On the Internet by
Hubert L. Dreyfus
Routledge, 2001
John Rothfork
1. The
rush by American universities to offer online classes raises questions
about the nature of higher education—specifically, about its pedagogical
methods, commitments, and priorities. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus considers
these questions by focusing on community. He asks if distance education,
using the Internet, can foster anything resembling a real community. If
it cannot, Dreyfus thinks distributive education will be limited to training.
It will fall short of true education, which Dreyfus suggests requires
creating a temporary community
dedicated to shared values. The relationship between a dedication to intellectual
values and how that fosters a discourse community are complicated by Internet
classes in which there is no shared physical presence with others. Perhaps
the question to ask Dreyfus is whether his sense of an elite and highly
competitive academic community provides the sole model for education.
2. I
was especially eager to read Dreyfus’ new book because he is the most prominent
humanistic philosopher to write about the Internet. A UC-Berkeley professor,
Dreyfus’ publications include a definitive guide to Heidegger’s Being
and Time (Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time,
Division I) and What Computers Still Can’t Do. Now In its third
edition, his work on computers remains the classic response to the eager
promises of the AI (artificial intelligence) community, which has been and
often continues to be unaware of the pragmatist understanding of perception,
language, and learning.
3. As a pragmatist, Dreyfus
explains that the development of language, personality, and community are
long, complex, and embodied social processes. By "embodied" Dreyfus
means inhabiting a body and culturally interacting with other embodied persons
through language. Dreyfus suggests that the sense of community evident on
the Internet is only a kind of residue left from embodied, linguistic, social
processes. Like other pragmatists, Dreyfus does not believe we can develop
thoughts, meaning, or character without embodied social experience. What
we know is always more than what we can say or write, more than we consciously
have in mind. For example, since we were toddlers we have known how to maintain
balance to walk. Unless we are congenitally blind, we learned how to construct
gestalt visual patterns to render depth perception. We know ten thousand
other such tacit things through embodied social experience. In On the
Internet, Dreyfus points out that "in order to produce artificial
intelligence," computer programmers "would have to make explicit
and organize the commonsense knowledge people share" by virtue of inhabiting
a body, having years of embodied experience, and talking with one another
in ways that tacitly rely on that experience (16). "Most of our understanding
of what it’s like to be embodied" he goes on to say, "is so pervasive
and action-oriented [i.e., performative] that there is every reason to doubt
that it could be made explicit and entered into a database in a disembodied
computer" (17). An unconscious background or context that informs computer
actions to make them meaningful does not simply emerge; it is always imposed
by a programmer’s judgment.
4. Pragmatism
characterizes the unconscious as embodied habits and skills we take for
granted in focusing on intentions or conscious thought. Temporal performances
create a background, context, or situation. In contrast, Freudian thought
renders the unconscious as a kind of space, like the basement, attic,
or closets of a house. It suggests that dreams and unconscious "thought"
are a kind of broken or deformed version of conscious thought— junk stored
in the basement or attic. Dreyfus sums up the pragmatist view by suggesting
that "there can be no understanding of relevance [of what is important
or even what constitutes a human situation or problem] without commonsense
understanding, and no commonsense understanding without a sense of how
the world meshes with our embodiment" (25). As though in a dream,
"in cyberspace, then, without our embodied ability to grasp meaning,
relevance slips through our non-existent fingers" (26). Real communities
offer temporal continuity, shared concerns, and mutual support. In contrast,
the Internet is always there in the background to offer a kind of temporary
suspension from responsibility. Lacking a real community to provide context,
reading and writing on the Internet are like doodling, role-playing, or
watching TV. There are few, if any, authors to be found—authors, like
Dreyfus, whose names evoke an intellectual context to imply a community.
Because there is only anonymous graffiti and endless advertising, the
Internet offers a suspension from familiar contexts and communities. This
is evident in the claims that the Internet offers an opportunity to express
"a postmodern self—a self that has no defining content or continuity but
is open to all possibilities and to constantly taking on new roles"
(81). Dreyfus does not, however, celebrate this as liberating or creative.
He believes it is adolescent, offering at best only a dream of actual
identity.
5. Dreyfus predicts that "distance learning
will produce only competence, while expertise and practical wisdom will
remain completely out of reach" (49). Dreyfus relies too much on
his own experience to imply that elite universities offer true education,
while thousands of lesser schools throughout America offer mere training
and competency— training which is, if possible, being further degraded
by the shift to Web classes. By practical wisdom Dreyfus means the kind
of knowledge one acquires from first being in the presence of an expert
who performs some difficult skill, like surgery or playing the violin,
and then trying to imitate the skill while being coached by the master. In
contrast to this model, Dreyfus suggests that online learning simply provides
a vast library without guidance, much less mentors and coaches. There
are also problems with the kind of library the Internet offers. Dreyfus
explains that unlike actual libraries or books, the Internet offers no
comprehensive organization of its millions of pages of data, which can
be associated quite diversely. They are rarely associated in any meaningful
way, though, because search engines cannot act on the level of meaning,
judgment, or relevance.
