REVIEW ESSAY

THE VIRTUES OF VIRTUAL: A REVIEW OF TIFFIN AND RAJASINGHAM'S IN SEARCH OF THE VIRTUAL CLASS AND HILTZ'S THE VIRTUAL CLASSROOM

CHRIS BIGUM

Faculty of Education Central Queensland University

'Virtual' is a much used and some would say overused term in this era of digital communication. As a shorthand, it is used to cover a wide range of practices using communication technologies in which the similarities between face-to-face communication and the new medium is highlighted. The adjective is used to label early attempts to reproduce familiar social practices and institutions using the new communication media. The two books, by Tiffin and Rajasingham (1995) and by Hiltz (1994), are contrasting contributions to the literature concerned with using things 'virtual' to support educational practices. The two titles convey the different positions from which the authors tackle the use of contemporary communications to provide education. Tiffin and Rajasingham conduct a speculative search for the virtual class; Hiltz built one and reports on her studies of it.

As is the case for all new technologies or new applications of technologies, it is necessary to justify their development. Hiltz, a sociologist working in computer-mediated communication, computer-supported cooperative work and human-computer interaction sees the question of whether to go virtual or not as a matter of experimentation and constructed her research around the testing of eleven hypotheses concerned with the effectiveness and educational merits of using an array of computer-supported communication (Ch. 4). Tiffin and Rajasingham, both communication scholars, base their justification on the argument that schools 'are designed to meet the needs of agricultural and industrial societies, not the coming information society' (p. 71) and that what is needed is a new, virtual system exploiting the future potential of technologies like virtual reality.

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As Bolter (1996) notes in his review of Tiffin and Rajasingham's book, it is 'a curious mix of speculation and analysis'. It is a book which is highly ambitious in its scope and reflects a strong commitment to a particular approach to the understanding of communication, systems theory. The authors argue for the importance of having a vision for education in an information age. It is one, they suggest, that ought to be based on telecommunication rather than transport. Like many books of this ilk, there is a tendency to overstate both the capacities of the technology and its future deployment 1. For instance, citing Rogoff's (1990, pp. 50-52) account of child development in a social matrix, 'in the future, in information societies, this social matrix may be largely replaced by networks of information technology'.

The book is intended to provide a favourable account of an imagined, virtual form of education. To make the comparison, the authors render traditional education to an amenable form, devoting two chapters to representing education as communication. What is portrayed is an information processing/conduit model of education, in which all components are 'networked'. In this part of the book, a spurious and unhelpful use is made of fractals to group different assemblages on different scales: the neural network of the brain; the dyad of teacher and student, the group network or classroom ;. the school, a network of classes; the system, a network of regions which are in turn are made up of networks of schools (p. 65). The fractal theme appears through the book when what is being discussed might, at best, be represented as a series of networks within networks.

Having established educatioff as a communication system, the authors then proceed to assemble a collection of largely unsourced facts, observations and caricatures that serve to establish their case that schools are in trouble. In an explanation of computer adoption in schools, for instance, they suggest that international rivalry was an important factor for Australia (p. 81). Schools are blamed for their inability to adapt and to change, and the authors assert that we need to know why no technological initiative 'has posed a serious threat to the dominant technology of education' (p. 87). Cuban (1986) and Hodas 2 (1993), among others, offer useful analyses in this respect but are not mentioned.

There is little discussion of the development and diffusion of the technologies described in the book, which suggests an unawareness of the complexity and unpredictability of these processes (Franklin 1990, Latour 1996a, Marvin 1988). If more consideration had been given to this aspect of technological development, then the scenarios and examples that the authors derived from linear extrapolations of current technologies would have been more circumspect.

The accounts that are offered of a future, 'virtual' education system are not far from the promotional hype of computer vendors:

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VR offers us the possibility of a class meeting in the Amazon Forest or on top of Mount Everest; it could allow us to expand our viewpoint to see the solar system operating like a game of marbles in front of us, or shrink it so that we can walk through an atomic structure as though it were a sculpture in a park (p. 7).

These kinds of argument have been made since computers first appeared in classrooms. Much was promised, little delivered. Each time, the excuse for each generation of hardware and software was inadequate technology. What was and is still at play is the fast-cycling dynamic of an industry that needs to sell as fast as it develops new product, which is of the order of every six months. There is nothing to suggest that future generations of hardware and software will deliver any more educationally than their predecessors.

