Go to The Web and Do Stuff

Jeanne Curran, California State University, Dominguez Hills
Susan R. Takata, University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Robert M. Christie, California State University, Dominguez Hills

On January 3, 1998, we uploaded our web site, on Compuserve, no less, because we didn't have the passwords and setup we needed for our university server. With the uploading of that web site we crystallized the fledgling identity we had tried to conceive through all our play with the world of high tech. On January 15, 1998, we moved the site, with all due respect to Compuserve, to our university server. Now we are really real, sort of.

This fledgling history of our coming to existence is typical of what happens to the small "not research" institution, as its faculty struggle to wrest adequate resources for research and technical support. Our institutions are well funded. They are state university schools. So we're a little embarrassed to plead poverty. On the other hand, funds, when they arrive, are disbursed through strange procedural mechanisms. One of the schools determined which faculty should receive new Pentium by visiting their offices (when school was not in session and the faculty were not present) and allotting the new equipment to those who had none or non-functional equipment. This meant that faculty who were engaged in extensive computer work, but who had machines a generation or so old, were passed over for faculty who were not in the habit of turning the computer on, or had taken the one they did have home. This occurred despite the fact that at least one department had filed a formal list of its present equipment and immediate needs.

The Business School at one of the institutions had its own server, its own techs, and carpeting to go with them. But faculty in liberal arts experienced extraordinary delays in their requests for space on a server. These are the dilemmas of community: distribution, fair, if not, equal access, and the energy to pursue such injustice as does occur without destroying the community. Because these are a microcosm of what exists on many levels and has been studied many times over, we just chalked our history up to experience, figured out which grants we had to write to get the paper and pencils we needed and did that. The net cost: energy that should have gone to creating a new identity for what we wanted to become.

We floundered a lot in discovering what we were about. New technology, like a new marriage, tends to be laid over the old, existing problems. There was much about traditional teaching that didn't work. So teaching with the Web needed more than recasting traditional texts in scrolling imagery.

Our first attempts were to put up our own work, so that students could access all that we had written, at essentially no cost to them. Since many of our students are financially strapped because they support families while in school, this was a good thing to do, but hardly defined a new identity. All three of us were working on manuals for our students, put them up on the Web, published them, and complained that our students just weren't reading them.

Lucky for us, we talked to each other. And so we discovered that we were all experiencing the same phenomenon. That led us to rethink the Web and what we could in fact do with distance learning. These are some of the conclusions to which we came:

Non-traditional students don't have access to the high tech equipment we've been told is the answer to all our educational needs. Even MIT discovered that in the Project Athena study. You want to teach with high tech? Good. Some of it will work, some of the time. What are you gonna do when it doesn't?

Labs. Of course, they're the simple solution. Then everyone can have access. Unless you discover, as we did, that the school doesn't have enough money to keep them functional, so that a large percentage of the machines are down at any given time, and access really is still a distribution problem. One school got a new lab from the General fund; the other schools at the institution didn't even know the money had been available.

Some students, the lucky ones who don't have to work, can get to the campus to use the labs. But those who work have almost no discretionary time in which to use the labs, and the labs are often used for teaching at night. Commuter campuses have different access problems from residential campuses. Some of us even funded projects to set up special access computers for our students. And those that can get to them are grateful. But many of our students can't. We need distributed campus computing, using every piece of equipment available anywhere to our students. We began to focus on cross-platform - you get it up, we'll read it.

But even that was nowhere near enough. Trees are not safe yet. On our campuses we just cannot count on high tech. Too many times it fails us. Someday soon that may be corrected, but for now, our equipment is just not reliable enough. That proved our biggest problem. Give it up? Footnote to Burbules' paper goes here. See Playing with ...) Accept it as a "risky promise" and back away from it? No. For there was much not working with the traditional system. We needed only not to force the student to be dependent on high tech, that which might not work.

Low tech. Hard copy. Trees. We hate paper. We teach courses that demand writing; it goes hand in hand with critical thinking. But collecting, keeping together, and redistributing papers is not something anyone in their right mind would want to do in classes that sometimes exceed sixty students, where some must arrive late because of conditions beyond their control, so that they must always paw through papers that were earlier distributed, because there were no offices open to coordinate, store and handle the papers. Now that's a run-on problem. Papers are not daunting where there are adequate support services. But some state universities, and many other small schools, do not have access to those support mechanisms.

