanding of technology used for delivery. An analogy is that I expect my car to start, to run, to transport me where I need to go; but I don’t need full and complete understanding of how internal combustion engines work. When my car doesn’t work right, I take it to “Skip” to fix it. In similar ways, others are the experts to help with the technology: producers, engineers, and camera-persons for satellite delivery and producing videotapes; computer technicians for Web-based instruction and computer-mediated-conferencing. Faculty design instruction that includes brief content sessions and experiences that enable students to synthesize new understandings and to integrate with previous knowledge and experiences. Faculty plan for student conceptualization of generalizations from the learning activities, for application of synthesized learnings to new situations, and for ways to assess learner outcomes.
How do these extended education offerings differ from earlier efforts in correspondence courses or in using audio networks? One important difference is the media used to deliver courses. Course delivery includes videotapes of lecturettes, case studies, interviews, trigger incidents for students’ analysis and feedback. Class “discussions” are held on the World Wide Web. Students may discuss class topics with all students or work with groups of students on team projects. The WWW-based groupware is used for interactions between students, within teams of students, and between faculty and students. To use the groupware, students need to have access to a computer with a Web browser and a local internet service provider. Students complete and submit assignments in the “courseroom,” a password protected area accessible to registered students only.
The complete program of studies leading to a M.S. in the UN-L Interdepartmental Human Resources and Family Sciences area is available for students without ever having to come to campus. The students complete a 36-hour program of studies that includes 18 hours in Family and Consumer Sciences, 6 hours in Nutritional Science and Dietetics, 6 hours in Textiles, Clothing and Design, 3 hours in research methods, and 3 hours in statistics. In addition to the course work, students take written comprehensive examinations and complete an Option III project which requires them to demonstrate critical thinking and problem solving skills as well as the ability to use “new knowledge” as consumers of research. No substantive changes to the program of studies were made for the extended education degree program.
The Interdepartmental Graduate Committee (the graduate committee for the Interdepartmental area program in Human Resources and Family Sciences) worked with the Administrative Advisory Council, the faculty, and the departments to identify specific courses and faculty to teach these 12 courses: FACS 906, Consumer and Family Economics; FACS 980, The Family in a Cross-Cultural Perspective; TXCD 811, Recent Developments in Textiles; NUTR 800, Contemporary Nutrition; HRFS 875, Research Methods; FACS 872, The Adolescent in the Family; FACS 907, Family Financial Management; BIOM 896, Statistical Decision Making; NUTR 855, Nutrition: A Focus on Life Stages; TXCD 870, Textile Economics; FACS 815, Advanced Instructional Theory in Family and Consumer Sciences; and FACS 987, Family Strengths. In addition to degree-seeking students, others have enrolled in courses to meet personal objectives, such as teacher certification renewal, Registered Dietitian renewal, continuing education units, or professional development units for renewal of Certification in Family and Consumer Sciences.
Distance education students access library resources through student visits to a research library, and/or through Internet connectivity to UN-L library special support services from Kate Adams, liaison librarian for distance education. Individual students access the library’s database through the WWW to the IRIS system, identify an article they want, and then the library staff retrieve the article, photocopy it, and mail or FAX it to student(s). Students access the Expanded Academic Index (EAI) to do an enhanced periodical search (provides author, title, subject and keyword searching of journals of economics, philosophy, psychology, medicine, drama, nutrition, literature, law, and engineering through IRIS, using “unlgrad1” student accounts.
One challenge in the delivery of the program has been to provide “one stop” student services through the college Deans’ office. To facilitate planning, a mythical graduate student who had never set foot (nor would ever set foot) on campus was pictured. With such a student in mind, we reviewed every step a student would need to complete in order to apply, be accepted, matriculate, register for each course, take care of special situations and requests, apply for the degree, and to graduate (including ordering academic attire, for although students study at-a-distance, many choose to attend graduation). On-campus students learn such things as how to secure advisor approval as needed, learn to deliver documents to appropriate offices, etc. Because extended education students have no cognitive map of the campus and its bureaucracy, special student services are needed to support them. Support staff who take everything in stride and are reassuring, helpful, and informed are essential to the success of the program.