A more disturbing feature is the uncritical acceptance of simulations or models, albeit in their VR form, as a vehicle to the kinds of educational understandings that are seen as highly desirable. Weizenbaum (1984, p. xvii) argued passionately for the importance of users understanding and questioning the basis of any model that is employed in computer software:

What is important in the present context is that models embody only the essential features of whatever it is they are intended to represent . . . . What aspects of reality are and what are not embodied in a model is entirely a function of the model builder's purpose. But no matter what the purpose, a model, and here I am concerned with computer models of aspects of reality, must necessarily leave out almost everything that is actually present in the real thing. Whoever knows and appreciates this fact, and keeps it in mind while teaching students about the use of computers, has a chance to immunize his or her students against believing or making excessive claims for much of their computer work (emphasis in original).

In a book that encompasses such a broad sweep of education, communication theory and technology, there must be omissions but there is little written about the selection and non-selection of ideas, sources and examples. Teachers will therefore find the text annoying in the authors' non-reflective selection of educational ideas and theories. They will also be disappointed in its lack of awareness of significant educational research and practices. For instance, classroom researchers will be dismayed to read that 'there is no body of study of the classroom as a communication system for learning' (p. 20). Designers of schools will be surprised to learn that 'school architects now reproduce the form of classrooms without thinking of their function' (p. 59). And millions of

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students would be surprised to know that 'people do not understand what is taking place around them because the educational system cannot keep pace with new knowledge' (p. 84).

Vygotsky's theory of a zone of proximal development is used to develop examples of teaching and learning in the author's new, imagined virtual environment (pp. 22-26) and to develop their account of education as a communication process involving transmission, storage and processing. Teachers will recognise the largely discredited conduit metaphor (Reddy 1993) in this representation of teaching and learning. A concept closely linked to the conduit metaphor, that of disembodied knowledge, is also employed throughout the book:

It is possible to think of cases like the above where unique knowledge may be resident in the teacher. However, in most fields of education the body of knowledge exists independently of the teacher. It has a separate existence in some kind of storage system such as a book. Text does not need a lot of bandwidth for delivery at reading speed. However, knowledge is sometimes contained in media such as 35-mm film that do need a lot of bandwidth (p. 42).

'

Metaphors of human communication are important. But it is more important to understand the implications of using a particular metaphor and to use it carefully and critically, conscious of what it means to reduce human communication to considerations of bandwidth, frequency and other properties of signal transmission. How we talk about what we store in books and film and computers is important. Despite advances in artificial intelligence, the day when we might usefully talk about any thing as having human knowledge is as far away as it ever was. As Lakoff in Boal & Lakoff (1995, p. 121) argues:

What has been discovered in the cognitive sciences in the last fifteen or twenty years is that reason is embodied, that concepts are embodied--they have to do with how we function in the world, how we perceive things, how our brains are organized and so on.

An important feature of the authors' virtual education system is that it is global, achieving an economy of scale through a homogeneous set of curriculum (a term not used in the book) resources. They envisage 'knowledge-based companies investing in the design, development and marketing of virtual environments for education in an information society in the way that the giants of the automotive industry now invest in motorcar manufacturing for the industrial society' (p. 166). This is reminiscent of the early imaginings for CAI in which it was

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claimed that education would be revolutionised due to the development of software to teach every possible level for every possible knowledge domain and appropriate for every possible learning style. Many teachers accepted that this was not only desirable but possible until it was pointed out how many person millennia would be involved in developing the software as envisaged. What Tiffin and Rajasingham envision is clearly grander, and because of the massive human resources required, regardless of any economies of scale, it will mean that, in their scenario, only some knowledge (most likely the more easily represented and the most capable of generating profit) will be developed. What is worth knowing, at least virtually, will be determined by economics 3 and ease of programming. The history of software development in education has affirmed those characteristics for each generation of hardware.

It would be easy for educators to dismiss this text as a limited, distance education hybrid perhaps of Negroponte's (1995) Being Digital, Kelly's (1994) Out of Control, or Papert's (1993, 1996) The Children's Machine and The Connected Family, but that would be a mistake. As education moves inexorably towards a more technologised future, the influence of experts from outside education to set educational agendas and determine priorities will increase. The lack of knowledge of educational theory and practice will not impede enthusiasts, visionaries or hucksters in their promotion of a brave, new, high technology educational world. They need to be met on their own terms. Their claims need to be challenged and responses made to their criticisms. It is not the first time that it has been argued that there is something wrong with education and the solution is virtual.