We thought the web was our answer to no more paper. It wasn't. It isn't. Not yet. So we concluded that survival for us and our students meant some combination of high tech and low tech, any combination that would not deny a valid truth claim brought by any of us. Valid truth claims include employers who cause students to be late, papers lost in transit, eaten by the family dog, and the terror provoked by the blank page as a deadline nears.

Notice that we have blurred the line between technology and sociology. The crises we encountered with our web site fell on both sides. Not having a computer accessible meant that we had to accept hard copy. But having a student terrified to put into words what we were asking for was an equally real problem, that could occur with or apart from the technology concerns. We had to make technology just one more variable in the mix. That is what we have tried to do with the Dear Habermas site.

The real promise of technology came from the stimulus it provided us to find an answer to non-traditional needs on "not research" campuses. Our primary interest in the Web was the ability we saw to have an office, virtual though it may be, open whenever the student could access it, and responsive whether the student was able to fit the "9 to 5" prevailing schedule of the university. That, we have begun to accomplish. All materials can be accessed at one of our web sites. And we can pick them up from one of our web sites. The answers we still don't have are those concerning what we do about students who have no access to computers. We are committed to providing them with minimal hard copy so they can function. But we can't provide them with whole Net searches. That we will need to make provision for on the campus. They will have to find access time. And we do not yet even have an accurate estimate of how large a percentage that involves. That is because many of our students who claim to have access off campus do not in fact have access when cold reality becomes part of the equation. "A friend will let me use his computer," is one of the riskiest promises we've encountered. Time and again, we have found that their only access is through our office.

Knowing this, and not having any real concrete solutions, and not expecting to have any until we have real encounters with the problem, we designed the web site we wanted to use. We began to use it. By the time classes begin this Spring, the site will be in use. It will be included in our courses. We will have adopted high tech. Only as the semester progresses will we understand the real possibilities and the mere dreams.

Our site grew from our teaching of Habermas with relation to our theory and methods classes and our classes in Sociology of Law and Women's Studies. We base our approach on the hope we have that Habermasian discourse may be possible, and someday all validity claims may be heard in good faith. We have tried, relatively successfully, to create Habermasian discourse in our classes. The writing our students do, and the design of our web site reflect that approach.

This is the part we considered most difficult. Creating a site that does something. Once our students begin to see what the site does, we don't have many problems with computer phobia. We have greater problems restraining those who need to learn a little more before they delve in.

What our site does is to create texts by interactive exchanges of ideas and polishing and collecting of ideas to create those texts, which are then published on the site. We have also built in workshops and training in search procedures. Our hope is that students can learn here how to think and express themselves in a community devoted to Habermasian discourse. Where all will be heard in good faith.

We have recognized this as the creation of a climate conducive to academic production. It has much that is missing in the traditional approach. The student is encouraged to share ideas, and to be comfortable with giving credit for ideas. Texts are built in small stages and kept short. And the work is recognized as text, not as busy work. In turn, students are recognizing their own potential to create text, and are experiencing the motivation to continue to do so.

There is a snag. The high tech snag. What if we have many who can't access the site? Well, low tech. Hard copy. We can give them the workshop and the net search materials. We hope they will find access for the many links we cannot provide. And we think we can provide adequate access for them to share ideas. Some of us will have to upload their work when they cannot. May our scanners not break down. But we found in the Fall semester that students were so motivated to produce texts, once they understood that these were in fact texts, that they overloaded us with papers. That means they will play. And the main technical difficulty will be managing to let everyone share the new media.

We bought a server (on one of those paper and pencil grants) last semester. We are making some equipment available. Even white-footed mice (not the laboratory grown kind, but real ones from the field) like controlling their environment. When their researchers turned light switches off, they turned them on again. (Footnote to white-footed mice goes here.) When our students can turn on switches that bring them expanded curricular stuff that they can do stuff with, and when that stuff goes out on the web as real stuff that looks good, our bet is that the students will turn on the switch. Certainly they have done so enough in the last six months to encourage us to put up the site, high tech failings or no.

Now all that remains is that we ask you to look at our site. It is not elaborate and flashy. It is a space to learn, to write texts and to publish them, and to bring those texts to the attention of the rest of the academy. We think it does that. We'd like to share it with you at the national meetings.

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