Does experiential learning instructional design used with technology work for graduate education? The graduate faculty is pleased to share that it does. The first cohort of extended education students started in August 1994 and completed course work in August 1997. A second cohort of students from Nebraska as well as across the nation participated in the 1995-98 program. To date, thirty-eight (38) women have earned their M.S. degrees using technology-enabled interaction with faculty and other students2. When the program began in 1994, satellite broadcast from the classroom or studio was used, supplemented by telephones for one-way video, two-way audio interaction in a synchronous delivery (learners and teachers met at a scheduled time). Now, professors are using the World Wide Web for asynchronous communication, along with videotapes (For example, visit http://romulus.UN-L.edu/. Courses that meet at this site are password protected.).
Who are the students? The profile of students includes full-time employees, full-time spouses and parents of children ranging in age from toddlers to teens and young adults. One extended education student commented: “Enrolling in classes keeps my fifty-something-year old brain stimulated and learning.” Distance or scheduling commitments keeps students from coming to campus. In fact, only one of the graduates would have come to campus for the degree program if it were not made available to her via distance education. “This program is the difference between obtaining a Masters degree or not” according to one student. These students were “new students” to us, students who would not have had access to graduate education if the extended education degree program were not in place. An additional benefit is that the distance education program increases the course selection for on-campus students. Some courses with limited enrollment have sustaining enrollment due to the extended education students whose numbers help these courses meet “minimum class size” standards. Thus, if a course had been offered as an on-campus course only, it would have been canceled due to low enrollment. With the distance education component, the class meets or exceeds minimum enrollment standards, and thus avoids cancellation, permitting a wider course selection for on-campus students.
Many of the students have experienced life-altering events, including births of children, divorce, widowhood, illness of family members, responsibilities for elder care; but, the distance education program meant they could remain at “home” to deal with these events without interruption of the educational program. A graduate of the program explained: “I chose distance learning for personal growth, at my husband’s insistence. Since my husband’s death (during my first year of studies), I now am responsible for the family farm and college education of my children. I also live 400 miles from campus. This program enabled me to complete the Masters degree to qualify for a professional position.” One extended education student said: “This happened to me…, but distance education provided the opportunity for me to update teaching strategies and change perspectives.”
Current (students in the third cohort, 1998-2002) degree-seeking students reside within the contiguous United States and Hawaii, along with Guam and Thailand. Enrollment covers the United States “coast to coast” (South Carolina to California) and “border to border” (Texas to Wisconsin). The cohort of students who matriculated for the program of study Fall 1998, will take one class each semester and summer and complete the Option III project and written comprehensive exams. This cohort of 36 students are from Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Thailand, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Each year, formative evaluations were completed. Among the objectives of the formative evaluation are to determine if distance education students perceive convenience and economic advantages. Most agree that distance education is an opportunity to meet personal goals, to advance their careers, and to contribute to the economic stability of their families (Table 1); however, their comments indicate that class time is an additional element in their busy lives. Students express a great deal of concern about the time required to study in preparation for classes and examinations, to complete assignments, and to retrieve resources from the library. They had not anticipated these demands on their time, although they had recognized that time would be required to attend class.
