Battle Beyond the Millenium: the Internet Versus the Teacher Culture: Are You Ready to Rumble? keynote presentation by Fred Kemp for Computers and Writing '99 in Rapid City, South Dakota, May 30, 1999 Some of you familiar with my online persona know that I sometimes take fairly extreme positions. When I was in the Army in the late 1960s in Korea I was part of a intelligence group that would occasionally send an airplane directly at North Korea, as if the plane were going to fly directly over the country. When the airplance got close to the border, North Korea would have to bring up all its radars and then my fellow GIs and I would capture the electronic fingerprints of the radar in order to determine radar capabilities. At the last minute, the plane would veer away. This we called a bocovir, for Border Corridor Violation Reconnaissance. Throughout the last ten years I’ve considered email lists perfect places for email bocovirs, because the lists are full of interesting people who simply keep quiet or are so permeated by either professional decorum or your standard academic fear that somebody in your department’s going to someday find out what you really think about things, that what gets posted often has all the fascination of a university president’s commencement address. To show how radical I can be in this pursuit, I once attacked Marxism on a list filled with english department faculty and graduates students. Another example is when I started MBU, or Megabyte University, an early email list in our field. I had heard a presentation by Cindy Selfe in Seattle about, of all things, Online Universities. The idea seemed incredible to me, but intriguing. I had never heard of the Internet before, although I had done what we used to call modem BBS’ing. So I when I got back to Texas Tech I applied for an Internet email address (we called them Bitnet addresses), and had to work my way all the way up to the head of academic computing. He stared at me as if I were requesting his wife for a weekend in the Bahamas. “You’re in the English department, right?” I nodded. “And you want an email address, right?” I nodded again. “You realize,” he said, his voice getting serious, “that bitnet is for research purposes only.” At that point I should have said, “so what am I? Chopped liver?” The understanding of what English professors are and do is, as Donna said on Friday at the Town Hall meeting, pretty weird, even and maybe especially on campus. So I got an email address, after being warned that for an English professor an email address was, and I quote -- and this quote is forever burned in my memory -- “a trivial use of the resource.” That comment has remained in terms of personal infamy right next to the remark by an English department graduate advisor that I was too old to be a graduate student. Richard Fulkerson advised me that I could sue for age discrimination, and that sent me into another funk. Was I finally at the stage in life where I could start suing people for age discrimination? And that was fifteen years ago. Anyway I started MBU, and since I was getting no cooperation from computing services I didn’t know anything about listserv or listproc or majordomo. What I was doing was getting email from people who wanted to participate and then sending it out to an expanding address file. About six months into this in 1989 Cindy Selfe wanted to study the interaction of people on the list, and asked everybody to assume non-gender related pseudonyms for a couple of weeks so she could see if the nature of the traffic changed from when people knew each other’s status in the field and their gender. But since I was fowarding the mail, I was the only one who knew the real names of people because I could see their return addresses on the email messages. So, in the spirit of the Bocovir, I promptly generated four or five pseudonyms and started letting these fictitious characters engage in a heated discussion with each other about something or other, and then a bunch of other people chimed in on one side or the other. I may be the only person in the history of email to have started a flame war with himself. Of course I eventually had to confess up to Cindy and she took it with her eternal good spirits and adjusted for the glitch in the data, and provided a legitimate analysis -- which I think concluded that email traffic was remarkably egalitarian in terms of status in the profession and gender. The point of all this is that today I am not sending you a Bocovir. I truly mean what I’m going to say today. R. U. Serious repeated the word “survival” a number of times, the survival of the writer in a vastly different writer’s market. He was talking about cyberpunk. I’m talking about pedagogypunk. I’m talking about the survival of the teacher in the upcoming vastly different educational market. Yes, I said educational market. Like it or not, the comodification of education is well on its way, and if we don’t understand the new rules of the game it will be our traditional values, and maybe we ourselves, who will become, as the delightful cliche goes, roadkill on the information highway. So be prepared, as Nick Carbone once called them, for some Frednostications. Over the last decade I’ve gotten the future right a few times, so you never know.   