• Introduction
• Teacher as Information Conveyor
• Teacher as Facilitator
• Blaming the Administrators
• Shifting Markets
• The New University
• The Professional Teacher
• References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 1998-99 by Peter J. Denning (pdenning@gmu.edu)  The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Section One: Teacher as Information Conveyor: A Dying View

David Noble has written eloquently about the disastrous social consequences that would arise in a world of "digital diploma mills." Students would find such a world barren, a place that does not appreciate creativity or the special talents of each individual. Faculty would find themselves without jobs and their intellectual property rights expropriated by university administrators.

Although Noble appears on first reading to be exposing administrative abuse, a deeper reading reveals much more: he vividly depicts the contradictions that await us as long as we cling to our current discourse of learning and teaching -- in which the teacher appears to be an information provider. Automation threatens the information-provider teacher because machines will ultimately be better information-channels than humans and because the products of a teacher’s work (course materials) must be claimed by the university if it is to continue functioning after the teachers are gone.

Noble cites a drift in university practices since the 1970s to support his claims. That was when many universities undertook to commercialize research products, mostly through patents and licenses. More recently, he says, universities have undertaken to commercialize educational content, mostly through copyrights, intellectual property claims, videos, CDROMS, and Web sites. The introduction of information technology into the practices of teaching, he says, tends to isolate the teacher and the student by replacing in-person interactions with email and web discussion groups and by requiring more faculty time in preparing digital objects for use in class. These processes have happened slowly without catching the attention of the faculty. Noble maintains that this drift poses a severe threat to the values of higher education, among them faculty control of the curriculum and processes of learning, academic freedom, faculty autonomy, and quality of research, faculty, and students.

It is easy to get drawn in by the apocalyptic claims and believe that the world depicted by Noble is inevitable. Is it? Will confronting, attacking, and blaming administrators avert it? Administrators have acted rationally in a discourse that we ourselves have created, the discourse of information. We have met the enemy: and he is us. Let us question the discourse and choose paths different from the ones it offers. No one wants a world with most teaching done by machines and the few remaining teachers the hapless victims of robber-baron administrators: accordingly, that world will not happen.

It’s too bad that the sage and information-manager aspects of teacher are getting bad names from these scenes. They shouldn’t. Students look to their teachers for wisdom and authoritative opinions (sage) and for access to information that can help them (information manager). Even if information manager is not the prime paradigm of the teacher, it is an important part.

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