Technology critics also need to become involved in debates that govern the distribution of technology at their own institutions. At the very least, we need to "encourage a general level of critical awareness about technology issues on the part of both pre-service and in-service teachers " (Selfe and Selfe, 496).
An essential part of this awareness will be exploration of the more general field of computer-aided instruction as essential background to using infotech in the classroom. Technology critics need to build on this initial awareness and push for a decentralization of computer resources within institutions. The fact that these remain in the hands of computer science and engineering departments at most universities is the source of many of the negative-incentives to explore infotech.
At the very least humanities programs should have their own servers, networks, and computer support personnel; humanities computing classrooms should also, as Selfe and Selfe point out, be designed with writers in mind (497). Those teachers interested in using infotech should press for administrative funding for the recruitment and training of computer support people, together with guidelines that replace the present ad hoc criteria based almost exclusively on technical prowess, with other criteria of equal weight: gender and ethnic balance, basic job skills such as problem identification, phone persona, and so on. Most importantly, teachers need to actively lobby for high-level decisions to b********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************cal dimensions of the situation are acute and lead him to argue for massive curricular change. For Lanham, curriculum reform is the meeting point of social pressures generated from without the institution (the democratization of higher learning, new patterns of immigration, pressures for public accountability) as well as those from within education itself (changes in patterns of educational sequence, various theoretical reforms). The kind of curriculum change Lanham has in mind would base the first two years of the university degree around a program, modelled on existing composition courses, to teach the skills of rhetorical argument (112-113). Such a programme would then serve as the basis for upper division specialization, but a form of specialization that is integrative rather than distributive:
If you want to teach citizenship in American democracy, you don't build your educational system on Hirsch's collection of canonical facts, or Bennett's collection of canonical texts--or on Allan Bloom's collection of Platonic pieties either. You build it, as the educational system that was invented to sustain democracy built it in the first place, upon a bi-stable alternation between the contingent and the absolute. The only true absolute, in a secular democratic education, is the obligation to keep that oscillation going. . . (114).
The core of this curriculum is thus the belief that in order to be effective, in either a specialist occupation or as a citizen, it is necessary to master the techniques for mastering the process of specialization. While the interrelational nature of our society is not solely the product of information technology it is, as I have pointed out above, certainly abetted by it. And if this argument fails to convince one of the need for the need to master a more general set of techniques for acquiring processes of knowledge rather than specialized facts, the hard evidence is all around us in the daily catalogue of redundancies, rejections and relocations that were once thought merely to be part of an economy in recession but which it is now apparent are the mechanisms of a "healthy" postindustrial economy.xxxviii
The curriculum is thus the point of negotiation at which the classroom, institution and society come together, with teachers as (ideally) the mediators of that process of negotiation. Too often curriculum change has been seen as the exclusive preserve of either the institution (leading to charges that certain curricula have lost touch with society) or social institutions (resulting in short-sightedness at best or at worst attempts to impose transitory political agendas upon education).
In either scenario curriculum change has been led largely by the concerns of university or corporate administrators. Not only must teachers reassert themselves in this process, but given the role that information technology plays in the social, institutional, classroom and machine domains, teachers will have to reassert themselves as technocritics is they are to have any say at all.
There have been
since 01 April 97