I chose the title “Battle Beyond the Millenium” as an homage to Roger Corman, who once produced one of his typically cheap sci-fi ripoffs of Star Wars called “Battle Beyond the Stars.” Perhaps a Star Wars title would have been more appropriate, something like “Episode I: The Digital Menace,” since a number of my colleagues consider me a Darth Vader figure, a once promising jeddae computerist who eventually gave in to the dark side of the force. The “force,” in this context, would be societal change, and the dark side would be the increasing, even overwhelming influence of communication technologies on all aspects of society. The global database, what Ted Nelson called the “docuverse,” and the astonishing variety of connectivity that the Internet allows, is rapidly repositioning individuals in their relationship to the knowledge and skills they need in order to survive and succeed. The internet is, ironically, requiring greater and greater formal learning and skills among the working population, and at the same time is promising new ways of acquiring that learning and those skills. If we didn’t have the Internet, we probably wouldn’t need it. But we do have it, and to my way of thinking, we need it badly, especially in education. But I’m getting the feeling from the sessions I’ve attended that you already know that. So I’m not going to try this afternoon to convert the already converted. What I am going to do is suggest is that you have to move faster to the internet, and I’m going to try to provide some reasons why and some ways how. I will suggest this speed not because I want to push my colleagues out in front of cultural sanity, as the “go slow” advocates always charge, but because I want to push us to keep up with what are already seismic shifts in our society that threaten to make our entire profession so quaintly old fashioned as to be irrelevant. Now that even the old grandmother of publishing houses, Harcourt, has announced it is establishing a private university, the possibility that your children and grandchildren will be attending Microsoft High School and AT&T University looms disgustingly real. [PAUSE] C&W’s notable Eric Crump came to Texas Tech a few years ago and delivered a knockout speech to, surprisingly, a sell-out crowd in the English department. The presentation was a “knock-out” both in its quality and humanity, as one always expects of Eric, and in the stunned look on most of my faculty and graduate students when they left the room. Eric sort of reorganized the whole universe of education in 45 minutes, and the teachers in the room were used to a much, MUCH slower pace of change. And, of course, later on they complimented his speaking skills and parenthetically commented on the fact that he was slightly a raving lunatic. What I said to them then applies today. As teachers standing on the limb that we always stand on, we tend to have a death grip on the tree trunk. Whoever climbs out on some distance on the limb tends to make the rest of us loosen our grip on the trunk and follow, if only a few inches. I’m suggesting that a death grip on the tree trunk while the rest of society -- and indeed the global society -- is provocatively engaged in exploration and risk largely through the overwhelming influence of communication technology, may represent a death grip in the literal sense. What I’m calling the “teacher culture” and setting in opposition to the internet, perhaps a tad unfairly but for rhetorical effect, often seems too conservatively nervous about everything happening outside the classroom, to the point of mistrusting government, business, science, technology, and even the students we serve. I think there are reasons for this, and I’ll get into those in a few moments as I draw the battlelines beyond the millenium. But first let’s discuss the Internet. If you follow ACW, WPA, Rhetnet, or CCCCOnline, you’ve heard me say repeatedly that the question of whether the Internet is, ultimately, a good or bad thing.... is hugely irrelevant. The big question for teachers in the next millenium is whether we use the Internet effectively in our efforts, or it bypasses us, and in so doing makes our efforts irrelevant to an education-seeking public. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times Columnist and frequent guest on Washington Week in Review, has written a terrifically informing and entertaining book called The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization in which he, like just about everybody else writing non-fiction on the Best Sellers List, says that communication technology is creating a much different world from what we’re used to. He concentrates on economics and politics. When accused of being a lover of globalization, just as I am often accused of being an uncritical lover of technology, he replies in much the same way I would. “I answered Johnathan that I feel about globalization a lot like I feel about the dawn. Generally speaking, I think it’s a good thing that the sun comes up every morning. It does more good than harm. But even if I didn’t much care for the dawn there isn’t much I could do about it. I didn’t start globalization, I can’t stop it -- except at a huge cost to human development -- and I’m not going to waste time trying. All I want to think about is how I can get the best out of this new system, and cushion the worst, for the most people.” Simply, and maybe even sadly, we teachers do not have the option of resisting or rejecting the Internet. You can turn your back on the tide, but that doesn’t stop the tide. Whatever our academic and