Table 1. Graduate students’ attitudes about distance education.
| Item |
n |
x |
s.d. |
| An opportunity to advance my career |
83 |
4.37 |
1.01 |
| An opportunity to lead to an alternate career |
83 |
3.55 |
1.39 |
| An opportunity to refresh my skills to return to my career |
83 |
2.94 |
1.54 |
| To meet my personal goals |
83 |
4.70 |
0.47 |
| To meet goals my family have for me |
83 |
2.74 |
1.17 |
| To contribute to the economic stability of my family |
83 |
4.04 |
1.21 |
(5=strongly agree; 1=strongly disagree)
Students frequently express heartfelt appreciation of the distance education degree program. One said: “Distance education has made it possible for me to fulfill a long-term goal to do a Master’s degree. It is impossible for me to commute or move the nearly 200 miles to campus. When the opportunity arose to get the degree through distance education, it was like an answer to my prayers. “
Students shared initial concerns about technology and about using the Internet to search for journal articles in the library and order the reprints. However, by the second course, they were more comfortable with delivery, and now volunteer their favorite and least favorite delivery preferences. Students have high expectations for faculty performance, for technology, and for relevance of course content, as commonly would be expected of adult learners.
The graduate students grow accustomed to distance education technologies. They experience success with class content and delivery, develop rapport with the cohort group of students, understand how to best access the faculty teaching the class, develop facility with using e-mail and Internet access to the library, and are persisters who are committed to the degree program. Particularly insightful were comments of students who appreciated faculty serving as models for teaching using experiential learning design. One student commented: “I have learned new teaching styles from extended education instructors, and I plan to use this experience to enhance my teaching skills.”
Technology used in distance education can be an artificial barrier to interpersonal communications: this phenomenon is called transactional distance. Although the majority feel interactions are satisfactory (Table 2), students tell instructors that they long for one-on-one interaction and continuous feedback about student progress from instructors. Faculty attempt to provide this high level of interaction through a variety of means, including phone calls, e-mail, bridge phone discussion groups, and response to e-mail questions. Very encouraging is the high level of support from family and other support systems. A student expressed it this way: “My family is proud of me - and I haven’t graduated yet!”
Table 2. Graduate students’ attitudes about interactions that occur in distance education.
| Response |
n |
x |
s.d. |
| My interactions with the instructor(s) |
83 |
3.85 |
.67 |
| My interactions with other learners |
83 |
4.12 |
.70 |
| My interactions with the course content |
83 |
3.76 |
.71 |
| My interactions with technology for course delivery |
83 |
3.70 |
.88 |
| My interactions with my family or other support systems |
83 |
3.65 |
.86 |
| My interactions with my employer |
80 |
3.49 |
.87 |
| My ability to balance competing roles |
82 |
2.79 |
1.02 |
(5=very satisfactory; 1=very unsatisfactory)
These students report less satisfaction with balancing the competing roles of employee, spouse, parent, and community volunteer, but the fact that distance education permits them to assume most of these roles while completing a degree is important to them.
To elicit students’ comfort with distance education, we asked “Where does this program stand overall on a scale of 1 to 7, where a 7 represents the “best” possible education and 1 represents the “worst” possible education?” The mean response was 5.56 + 1.06, reflecting the students’ confidence in the quality of education regardless of the delivery technology that elicits less-than-satisfied responses from a few (7%) of the students. For more information, call (402) 472-2913 or email agri030@UN-Lvm.UN-L.edu or visit our site on the WWW: http://ianrwww.UN-L.edu/ianr/chrfs/exteduc.htm.
More than one-third of the faculty in the college participates in teaching extended education classes, a critical mass great enough to produce significant shifts in the culture of the college. However, one factor contributing to the success of the distance education program was the emphasis on faculty development. Faculty participated in satellite video conferences on distance education, LearnShops with faculty from other institutions (through the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance), participated in monthly brown bags, and generally have been supportive of one another. One unanticipated spin-off of the successful extended education teaching is that many faculty chose to adapt experiential instructional design in their on-campus classes. The conversation about instructional design and good teaching has enriched the college through the resultant emphasis on teaching and has provided an appropriate balance with discussions about research and outreach.
1Dr. Laughlin provides leadership for the Interdepartmental Human Resources and Family Sciences M.S. degree program delivered via distance education, and is a founding member of the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (Great Plains IDEA).
2The program received the A*DEC Outstanding Educational Program Award, 1998.