6. Dreyfus’
model implies that far from replacing traditional classroom education,
using the Internet as an educational tool has the reverse effect. It makes
judgment, associative thinking, and coaching by a teacher all the more
important. For example, I used to require students to find background
material on the Internet for a nonwestern literature course. I was amazed
to find that almost no one questioned the rhetorical motives of what people
made available on the Internet. My students would dutifully print page
after page of Islamic proselytism as though it were an encyclopedia article.
Rhetorical and analytic skills do not simply emerge from leafing through
randomly selected books in the library or from browsing through a few
hundred Websites on the Internet. One of my colleagues had her students
examine a very professional looking Internet site devoted to medically
following "the first male pregnancy."
When she asked if this were reliable research information, more than half
of her students thought it was! What is lacking on the Internet is an
analytic community possessing the authority to make judgments about the
merit of material "published" there.
7. The
issue here is authority. We are all familiar with objections to any imposed
authority on the Internet. Such objections typically lack a context or
have an implied context. In talking about controlling information on how
to make bombs or biological warfare agents, the context is one of law,
government, civil rights, and ethics. Within those discourse communities
authority is not imposed—it is developed. Institutional processes determine
who gets into law school, who passes the bar, who becomes a judge, and
who is indicted for a felony. We may be cynical about hidden forces at
work in these processes, but such social forces construct truth and authority
in every discourse community. The Internet sustains no such communities
and consequently cannot offer guidance to sort the chaff from the grain.
8. Dreyfus
understands education to require fostering a sense of community in a traditional
classroom where a master illustrates how to perform a technical process—such
as how to do philosophical analysis on a specific text or idea. He views
the erosion of hierarchical structure or traditional authority as an educational
loss, not as liberation or freedom. It could be construed as freedom only
in the sense of being liberated from some imposed, rather than self-chosen,
dedication. The question then is what are you going to do with your freedom?
Identifying a social process as "instruction" or a "class"
implies that there is an instructor who knows how to do something that
students aspire to learn. Newsgroups provide an obvious contrast. They
are not "classes" because everyone has an opinion and no one
has the authority to sort them out by awarding grades and explaining why
one argument is better than another.
9. Dreyfus
predicts that
[w]e might well end up with a two-tiered
educational system where those who can afford it will pay five times
as much as the distance learning students pay, in order to be in the
presence of their professors. This would amount to an elitism not much
different from the English elitism of Oxford and Cambridge vis-à-vis
the other universities that don’t have tutorials—the very elitism that
. . . the democratic leveling produced by distance learning is supposed
to eliminate. (63)
Even so, I doubt that the situation
is as bad as Dreyfus implies. Many of us can tell stories like the one
Geoffrey Cain tells in an Amazon.com review of On the Internet: "I took one of Dreyfus' classes at Berkeley
as an undergraduate and I never got to talk to him, there was no face
to face learning." Cain ironically advises, "If you want to
feel like a ‘disembodied presence’ go take a class at Berkeley as an undergrad."
Except for a few Ivy League schools, American universities have never
offered the British tutorial model in which students come to a professor’s
office to explain what they know about a topic and to be questioned as
junior colleagues. Nonetheless, American universities offer unparalleled
education in science, engineering, and in the arts and humanities, partly
because they offer so many diverse communities and models of education
to meet the needs of students with different learning styles.
10. Dreyfus
teaches Ph.D. students at one of the most elite universities in the world.
His students are destined to become philosophy faculty at other elite
research institutions. This constitutes a tiny part of American higher
education. When I taught online classes at a Texas university, I
was surprised to find a frequent student comment. Internet students often
said they felt free to ask questions and make comments about the texts
we were reading without fear of sounding stupid or being ridiculed by
their peers. There is something more positive in this than is evident
from Dreyfus’ statement about what a student loses in an online class
by not having an opportunity to "risk making a fool of himself"
(39). My students were not the elite. They would not even risk speaking
in a traditional classroom situation when I suggested there were standards
that determined what was accurate or insightful and what was uninformed
or wrong.
11. Some
of my colleagues get their students to speak in the traditional classroom
by abandoning academic integrity so that community becomes not the background
and context, but the focal point of the classroom experience. In such
"classes" the experience of sharing feelings becomes the content of the
course. Such classes resemble monitored newsgroups. Everyone expresses
an opinion, but no one’s opinion means anything. Dreyfus wonderfully explains
Kierkegaard’s understanding of how our personal judgments construct our
identities. I will not attempt to paraphrase that process, but instead
follow Dreyfus’ application. "Kierkegaard," he says, "saw that
the public sphere was destined to become a detached world in which everyone
had an opinion about and commented on all public matters without needing
any first-hand experience and without having or wanting any responsibility"
(76). We recognize this as descriptive of Internet classes, but traditional
classrooms that abandon instruction to offer therapy also foster short-lived
crypto-communities. In these classes, as with email and newsgroup posts,
"anonymous amateurs . . . post their views from nowhere" without
risking a putdown from peers or a judgment from an instructor (79). "The
anonymous spectator takes no risks" and consequently does not construct
a real identity or character with the hallmark of authority in some specific
community (81). It is no wonder that "facilitators" of such
"courses" have problems giving grades.