Hiltz (1994) also offers a virtual solution, but her analysis--which is based on the experience and research of building a prototype virtual classroom--is more pragmatic and sensitive to the educational issues that are involved. Her book is a careful, detailed and measured account of one of the first projects to build a virtual classroom. 4 It is divided into three sections. The first four chapters detail the basis of the project, covering the learning theory on which it is based, the design principles of the software, the hypotheses to be tested and the theoretical framework in which the innovation was studied. The second section focuses on teaching in a virtual environment and is full of useful advice for teachers who want to develop this way of working with students. It also describes implementation problems. The third section details the analyses of the experimental measures taken to test the eleven hypotheses of the project. The final short section summarises the findings from the research study and discusses their implications for the future development of such systems.

Hiltz's vitae 5 and some of the detail about the project reported in the book reveal something of her skill as a 'heterogeneous engineer' (Latour 1996, p. 32)

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in assembling the resources, people 6 and technologies to achieve her goal, 'to improve both access to and the effectiveness of postsecondary education' (p. 9). In 1977, the project was 'a gleam in its creator's eye' (p. 5) and from then Hiltz briefly traces the negotiation of the technology--' Tools for the enhancement and evaluation of a virtual classroom'mthrough to the time of this publication. Although the detail is limited (p. 16), it is a reminder of how unpredictable any innovation of this type is.

The book includes a good deal of detail and examples as Hiltz illustrates and explicates the theories on which she drew, and the approaches she used in designing her virtual classroom. Heavy emphasis is placed on collaboration and co-operation and she assembles a useful review of the educational literature around this topic. Her description of the principles of the user-guided design approach not only reflects good system design but, with minor amendments, is not far from what most teachers would be happy to accept as principles for good teaching.

Hiltz describes the nine 'communication structures' which are employed in her virtual classroom. All are text based and she lists (where applicable) their traditional classroom equivalents (p. 35) and gives detailed examples from classes of how students made use of these structures. It is important to note that a lot of Hiltz's study took place in the late 1980s when 1200 baud modems were state of the art and IBM PCs were not renowned for handling shareable graphics for remote users.

Unlike Tiffin and Rajasingham, Hiltz maintains a balance in her advocacy of virtual forms of educational practice. There is a pragmatism in how she argues the pros and cons of her position and an awareness of the limitations of her argument. She identifies four major theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of educational innovation involving computers in order to obtain a set of 'independent' variables:

Technological Determinism (characteristics of the system); the Social- Psychological approach (the characteristics of the users); the Human Relations school--characterist ics of the groups (courses) and organizations (colleges) within which systems are implemented; and the Interactionist or Systems Contingency perspective (p. 66).

She opts for the latter framework as more inclusive and better able to account for the interaction between each of the three sets of variables, system, user and groups. This approach (Hiltz 1986, Markus 1983) has parallels with the sociology of technology developed by Law, Callon, Latour and others called actor-network theory. 7

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The section for teachers, entitled the perpetual professor, is a rich, detailed account of principles and advice for teaching using this medium. Among the many examples she uses to illustrate points, she includes experienced student advice to faculty (p. 103). The practical advice continues in the section on implementation problems and includes advice on numbers for types of classes, the scale of implementation with which to begin, and recruiting students. Interestingly, Hiltz notes that 'the single most important behavioural practice which produces relatively good results in online courses is the timely and "personal" (in tone) response by instructors to questions and contributions of students online' (p. 249).

The research followed a quasi-experimental design for a small number of courses, based on 'matched but "nonequivalent" sections of the same course taught online and in the traditional classroom' (p. 145). A larger number of courses were studied to identify and 'explore a range of "unique uses" of the technology in different types of courses' (p. 163). Hiltz reports the only statistically significant difference for grades occurred with a computer science course. While the importance of 'statistical proof' is an important part of attracting funds from most US agencies, Papert's (1972, p. 2) parody of the application of the scientific model to the evaluation of computer-based learning is still aptmhe suggested that the failure to find significant differences in favour of computer-based approaches was like the failure of a nineteenth century engineer who failed to show that engines were better than horses:

This he did by hitching a 1/8 HP motor in parallel with his four strong stallions. After a year of statistical research he announced a significant difference. However it was thought that there was a Hawthorne effect on the horses ... the purring of the motor made them pull harder.