intellectual critique of the ideological ramifications of communication technology, that critique will have no effect whatsoever in retarding the influence of an oncoming Internet. Marxist, neo-marxist, and feminist critiques of technology do not guide action and do not affect societal behavior. [PAUSE] Boy does it make people mad when I say this. It’s like saying to a literature professor that explicating and explaining literary texts is essentially a useless exercise, that it really doesn’t affect how the vast majority of people read. We in rhetoric and composition often want to examine human behavior as if it were a text to be deconstructed and intellectually appropriated, but few people read our books and articles, and fewer still act upon what they read. To a large extent, by dwelling on this textualizing of experience with our professionally spiraling erudition and vocabulary, we have separated ourselves from what the majority of our students want and need in their lives, and IBM and Harcourt and Microsoft are more than willing to step into the gap. Make no mistake: huge changes are coming about in education, frightening changes in the nature of the student-teacher encounter. The student-teacher encounter is what I call the contact between the teacher, the student, and the stuff of learning, whether it be long division or the shorter poems of Wallace Stevens. The teacher mediates the student’s experience as the student engages with the learning stuff. That student-teacher encounter, since the dawn of mass education in the 1820s, has largely been characterized by the classroom and by cohert instruction. I don’t think you need me to define the classroom: that’s probably the single most universally recognizable situation -- some would call it a condition -- on the face of the earth. Cohort instruction, on the other hand, may be a less familiar term. Cohort instruction exists when ten, or twenty, or fifty students are assembled as a unit for a particular period of time and are placed under the managerial authority of a single teacher for that period of time. You probably have never experienced an alternative to classroom-based cohert instruction. It may seem to you that there can’t be such an alternative, and there’s a good reason for that. It has been, up until very recently, the only conceivable way of institutionalizing mass education, of processing large numbers of people. We may think the classroom is designed and promoted for the student, for the learning of the student, but it is not. The classroom and cohort instruction are technologies that arise primarily from institutional requirements, and only secondarily serve the student. Of course, if you can’t have mass education without classrooms, then the technology of the classroom indeed serves the student, or most of them, since without the classroom they could never have been formally educated at all. As I said before, alternatives are unthinkable. Or at least were unthinkable, up until the Internet. The Internet, and especially the interface to the Internet that we call the World Wide Web, provides the student-teacher encounter an alternative to the space/time conditions of the physical classroom. In the current parlance, students can experience the “stuff” of learning as mediated by a teacher anytime, anyplace, and engage in the activities of formally mediated learning without having to show up in a particular place at a particular time. And even more drastically, the Internet provides the possibility of eliminating not only space/time limitations, but the limitations of the cohort model of encounter. Though, again, it may seem inconceivable to those who haven’t conceived of it, it’s possible that students can engage in a formal learning experience without being space/time attached to another group of students or to a teacher. Now you skeptics out there, and I assume you are legion, are even as I speak dismissing non-cohort instruction as simply some form of cheasy postal correspondence course or some assign-and-grade distance education. Such degree mill processes are rejected by almost all trained and experienced teachers as pedagogically shallow -- by almost all, that is, but those who are moonlighting as graders for extended learning programs. And rightly so. An effective learning environment requires peer interaction. Learning is a matter of negotiated meanings and negotiated rhetorical effects, and such negotiation requires a discursive medium in which to negotiate. Simply having students read text books and complete assignments and get feedback from graders is not enough, by far not enough. Students have to talk it over with each other a lot, both within evaluative criteria provided by teachers and outside that criteria. As long as non-classroom, non-cohort instruction is conducted over the U.S. postal system, or through video-taped lectures, or even through satellite uploads and compressed video shared classrooms, there is little opportunity for peer interaction, and hence such instruction is reductive and to my mind.... quite ineffective. But the world wide web is an entirely new ball game. What some people are calling “asynchronous learning networks” allows a wide range of anytime, anyplace peer interaction that does not depend on same time, same place meetings. The web provides, as its name suggests, a startlingly expanded repertoire of connectivity. This repertoire is so startling that we almost