12. Kierkegaard’s sense of faith and decision
is nothing if not demanding. Faith and judgment are overwhelming and engrossing
processes for him. I do not suggest that Dreyfus’ sense of education necessarily
parallels this unconditional commitment, but the model of education that
his students and classes provide is far removed from the kind of
students I taught or from the tens of thousands in community college classrooms
throughout America. Should we simply abandon those who lose the risks
offered in Dreyfus’ classes? And what of the many who never have the opportunity
to rise to the level of taking intellectual risks in elite schools? Using
Dreyfus’ own terms, students must achieve basic competence before aspiring
to professional expertise and mastery. Online instruction offers many
students a chance to gain college level and even professional competency
in some classes—a chance that is either not otherwise available to them
or that they would not take in traditional classroom lecture situations.
Except for the Ivy League and research institutions, the American model
of education invites everyone to college. It also invites students to
change majors until they find a community fascinating enough to become
dedicated to. If online instruction redefines the traditional classroom
situation as elitist, that may not be such a bad thing. Traditional classrooms
often contain silent, begrudged, and bored students. In my experience,
the four, five, or
ten interested students were often so intimidated that they spoke to me
only after class or during office hours. If I could have partitioned classes
so that I had the equivalent of honors students in the traditional classroom
and those who were there only because they wanted the credit in online
classes, everyone would have been more satisfied.
13. I venture to guess that in Dreyfus’ classroom
the sense of community is more professional than local. Even though journal
and university press editors and prominent philosophers are not physically
present, I imagine that they are very much part of the community that
Dreyfus fosters. When the Internet attempts to sustain something comparable
to Dreyfus’ classes, it ends up with list-serve email and a community
that is too tenuous to engage scholars very deeply. At the other extreme,
"courses" with little content and few standards will no doubt
be popular as long as they fulfill degree requirements at state universities.
As Dreyfus suggests, such courses will ultimately shunt many students
off into low-level terminal degrees. Between these two extremes there
is still a vast area for effective online instruction. I presently design
and teach Internet courses in technical writing. It involves much more
work than going into the classroom but in some ways it better reflects
the professional activities of technical writers who increasingly build
Websites and work on the Web with colleagues scattered across the country
or around the globe. More than half of my students are nontraditional
and many are scattered in small towns. These can take graduate level technical
writing classes only because they are offered via the Internet.
14. We
should not expect the Internet to offer authentic communities to rival
the real communities we are involved with every day: families, jobs, traditional
schools, churches, neighborhood friends, childhood friends, and the like.
This does not necessarily mean that the Internet cannot sustain some limited
form of community, especially for those who come together to share an
enthusiasm for some focal concern, which may indeed be educational in
nature. At the same time, we should not expect online instruction to rival
the best education offered by elite institutions. Online instruction can
do some things well, such as encourage reticent students to ask questions
and become engaged in analytic study without worrying about peer judgments.
Other things it does less well. I can quickly show a room full of technical
writing students a half-dozen case solutions that failed and compare this
set to another half-dozen that succeeded. There may be 30 skills illustrated
in the work, but only one or two that a particular class is interested
in better understanding. Despite hours of effort to author dozens of webpages,
the online process still lacks the immediacy, complexity, responsiveness,
and effectiveness of the traditional classroom. In the classroom I can
quickly tell if a student has mastered organization, writing, or software
techniques, and coach her in areas where she needs help. In online courses
there are blanks between authoring Webpages to offer instruction, receiving
student work, and coaching the student about the work.
15. Undoubtedly
American universities will continue to hope that online instruction will
be the answer to many of their problems. Unfortunately, these problems
tend to be financial, political, and logistic rather than educational.
Committed and dedicated teachers can certainly use the Internet as a medium
of instruction but there is little incentive for them to do so. Hard work
and creativity expended to produce excellent online classes rarely pays.
Such work is invisible to senior colleagues and administrators who have
never taken, much less developed, a Web course. Although I appreciate
Dreyfus’ thought on the Internet and distributive education, I cannot
imagine him developing and teaching a Web class. I would be the first
to admit that it would be a waste of his great talent. However, the pragmatism
that Dreyfus advocates stresses that knowledge resides more in technique
and performance than in theory. I spend months developing Web courses—time
that I would otherwise spend to produce work for traditional print publication.
For annual reviews I describe how to access the WebCT courses I develop.
I doubt that any administrator has bothered to look. Even if they did,
I doubt they could assess the quality of the work, having themselves never
authored a Webpage. Their concern seems to be entirely fiscal and political.
Thus, the threat to education is not, as Dreyfus suggests, the Internet
or online instruction, but the anti-educational agenda that underwrites
so much education policy.
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