Dear Mark:

Thank you for having me as a guest in your blog this week. I have admired the ways you have used this space to puncture one of the chief myths we both abhor: the notion that if some technology is good, then more must be better. Perhaps I even understated your aversion to the role of technology in education. But let’s get into that later.

Clearly, judging from our two essays published this week in The Chronicle Review, we share many concerns. But our approaches scrape up against each other in some places as well. Let me start with the conclusion to your essay, to which I must take qualified issue:

“So let’s restrain the digitization of all liberal-arts classrooms,” you wrote. “More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces.”

I wonder if you overstate your case here by overemphasizing the presence of advanced technology in the classroom. In my experience at several major research universities, there is a lack of adequately wired classrooms, not a surplus. Most of the classrooms at several of my places of employment have been quiet and slow. For someone charged to teach the controversies, intricacies, complexities, and paradoxes of digital media, this has been a constant source of frustration. I can’t tell you the number of times I have been on the phone with the Czar of classroom assignments at a university pleading my case that multi-region DVD players and dependable Wi-Fi are not luxuries for my subject and that perhaps that Introduction to Spanish section could deal just as well with the old classroom to which my class was assigned. Has Emory really wired all its classrooms with the latest tech? If so, let’s discuss a faculty exchange program some time!

I am a liberal-arts professor. My degree is in American Studies and I am trained as a cultural historian. Despite teaching American history early in my career, I have spent most of it in media studies. So I have several points to make about the digitization of the American campus.

First, much of the hardware, software, and innovation has been to extend and improve library services. This has been a grand success, from the point of view of both librarians and users. These days the library is ubiquitous in the lives of students and faculty. And, like a good offensive line in football, we don’t always notice how effective it is.

While I have been critical of the haphazard rush to digitize collections without regard to qualitative concerns, I have to profess that the research library in 2008 is exponentially better than it was in 1998, when I was researching my dissertation.

Second, digital technology in the classroom should not be expected to make any positive difference in the learning capabilities of K-through-12 students. As far as I have seen (and read in the ample data in your book and elsewhere), this whole effort to put computers in front of kids has been just dumb. It strikes me as a huge scam that has made a lot of contractors rich, baffled and frustrated devoted teachers, and failed to help students in any way. That said, every high school could benefit from a real computer science course or five. Computer science—a logic- and math-based discipline—can be as important and valuable as teaching violin and poetry (two other subjects that are sadly slighted in all but the wealthiest American schools). However, most of what I have observed has been the most facile uses of computers in an educational context. I would rather every school in America have good food, a non-leaky roof, and well-paid teachers who never touch a computer than have the current state of misappropriation of resources.

Third, digital technology can make, and has made, a difference in many higher-education classrooms for the simple reason that the acquisition and manipulation of information and culture can be a profound learning experience. That does not mean it’s done right in many cases. I have employed digital technologies in dumb ways in some of the courses I taught, generating projects that are all show, no substance. But I have also released some students on impressive explorations by encouraging them to use these powerful tools wisely. But, as I hinted in my essay, I have to really teach them how to do this. Just because they can text and use Facebook does not mean they know or understand anything about digital media.

Fourth, I have seen some rather profound uses of digital technology in the university classroom. Take, for example, the History Engine,” a new search engine designed by the University of Richmond for undergraduate history students to ease the access to and use of digitized primary sources. I think it’s rather brilliant and look forward to designing courses that use it well.

Also see a project that I would have been part of had I stayed at New York University: The Dead Media Archive. This is a Wiki developed by students and faculty in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University—the same department that was home to that great critic of techno-optimism, Neil Postman. Under the direction of Professors Alexander Galloway and Benjamin Kafka, students have been writing and editing historically rich essays about technologies that no longer seem to matter in the digital age: The mariner’s compass; stereoscope; player piano. Students quickly learn that technologies that once seemed dominant and permanent are in fact fleeting. And they learn that big inventions don’t drive history.

I could assemble a list of more than a dozen model projects that push learning through different mental and social processes than those required to compile standard research papers or essays (not that there is anything wrong with them).

And fifth, I must add that my (and my field’s) role within the liberal arts process is to de-familiarize students (and the public) with media technology. Just as fish don’t realize they live in a unique and special place called the ocean, most American don’t quite grasp the wide effects of digital and communicative technologies in their lives. This current condition is not some accident, not a matter of some “evolution,” and certainly not a “revolution.” It is the result of a complex series of policy, market, inventive, and cultural confluences. So maybe I am like an oceanographer for fish—although that makes me sound even more superfluous than I already do.

I would love to read your thoughts on these reactions. Perhaps I have stated the obvious. Please forgive me if I have.

Siva