gag on it. And that is where the teacher culture comes in. You, dear friends, are the teacher culture. And so am I. After 27 years teaching in the classroom, I know both of us pretty well. We are, as a rule, service oriented, selfless almost to a fault, dedicated to our students to an almost foolish degree, slavishly hard working, and increasingly frustrated by both students and a society that see us more as obstacles to something than as springboards to better lives. This shouldn’t come as a shock to you, but things are not hunky dory in the teaching world. You all have colleagues who are old and bitter and growing older and more bitter. And if you’re like me, in your most private moments, you are concerned that you could get that way too. The students don’t turn in their papers on time, they read the newspaper in class, they make the same errors over and over, they roll their eyes at every assignment, and if given the chance they cheat without hesitation. Their ideas are shallow, their intellectual motivation practically non-existent, and their engagement with the glorious process of writing is as flat as West Texas itself. If you dedicate your life to people who feel this way -- and I consider 27 years a pretty good dedication -- it’s not too hard to see how many teachers get cynical in their later years. But the fault, Dear Brutus, lies not in people but in their pedagogy. Far too many teachers are trying to fulfill 21st century learning requirements with 19th century processes. If you consider our students as a resource, as I do, much of what we do with them in our classrooms every day is almost a disgracefully ..... “trivial use of the resource.” But the teacher culture, with all the admirable individual qualities I listed above, in some perverse ways enjoys the way things are going now, even the bitterness. I taught public school for nine years in three different school districts, and the one overwhelming memory I have from those years was sitting in the faculty lounge and hearing teachers talk about how dumb their students were getting. I hear the same talk from a few of the graduate student instructors in my composition program and a few of my faculty colleagues. And why not? Incorregibly stupid students relieve us of the responsibility for not having delivered an effectively pedagogy. I remember one comment in particular: “For twenty years I’ve been doing the same thing in the same way, and these dummies still don’t get it.” And of course I’m thinking, who’s the real dummy? Twenty years doing the same thing in the same way, and it hasn’t been working? Give me a break. Of course just identifying a “teacher culture” in front of a bunch of teachers is a rhetorically dangerous thing to do. Just saying that there is such a thing raises hackles. It’s like talking about the gun lobby in West Texas. In West Texas, by God, there isn’t such a thing as a gun lobby. There are just freedom-loving Americans and commie rats. And across country there isn’t such a thing as a teacher culture, just loving, self-sacrificing, mentoring individuals and miserable technology-infested business scum. One of the reasons I left public school teaching was that I figured that I was affecting in any significant way about 25% of my students, those guys that sat in the front row and actually smiled at me, and I was considered a pretty good teacher. I’ve heard for 27 years teachers talking about “reaching” this student or that student, as if the classroom were a kind of Grand Canyon and all we can do is construct a sort of very narrow rope bridge that only 25% of the students on the other side can cross over. And I thought, after nine years of this, my God!, I’ve got to get into a line of work with a better success rate. I ran a fast-food restaurant for two years and didn’t poisen anybody. I’m not sure I can say the same of my nine years in public education. The teacher culture likes the power at the front of the classroom, which I have called the proscenium classroom. Forget the 30 or 40 thousand dollar salary a magnanimous society provides. For an hour we got these suckers, and we love it. Control is the great compensator. I have supervised 55 to 60 graduate student instructors a semester in first-year composition for over eight years, and I think I’ve come to know the front-of-the-classroom teaching instinct. Teachers, even very bad teachers, glory in that power. And so do I. So much so that I recognize more than anybody else the danger in the proscenium classroom. People wonder why I, who enjoys capturing a crowd more than anybody, am such a proponent of student-centered instruction. It’s because I understand more than most the dangers of depending on charismatic instruction. Our job is not to wow students with us or our brilliant subject matter, or to clone them into becoming, God forbid, English majors. Our job is to get them to figure out how to manage their lives productively through critical thinking, and for that we have to reduce our domination of the classroom, maybe even to the point of moving learning outside the classroom. How on earth can we do that? We can do it through the web. As I described in my presentation earlier this morning, at Texas Tech we have written an interactive database-driven web application called TOPIC that allows students to work together to solve writing problems in a largely trouble-free browser interface. It’s crude, but as somebody said