The book gives good coverage to the experimental findings and analysis associated with the research. Over one hundred pages of appendices provide the reader with details of instruments, interview transcripts and course reports taken from each participating instructor's case history in the project. The technology used in this study will appear quaint to some readers used to somewhat better interfaces. Nevertheless, Hiltz's findings and the experiences she reports ought to be valuable to any student or teacher planning on exploring the educational virtues of the virtual.

The two books offer contrasting styles, approaches and outcomes. One, located firmly in a booster discourse (Bigum & Kenway, forthcoming) provides a technically flawed vision that nevertheless is important in flagging the kind of imaginings that cost-cutting administrators of education systems will find

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seductive, at least in the first instance. The other book provides a description of a study conducted in the early days of virtual teaching. It has something for the researcher, the practitioner and student. It is a significant contribution to what will no doubt be a long debate.

Notes Bolter (1996) carefully and thoroughly demolishes their claims that their imagined VR education system will be 'technically feasible in the next ten years'.

2 A later version is available in print, Hodas (1996). 3 Making money from educational software is a high risk enterprise. There are few success stories.

It is unclear that new hardware will make educational software any more attractive than entertainment software. It is likely that the existing patterns will continue to be reproduced.

4 irtual Classroom TM is a registered trademark of the New Jersey Institute of Technology! 5 hhttp://eies.njit.edu/~hiltz/vita/vita.html 6 Thirteen system analysts and over $800,000 in supporting grants gives an indication of the scale. 7 Useful references include: Bijker and Law (1992), Latour (1996), Law (1991), Law and Cooper

(1995).

References Bigum, C. and Kenway, J. (forthcoming) New information technologies and the

ambiguous future of schooling: Some possible scenarios, in A. Hargreaves, A. Lieberman, M. Fullan and D. Hopkins (eds.), International Handbook of Educational Change, OISE, Toronto, Canada.

Bijker, W. and Law, J. (eds.) (1992) Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociological Change, MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma.

Boal, I. A. and Lakoff, G. (1995) Body, brain and communication, in J. Brook and I. A. Boal (eds.), Resisting the Virtual Life, City Lights, San Francisco, pp. 115-129.

Bolter, J. D. (1996) Review of In Search of the Virtual Class: Education in an Information Society, The Journal of International Communication, vol. 3, no. 1, http://www.moorhead.msus.edu/--gunarat/jicreviews3-1.html#Tiffin.

Cuban, L. (1986) Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920, Teachers College Press, New York.

Franklin, U. (1990) The Real Worm of Technology, CBC Enterprises, Montreal. Hiltz, S. R. (1986) Recent developments in te leconferencing and related

technology, in A. E. Cawkell (ed.), North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp. 823-850. Hiltz, S. R. (1994) The Virtual Classroom: Learning Without Limits via

Computer Networks, Ablex, Norwood, NJ.

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Hodas, S. (1993) Technology refusal and the organizational culture of schools, (EDPOLYAR%ASUACAD.BITNET@ VM. USC.EDU), vol. 1, no. 10.

Hodas, S. (1996) Technology refusal and the organizational culture of schools, in R. Kling (ed.), Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 197-218.

Kelly, K. (1994) Out of Control: The Rise of Non-Biological Civilization, Addison-Wesley, New York.

Latour, B. (1996) Aramis or The Love of Technology, (Catherine Porter, Trans.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Ma.

Law, J. (ed.) (1991) A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, Routledge, London.

Law, J. and Cooper, R. (1995) Organization: Distal and proximal views, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, vol. 13, pp. 237-274.

Markus, M. L. (1983) Power, politics and MIS implementation, Communications of the A CM, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 430-444.

Marvin, C. (1988) When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Communications in the Late Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, New York.

Negroponte, N. (1995) Being Digital, Knopf, New York. Papert, S. (1972) Teaching children thinking, Mathematics Teaching, Spring. Papert, S. (1993) The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the

Computer, Basic Books, New York. Papert, S. (1996) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap,

Longstreet Press, Atlanta, Ga. Reddy, M. (1993) The conduit metaphor, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and

Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rogoff, B. (1990) Apprenticeship in Thinking, Oxford University Press, New

York. Tiffin, J. and Rajasingham, L. (1995) In Search of The Virtual Class: Education

in an Information Society, Routledge, London. Weizenbaum, J. (1984) Computer Power and Human Reason. From Judgement

to Calculation, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex.