The Technological Meaningfulness of Academic Work in the 21st Century

I was speaking to an academic colleague the other day who was trying to work out why her quizzes weren't displaying properly in the VLE. She'd spent many hours entering them and editing them, only to become frustrated that they didn't appear to display as she wished. We worked on the problem together and sorted it out (this is very much my preferred course of action in these circumstances), but I asked her how she felt as she was entering all this data. Of course, it's incredibly boring and tedious. I remarked that one of the effects of technology in education is the amount of low-level repetitive work it creates for people who feel they are meant to engage in high level intellectual work.   

A similar situation arose with a member of professional service staff who was trying to get some specific data from the system that the system would not provide through the interface. Basically, we wrote a little program together (our shared Python coding environments are brilliant for this kind of thing), and again, solved the problem together. Here the alternative repetitive low-level work was by proxy, as a different system would be used that demanded far more tedious work than would be required from a bit of computational thinking and practice. Finally, I have been working with our medical school, the vets and the dentists in trying to synergise their educational approaches (they basically share a similar technical and pedagogical approach). Doing these things with people (not doing it to them) has become important to me, just as the process of working together to create synergies in activity. It's about bringing wholeness to the relationship between technical and intellectual work.

More broadly these situations have led me to reflect on the nature of academic work, and the relationship between high level and low level work. The distinctions are difficult: artistic work, for example, often features much repetition - indeed, it is characterised by this. But where that feels fulfilling and in a certain sense "high level" because it leads to self-expression, the tedious button-clicking of an interface definitely feels menial and low-level. So what's the difference?

I think looking at individual tasks in isolation is not helpful. Bridget Riley adding rows to one of her geometric paintings, or Lowry painting matchstick figures, is not a task that is disconnected from the overall artistic aims and ambition: it is entirely consistent with it.  The work has to be taken as a whole, and taken as a whole, the artist's "menial" tasks are consistent and coherent with the whole. So what does modern academic work  look like as a whole? 

I think this is at the root of what's happened to academia since the advent of technology (and possibly a bit before). The ideal of the academic institution is not individual academic labourers pushing out publications to raise their H-index, bidding for grants, etc, but the community of scholars - teachers and students - in the college working together for the wellbeing of each other and the pursuit of truth. When everyone works as one, the mechanism which selects what must be done is understood by all, and each responds in the knowledge that whatever task has to be performed - whether repetitive or deep and intellectual - is done because it is required for the common good. 

The point about the college is that it is a coherent whole. So what did technology do? It carved up the function of each individual and instead of it being a convivial activity, it became specialised and professionalised, given to a particular individual who could basically perform this function on behalf of everyone else. It's precisely what Illich says in "Tools for conviviality" about the difference between the conviviality of the shovel, and the lack of conviviality in the JCB. 

What is a convivial approach to technology in universities? It is certainly about doing things together, not doing things to people, or even for people. What's been so interesting with the current crop of technologies in institutions is that the skills for accessing and manipulating their data have become common: very often these are simple programming skills, and these skills, even if they are not known by everyone, can be communicated and their experience shared across a community. 

The technical essence of the Personal Learning Environment was a common toolset with which universal skills which could be shared. What we didn't talk about so much was the fact that because these skills were common and universal, effective convivial activity could be organised. (I do remember Oleg saying that the PLE was a way forwards to Illich's ideas of conviviality, but I couldn't see it clearly at the time). 

Today academic work is disaggregated, individualised, compartmentalised and specific functions are separated off with no connection to a common purpose. Moreover, the disaggregation is reinforced by tools which position themselves in "market segments" when in fact the whole thing is manipulating the same data. The one blessing that we have is that access to the core data underneath each of these specific functions has become easier through the APIs. Increasingly, I think we will see a single "back-end" for these systems - probably (so it seems at the moment) coordinated by Microsoft. 

But a deeper issue lies in the fact that our disciplines themselves have become separated from the technological and institutional context within which they organise themselves. Discplines tend not to think of themselves technologically or institutionally - and yet almost all disciplines these days see at their frontiers issues of technology, uncertainty, institutional organisation and data. In fact for many disciplines, if they were to examine the institutional and technological context of their own educational technology, they would find real-life and tangible examples of the very things they concern themselves with in an intellectual way. For example, medicine is increasingly going to become dominated by the kind of AI tools which sit behind many of the interfaces they use to organise and discuss their content. The same goes for Law (think Turnitin), Maths (learning analytics, convolutional neural networks), Psychology (AI), biology (bio-sensors, imaging), and so on.  

Change requires a new meta-language of subject orientation with technology. Institutionally, maybe this can be organised through inter-disciplinary collaboration and engagement, where deep questions about disciplinary knowledge and technical engagement can be asked. All disciplines demand that certain competency criteria are met. But there are always many ways to do this. And doing it together, where the disruptions of technology can be felt in the very fabric of disciplines themselves, may provide a powerful way back to the kind of wholeness and integrity of academic life that the college once had, but within a new digital context.  The way forwards is synergy.