yesterday, we are in our infancy, and having had two infants I can tell you that infants can be pretty crude. TOPIC isn’t the answer to fully employing the instructional power of the internet, but it’s part of a hugely evolving and complex answer. But if experience is any teacher, some of you are saying to yourselves in frustration right now, but what in the world would non-classroom, non-cohort instruction look like? Simply a set of web pages? I don’t have the time this afternoon to present a complete instructional design, thank God, but I’m going to give you one fairly specific paragraph of what I think is going to emerge as just-in-time, life-long learning following the battle beyond the millenium. I’m a fool, of course, for getting specific in what should be a broad futurist pronouncement, but what else is new? Imagine a writing center with 200 writing consultants and ten thousand students registered in some way. The students post their writing to web forms according to explicit criteria and standards in the web system. Other students registered in the system and at that particular stage of progress read those documents and critique them according to explicit criteria and standards. When a student feels that his or her document is ready to be evaluated, whatever consultant is online at that moment evaluates the document, as does a second consultant, and if their evaluations don’t correlate sufficiently, a third consultant. All elements of instruction from grammar to critical thinking can be handled with rolling admissions and peer collaboration, two instructional processes previously considered incompatible. And at numerous points within the progress of the student, triggered either by the request of the student or by some automated flag, the writing consultant intervenes with online or even face-to-face problem-solving help. But just as with grading, it would be any writing consultant, not one that is assigned to that student. Now both you and I know it would be much for that student to fly to Lubbock and live there for a semester and be in my class and benefit from my brilliant presence. For I am a brilliant teacher. And so are you. But my friend, outside of this room, there aren’t that many brilliant teachers. And the inclination of students to go to the mountain is declining. This communication technologies life, for better or worse, is inclining them to expect the mountain to come to them. For hundreds of years, students have had to conform to institutional requirements. From here on out, I think the institutions are going to have to conform to the students’ requirements, and Microsoft and At&T know this deep in their greedy little souls. Battlelines are being drawn, and it’s not between the endearing, organic Gungas and the robots of the Trade Federation, as George Lucas in his lumbering literary romanticism would have it. On one side exists an astonishing array of communication capabilities that our people are increasingly expecting to serve them where they are in their lives and with their needs. On the other side exists a profession of very good people who want to do what they thought they were going to be able to do when they became teachers. In a session at this conference a young graduate instructor, whom I’m sure will become a fine, fine teacher, expressed dismay at how difficult it was to reassert her personal control over students who had been working at computers. She explained this as something infelicitous about computer-based classrooms, and I was saying to myself, “But that’s exactly the point! Students don’t want to be controlled; they don’t even want to be taught; they just -- and I believe this in my heart of hearts -- they just want to learn. What they are resisting is not learning, but control. And I was one of them. I can control a classroom pretty good, because I’m big and male and loud and confident and very experienced, and as I said earlier, I enjoy it. I enjoy having you there listening to me right now, rapt with attention...... I feel the power. ......But I have clear memories of when I was on the other side, when I sat in scrunched up desks six hours a day for nearly fifteen years at the absolute mercy of some very strange people. I wondered why it had to be this way. And even though one out of every four or five of my teachers was great, it wasn’t enough. I think the internet is going to win the battle beyond the millenium, and the teacher culture, I’m pretty sure, is going to whither and disappear. But individual teachers themselves, if -- as R. U. Serious was saying -- they understand and adapt to what’s coming up, will survive and will thrive. We won’t be herding kids around they way we do now, but I can say from my own experiences in TOPIC-based classes, the thrill of helping people to learn will be no less. And in case you’re feeling alarmed by my knock-out presentation, don’t worry. You’ll have your classrooms for years to come. But somewhere down the line, as things turn out, think back to that moment in Rapid City when that guy asked you to crawl further out on the limb. If it turns out something like I’m describing now, send me an email. As always, C&W are terrific people with the best ideas in education. I feel extremely priviledged that Michael asked me to speak to the group at this conference. Remember, my email address is f.kemp@ttu.edu, and if you’re on email lists that I’m on, dodge any bocovirs I may send your way.