Partial support for faculty development was obtained from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Extension Service Agricultural Telecommunications Grants: Great Plains InterUniversity Consortium: Building capacity for distance learning, Co-Directors, B. Stowe & V. Moxley, and Establishing a network training concept for distance education, Co-Directors: D. C. Draper, J. A. Stout, & J. Laughlin. These grants funded four years of faculty development activities. In addition, J. Laughlin obtained an A*DEC grant to partially fund satellite delivery of NSD 800 Contemporary Nutrition, 07/95-12/95.
Angelo, T. A. (1997). The campus as learning community. AAHE Bulletin, 49(9), 3-6 .
Berge, Z., & Collins, M. (1995). Computer-mediated communication and the online classroom in distance learning. Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, 2 (4). Retrieved from http://sunsite.unc.edu/cmc/mag/1995/apr/berge.html (Jan. 14, 1998).
Ewell, P. T. (1997). Organizing for learning. AAHE Bulletin, 50(4), 3-6.
Hooker, M. (1997). The transformation of higher education. In D. G. Oblinger and S. C. Rush (Eds.) The Learning Revolution (pp. 20-34). Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.
Oblinger, D. G., & Rush, S. C. (1997). The learning revolution. In D.G. Oblinger and S.C. Rush (Eds.) The Learning Revolution (pp. 2-19). Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.
Reeves, T. C., & Reeves, P. M. (1997). Effective dimensions of interactive learning on World Wide Web. In B. H. Khan (Ed.). Web-based Instruction (pp. 59-66). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.
The author describes the process of developing and teaching a World Wide Web course. This case study illustrates the nature of course development (front-loaded rather than day-to-day), strategies for presenting the content of course, techniques for fostering teacher-student and student-student interaction, and recommendations for assuring that technology supports rather than interferes with the learning process.
A variety of primary interactions must occur between teacher and learner before teaching and learning evolve into the process known as education. This basic premise holds true whether the educational process takes place in the classroom, through the mail, or via telecommunication.
The pedagogical literature is replete with descriptions of student-content, student-student, and student-teacher interactions as they occur in the traditional classroom (Moore, 1989). Researchers who have explored these interactions in non-traditional settings of distance education, such as correspondence courses and independent learning, emphasize the importance of nurturing these interactions and recognize the impact of distances of time and space upon these interactions.
Traditional European pedagogy continues to dominate modern higher education classrooms. In this paradigm, the professor, who defines and imparts knowledge, orchestrates the educational process. The professor determines the course content and designs student-content interactions. Likewise, the professor makes an impact on student-student and student-teacher interactions. In a traditional academic setting these interactions generally occur face-to-face as students share time and physical space with their professor and with other students. Traditional college students, having recently emerged from 12 years of traditional education, depend upon and indeed expect their professors to structure the quantity and quality of their classroom related interactions.
In contrast to the traditional teacher-centered paradigm, non-traditional academic programs are primarily learner-centered. In historically popular independent study or correspondence courses, the professor interacts with the student vicariously through the educational materials chosen for the students to study. In non-traditional distance settings, the actual process of learning takes place independently of the instructor.
The typical non-traditional student is more than 25 years old, married, and has family and community responsibilities. She is employed and attends school on a part-time basis. For many years these students have turned to non-traditional programs in order to meet their education objectives while continuing to meet ongoing responsibilities. These students’ expectations differ significantly from traditional college-age students. Adult students enter the classroom with a certain level of experiential learning. They typically know what they need or want to learn, and they require a great deal of flexibility as to when and where they attend class. This independence comes at a price. When distance education relies primarily on the mail and an occasional phone call, students’ primary interaction is with the course content. The student and faculty member may meet personally at the beginning and end of the course, or not at all. Students have little or no student-student interaction.
With the proliferation of distance education courses, indeed complete degree programs, educators are asking if education is truly possible without structured student/student and student/teacher interactions (Clark, 1993). In this paper, the author uses her experience developing and teaching a Web-based, computer mediated course titled Community Based Health Promotion Programs for Older Adults to describe both the process and impact of using computer conferencing to fill the interaction gaps inherent to distance education.
