Tara Brabazon,
Digital Hemlock: Digital Education and the Poisoning of Teaching.
UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002.
ISBN 0 86840 781 X
222 pp.
$A 34.95
(Review copy supplied by UNSW Press)

Technology is not neutral, it is always an intentional and human creation, but it is invoked and applied as if it is a force from “out there”, a god. With the re-ordering of tertiary education on the back of technology, it is necessary to disentangle the embrace of digital teaching from the agenda for “change”. Tara Brabazon applies the blowtorch to the whole program, the immense cost, the managerialism, the “motherhood” statements about flexibility, and the illusion of access – that education occurs when content is downloaded. She voices the unspoken and unheard questions of those involved in the shift to digital teaching. While Socrates asked the difficult questions for his time, and was sentenced to death and drank hemlock for scorning the gods, so too does Brabazon stare down the new god of technology. Her aim is an end to mute acceptance of this god, to open universities to debate and discussion, and to reclaim the essence of teaching, primarily as a transformative exchange between teachers and students, and the potential for education as a life-changing encounter.

Brabazon joins others who call “Internet teaching” into question, such as David Noble (Digital Diploma Mills), who gave an account in 1998 of the “automation” of higher education, and Hubert Dreyfus, who argues that online education in itself, as disembodied interaction, is an impoverished interaction, capable only of providing competence. Brabazon takes up a similar theme, and examines how disembodied learning works in a new environment where the “classroom” is unbounded, students use email, discussion groups and “access” downloaded lectures. She claims the experiential factor – invisible to the audit process – is crucial in the university experience.

Any committed teacher in adult education can provide stories where former students, sometimes encountered years later, express gratitude as they recount an ephiphanic moment which changed the direction of their lives. Brabazon recalls such encounters and reminds us that there is no replacement for the exhilaration and the life-changing moment that teaching produces through embodied interaction. She looks for that “outstanding teacherly moment”, that connection that a teacher or lecturer can give that will change a student’s life forever. And such moments, she contends, necessarily derive from embodied interactions, face to face teaching. Lives are not changed by clicking to the next link.

I knew Tara Brabazon had hit a nerve with me early in her book when she described Powerpoint as a technology that should be uninvented. As a technology that has captured “presentation”, it upstages and diminishes the presenter, encourages “mental absenteeism” in the audience, and these numerous slides, when examined later, usually make little cogent sense. Further, by providing “access” to a Powerpoint presentation, students are discouraged from attending at all. Finally, Brabazon curtly points out that writing bullet points is no substitute for the art of writing a good sentence.

While not against online education, Brabazon is appalled by the forces shaping it. The problem, she describes, is not technological change, but that technological change is being driven by crisis, accompanied by the managerial “excessive droning for change”.

In fact, Tara Brabazon is boiling with fury. The promotion of technologies such as Powerpoint with “access” anywhere, anytime, not only undermines teaching, but constitutes “betrayal and failure” in the unquestioned acceptance of the notion that use of technology per se is an improvement.

A particular target of Brabazon’s fury is education managers and administrators, who advise teachers on teaching, yet “could not run a bath, let alone a classroom”. After the huge amounts of money invested in online education in the late decade, there is still a top down “push”, with religious overtones and evidence of worship of the new god. Learning is reduced to a management problem. As an experienced university teacher, Brabazon uncovers the steady overhaul of tertiary education by managerialism and the changing nature of the university. She describes how a new discourse of education deftly removes teachers from the field, with ‘teaching” being separated into content and facilitation, with the marginalisation the term implies. Teachers become digital butlers.

Brabazon’s confidence is born from dedication ( her word) to teaching and its potency. She places herself in one corner, with years of experience of both online and face to face education, enthusiasm, dedication and dozens of anecdotes and communications from students recounting “life-changing” moments in education, versus the agents for the push to re-making education as value adding and customer focus, and the managers who would sooner invest in the machine that goes “ping”, instead of the participants in teaching and learning.

Brabazon writes with wit and her book is broad and well-researched – it covers areas beyond the management malaise: the soaring workloads involved in digital communication and preparation, the consequences of prioritising access over storage in libraries, the vexed issue of the new literacies that emerge with new technologies, the atomisation of the experience of tertiary education and the motivation of students within this environment, and social values in an efficiency model of education.

In all this, Brabazon professes to be not only a dissenter, but a digital enthusiast, not a Luddite. She has been a keen adopter and user of information and communication technologies, and has a wealth of evidence to show for it. At issue are the masters the technologies now serve – at the core is the undermining of the nature of learning. She describes the easy assumption that providing greater access to information via the Internet means greater knowledge and ultimately, wisdom. Missing is the interpretive and critical moment that is essential to real learning. She calls for “not technical interactivity, but intellectual interactivity”. Remove the teacher, remove the interaction and the learning.

In her discussion on virtual communities, Brabazon mentions one of the sadder consequences of the digitised student: the erosion of the network of social affiliation that traditional campus life provides. Tertiary education is one of the fundamental experiences of the community of ideas in a non-privatised space, and plays a role in social connectedness that is fundamental in our society – where students experience an agora, a public space where ideas are safely explored and shared. Brabazon asks what happens to cultural capital when the social network of education is attained over the Web?

While Brabazon’s rage is justified, it can go over the top: she states that Internet teaching is not just another option to traditional teaching, but a “menace”. If Internet teaching is digital hemlock, then where does that leave us? There is no longer a work or study world which is independent of digital technology. Brabazon would agree that it is not a case of accepting or rejecting technology, but having a say in how it is selected and employed, and fighting for teachers and students to be stakeholders. This, after all, was Ned Ludd’s crime, which was not to reject the new technology outright, but to agitate to be a stakeholder, for which his fate was similar to Socrates.

I suspect that the face-off between those that value the transformative potential of embodied teaching, and those who are constructing a program for effective learning are not always necessarily opposed. Many participants in online education, including managers, would acknowledge that online education is a case of horses for courses, that off-campus education works best for mature age, focussed students already in employment, and that it is a proven failure with full-time undergrads. Which is no excuse for the zealousness of the top-down push for shifting subject online in the recent past and present. Ultimately, you can’t take the teachers out of teaching.

Online education is still evolving and taking shape, and I suspect its evolution parallels that of the Web – a euphoric, diverse and democratic first stage, a managed, instrumentalist stage 2, out of which has emerged a hard struggle for a wiser, fairer stage 3, yet to come. As a dissenter, Brabazon directs her ire to those stuck in stage 2, still worshipping the techno-god. Her book returns teaching to its central place in our universities, and to its nature as a cultural and transformative exchange.
With Digital Hemlock, Brabazon aims to “skewer and pierce the pomposity of Internet teaching”, and her book will arm readers with accounts and quotes that will enable them to deliver a tirade against any manager who suggests at a meeting that teaching staff “resist change”.

Jodi Brooks

University of New South Wales, Australia

Created on: Friday, 27 June 2003 | Last Updated: Friday, 27 June 2003