Community Based Health Promotion Programs for Older Adults is a 3 credit dual level graduate/undergraduate course taught exclusively on the World Wide Web (WWW). The course syllabus, goals and objectives, reading assignments, and lectures reside on the Web, giving students the opportunity to complete their coursework in an asynchronous manner—at the time and location of their convenience. The Web serves as the tool to connect students with the content of the course. This course also uses computer mediated communication, specifically electronic-mail, threaded message boards, and real-time discussion sessions (chat rooms) to facilitate interaction among students and between students and teacher.
Instructors of Web based courses need either technical support or technical savvy. I chose to use all of the available technical support the university could provide. Two years after beginning to develop this course, I still do not know how to use the hypertext markup language known as HTML. I don’t know how to set up a bulletin board or a discussion room. I couldn’t begin to “design a Web page.” I decided early on that I am a gerontologist, not a computer programmer. In retrospect, that decision has usually served me well, but has also left me frustrated. Other instructors are quite adept at HTML programming and the technical aspects of managing a discussion room and bulletin board. I struggle with e-mail.
Web course development requires comprehensive, holistic, front-loaded development, rather than day-to-day planning. Fellow faculty and administrators who have not undertaken this effort, seriously underestimate the time required for course development and maintenance. In a study of how faculty prepare distance education courses, Wolcott (1993) offers the following statement from one faculty member in her sample: “I don’t know of anybody who sits down and thinks through a class the way this (distance delivery) system makes you think through it to crank out a sixty or seventy page syllabus. It’s a very time-consuming process to prepare and teach one of these courses. It takes planning much further in advance to do this kind of course than to do it on campus.”
The appearance of information on the computer screen is critical to student-content interaction in a Web class. In traditional didactic settings, the presence of the instructor can mediate the interaction between the student and content and can compensate for hastily written overhead transparencies or drawings on a chalkboard. In distance education, the content must stand on its own. As a Cooperative Extension Specialist, I rarely have an opportunity to interact on a personal level with my students and so I present information in a “fact sheet” format. I followed that same style in designing this course paying particular attention to appearance and readability. As with my Extension printed materials I drew on design techniques such as headings, underlining, italics, bolding, and bullets to help students identify critical pieces of information.
The basic content of this course is presented in what I’ve called a netlecture. A netlecture, is simply a traditional lecture redesigned for an electronic format. The style is conversational. I could take the netlecture and read it to a traditional class and it would sound like a typical lecture. I specifically chose conversational language to encourage a sense of personal interaction between teacher and student as opposed to reading more pages in a textbook. Following is an excerpt from a netlecture about health promotion and aging.
If you had just turned 65, what would be your biggest concern? The number of years you may have to live, or the quality of life you have in the next 17 or so years? Most people will say that quality of life is more important than quantity of life. Their focus is not on life expectancy, but rather on healthy expectancy, or the number of healthy years they can expect to have left. The quality of those remaining years depend on one’s physical activity, nutritional intake, social support network access to good medical care, health education, and health services.
Active links to other Web sites related to the content are embedded in the netlecture. For example, links to demographic data provided by the US Census, American Association of Retired Persons, and National Institute for Aging Web sites serve to facilitate both the student’s cognitive and physical interaction with the materials. Students express appreciation for the “break” in reading, and the opportunity to use the Web as a resource to supplement their learning.
The content for a Web course is in no way limited by the materials posted by the instructor. The Web itself is a connection to information on every subject imaginable. Introducing students to the Web through course links or specific class assignments exposes students to both trustworthy and questionable information. It is therefore imperative that students learn how to scrutinize information located on the World Wide Web. To address this issue, one course unit involves identifying and evaluating health promotion sites on the Web. The netlecture for this unit includes specific information about how to evaluate a site and in the discussion students evaluate sites they have posted on the bulletin board.
Students participating in this course were typical non-traditional students—primarily women, more than 25 years old, employed and attending school on a part time basis. The majority of students who have completed the course were graduate level—10 masters, 2 PhDs, and 3 post-doctoral students employed in health related fields. Seven students were nurses working in academic settings, 6 students worked in the health-care industry, 4 were academic faculty/non-nursing. Three undergraduate students completed the course.
Computer mediated communication tools facilitate student and professor interaction on several levels. I frequently use electronic-mail (e-mail) to interact with individual students and I use list-serves to contact the class. E-mail is routinely used to provide feedback to individual students regarding assignments and answers to specific questions. Each student’s final evaluation and grade summary was transmitted electronically to the student. Electronic mail and the threaded message board are particularly useful as ways to exchange information at any time of the day or night. The students and I can send or respond to messages at our convenience.
List-serves (group e-mail) are an efficient and effective way to get a message to the entire class. Students learn to check their e-mail daily for up-to-the minute information regarding the course. Although electronic mail is an effective and efficient method for sending brief messages to students, sending and receiving longer messages is more complex. Students are required to complete several writing assignments for the course. Originally, these were to be sent as attachments via e-mail. Compatibility problems with attachments occasionally prevented my opening them. Although I can open attachments from some students without difficulty, others prove impossible. A great deal of time and effort is expended trying to send and retrieve assignments. The students agree that written assignments should be sent by fax or mail to reduce the frustration created by incompatible software.
The discussion sessions (often known as chat rooms) were the most successful and most satisfying method of communicating between students and instructor and among students. With one exception, students overwhelmingly identify the discussion sessions as the highlight of the course. One student reported, “The discussions in class are very lively. The instructor keeps the discussion going and gets everyone involved, capitalizing on the knowledge and expertise of the class members… This is truly an adult learning experience.”
The weekly real-time discussion sessions provide the greatest opportunity for student-faculty interaction. Real-time discussions allow for teacher-student interaction and provide the richness and texture of interpersonal interactions so often missing in distance education classes. It is during these discussions that I begin to understand how each student is assimilating the course content. Similarly, real-time discussions can be used to manage routine class housekeeping activities. The real-time discussions also give students an opportunity to interact with one another on a more personal level. Although they are unacquainted with each other, students share job opportunities and personal concerns.
As an instructor, I find the 90-minute discussion sessions exhilarating and exhausting. Because each student’s computer receives my messages and responds to the student’s commands at a different speed, I felt it was necessary to maintain several concurrent lines of discussion. Students who access the Internet through a university system can respond much more quickly than those who get to the Internet through a modem and a commercial server.
The real-time discussion sessions require coordinating times that work for everyone, across 4 different time zones. The class met from 7:30 until 9:00 p.m. Central Standard Time as a compromise for students on each coast. Students on the east coast could get home from work and eat a quick dinner before class and still be finished by 10:00—which most (as busy, hardworking adults) considered a good bedtime. Students on the west coast could get off work at 5 Pacific time, and begin class at 5:30 and be finished by 7 for a late dinner.
I’ve often been asked about the difficulties communicating with several students simultaneously in the discussion sessions. I believe that ten students is probably the upper limit for a single discussion session. In a larger group some students would go unnoticed and would certainly not actively participate. I suppose that could be likened to a large lecture, and that parallel could be used to justify larger enrollments in a Web course. Multiple discussion times would also resolve that issue with students signing up for a weekly time. The limitations of faculty time and energy constrain this option.
Hilman et. al, (1994) add student-technology interaction to the list of traditional educational interactions saying “a student cannot begin to deal with the content of the instruction if he or she is unable to first interact with the interface” (p. 36). The following discussion of interaction with the technology highlights the importance of teaching students how to use the technology and of providing access to technical support, especially when technical upgrades are introduced.
In an informal course evaluation conducted via e-mail, students describe technical problems as the most difficult part of the course: “Getting past the technical difficulties, connecting, surviving the shutdowns, etc.” and “The problems I experienced were due to the difficulty of compatibility with KSUs system and the system I use at my institution.”
When the interaction with the technology works smoothly, all is right with the world, but when technical difficulties impact one aspect of the class, frustration with the technology seems to stop progress in other areas of the course. It seems that students become paralyzed until the technical issue is resolved.
Because this was one of the first Web courses offered by Kansas State University the technology changed and emerged along with the course. The technical specialists were choosing and developing new technology at the same time students and I were learning to interact with the technology we had at the beginning of the course. Mid-course changes (upgrades) in technology were frustrating. At one point the entire original course was ‘ported’ into a new interactive framework. The new framework was a great improvement… but making the change in mid-course disrupted the course for several weeks as the “bugs” were worked out. In another instance, a new threaded message board replaced the original static board. When students discovered that they couldn’t successfully complete an assignment because they couldn’t post it to the new message board, they became angry. Students whose only connections to the course were electronic seemed to feel abandoned or in some way locked out when they became disconnected from the course due to technical difficulties. One student described it as feeling like “I was knocking on the door to the classroom but no one would let me in… I knew the class was meeting without me!” Before making any changes, technical specialists must anticipate the practical, instructional, and emotional impact that new/upgraded technology can have on students and faculty of courses in progress.
The process of developing and teaching a World Wide Web course has been exhilarating, fun, frustrating, mind-stretching, and very time consuming. I trust that the reader who is contemplating Web course development can learn from my experience. For the novice, I think my best advice is that the technology should be in place and the course fully developed and piloted locally prior to off-campus delivery. Technologies should be tested and re-tested before they are released for student and faculty use. Additionally, students must have an opportunity to access all aspects of the course with their own systems prior to enrollment so they know if they can or cannot successfully interact with the technology.
Clark, T. (1993). Attitudes of higher education faculty towards distance education. The American Journal of Distance Education, 7(2), 19-33.
Hillman, D., Willis, D., & Gunawardena, C. (1994). Learner-interface interaction in distance education: An extension of contemporary models and strategies for practitioners. The American Journal of Distance Education, 8(2), 30-42.
Moore, M. G. (1989). Three types of interaction. The American Journal of Distance Education, 3(2), 1-6.
Wolcotte, L. (1993). Faculty planning for distance teaching. The American Journal of Distance Education, 7(1), 26-36.
This publication highlights some typical experiences with information technology (IT), but we don’t pretend to present an inclusive summary of all that’s going on in our field—that wasn’t our goal. We do think this issue explores some important territory: a focus on the use of IT to improve teaching and learning, an examination of IT as a research tool, and an exploration of our role in helping individuals, families, and communities to use IT to facilitate reflection, dialogue, and critical action—all needed for empowerment. It seems to me that this issue can help all of us critique the role of technology in our lives and those we seek to influence.
EDUCAUSE, a higher education association for the purpose of transforming higher education through IT, recently published Dancing with the Devil (Katz & Associates, 1999a) to frame the issues of IT to enrich the dialogue on college campuses. We hope this issue of FORUM enriches the dialogue in our field in higher education but also in other domains. The following summary (Katz & Associates, 1999b, p. 119) of insights by essayists in Dancing with the Devil have implications for our individual environments:
Duderstadt (1999), in sharing his glimpse of the future, challenges us to “aspire to a ‘culture of learning’ in which people are continually surrounded by, immersed in, and absorbed in learning experiences” (p. 25). Can there be a more compelling vision?
—DM
Duderstadt, J. J. (1999) Can colleges and universities survive in the information age? In R. N. Katz & Associates, Dancing with the devil (pp. 1-25). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Katz, R. N., & Associates. (1999a). Dancing with the devil. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Katz, R. N., & Associates. (1999b). Tying things together: Advice for the practitioner. In R. N. Katz & Associates. Dancing with the devil (pp. 119-122). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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