agglutinations.com

January 15, 2003

Correspondence with Author Paul Duguid: Thoughts about The Social Life of Information (2002)

by Nader Vossoughian

Brown and Duguid’s interests span culture high and low, from Bourdieu and Bruno Latour to Wired magazine, CNET, and the advertising of Chiat/Day. What follows is a correspondence between Paul Duguid and myself. Paul is presently affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

Dear Paul Duguid:

I just completed reading your book The Social Life of Information (2002) and was most impressed. There is a great deal in there that I have been trying to articulate on my own working within the field of architecture. I am completing a doctorate at Columbia University in the School of Architecture, and as you may know the place has been a bastion as of late (for the past half decade perhaps) for what so-called "paperless studios." These are studios in which students work primary with advanced imaging software (Maya, Softimage, etc.). I have been quite critical of these studios, for as long as they've been around, in part because they DO rely on paper -- more so than ever before, just ask the guys who handle the printing center -- and the studios also still dependent upon the very conventions of representation that they are supposed to be trying to subvert. There is a new (now not so new) jargon that has emerged to accompany these approaches, and they go by names like "co-citation," "performance value," and the like. But look closely and you see many assumptions about design that are decades if not centuries old: all you have to do is look up the early twentieth-century time-motion studies of Alexander Klein or Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, the early work of Christopher Alexander or the writings of Gui Bonsiepe, and you'll see how many contemporary architects who have fashioned themselves as systems- or information-based designers are recycling the very same ideas (and fantasies) that architects harbored during eras past.

I am very much in favor of innovation in architecture and design, but like yourselves I am skeptical of "infotopians" who confuse originality with marketing. I thank you for your book – it has helped me take my ideas in new directions!

But enough brown-nosing. I actually have some comments/questions. I am not sure I agree entirely with your views on the future of the university. I am not one of those people who believe that universities are going to disappear any time soon, but I do feel there are stages in a person's development that may better benefit from distance learning than others. For example, I am presently completing my Ph.D. degree, and I am finding that perhaps no stage in a student's career could better be served by infotechnology than the doctorate. Undergraduate study is a period of socialization, and I wholly concede to that. It is a period of growing, when you’re supposed to get drunk and arrested and all of that (unfortunately, I too dumb to know this at the time), and that is just part of your education (it’s not just about book learning). But I am not sure that I agree that doctoral study is intended entirely to be a period of "apprenticeship" (I believe that this is the word you use in your book). The apprenticeship model, which is a very old model (in Germany they call it your "doctor-father" -- how awful!) may not foster, in an optimal way, the kind of independent thinking that can challenge the way institutions evolve. Sometimes, the apprenticeship model breeds great students who are terrible teachers, ardent disciples who never make the transition to becoming mentors themselves.

I went to a liberal arts college (Swarthmore), and it was instilled in me early on that student-based learning (teaching students to teach themselves) represents the best option we have (I believe you actually state something like this yourselves in your book.) In the graduate lectures I help teach at Columbia (usually as a Teaching Assistant), it is always the students' responsibility to present the material under review. I see my role as one of moderator, to nudge the conversation in this direction or that. And when I grade papers, I often require students to read each other's work before they hand it in to me, because I think that this kind of exercise gives students confidence and places the whole grading process in a larger context (the professor no longer looks like the final arbiter). The students seem to appreciate this model, judging from they feedback I get.

Naturally, one of the problems with this kind of student/teacher relationship is that it can be wildly time consuming. How do you teach a seminar-style class to a hundred or two hundred students? I have no answers for this. Perhaps you can give me suggestions. I like the idea of the video-based learning you suggest, in which students pause a tape in small groups to discuss a professor's lecture. But is there an analogue you can suggest in the real-time, real-space scenario? When giving lectures, for example? More generally, is the lecture an outmoded form, in your opinion, and if so, what alternatives have you considered? If the real-time lecture format is not a thing of the past, how do you make it more democratic (so that students’ views aren't left out of the fold)?

In any event, I thank you for your wonderful book. It was a pleasure spending my Christmas break with your text.

Sincerely,

Nader Vossoughian

And here’s the response I received from Paul Duguid…

Dear Nader:

Sorry for taking to long to get back to you on your comments. Here are some rather brief responses.

You say that "there are stages in a person's development that may better benefit from distance learning than others". John and I would agree with you completely. Our argument was not that there is no place for distance education, only that distance education will not serve all needs. The two systems are, in our eyes, complementary, but they are usually presented as alternatives. The reason we feel campuses are under stress is that there are many things that can be done better online. The reason, nonetheless, that campuses will survive, is that there are many things that are done better on campus. It is not a matter of one replacing the other. Indeed, we mention in passing what you seem to believe-- that for some architectural students, it may be better for them to be free to work in centers of architectural excellence of one sort or another rather than in conventional schools. Whether you could do an architectural doctorate online, however, raises all sorts of questions about what such a degree is expected to achieve.

And despite your intense disagreement about graduate study and apprenticeship, John and I still stick by that argument. We have no wish to deny that systems of apprenticeship have often been paternalistic and some have been highly oppressive--Adam Smith inveighed mightily against them 250 years ago, and he was not the first. But such complaints are usually to do with the formal system (the indentures, the guild controls, etc.) that is laid on top of the underlying learning pattern. That underlying pattern is essentially one of working with those who have mastered the skills of a particular profession. That pattern, we believe, is inescapable as a form of learning. Only when that is clear can we deal with the iniquity of the formal systems that embody the informal. Instead, however, "reformers" usually try to build new systems, which, because they ignore how people learn, usually fail. Our notion is that we don't really have a choice. Socialization is how people learn. What we do have a choice about is how we formalize that system. Indentured apprenticeship is, clearly, not the way to go.

That gets to your next point, about student-based learning. That's important (and part of socialization), but it is not in itself enough. I would not want to be operated on by doctors, live in a house built by architects, or plead a case with lawyers who had learned all they know from fellow students. Experience counts for a lot.

My hesitation about your view of "moderating", though I agree with you at base, is that it assumes that teachers know what needs to be taught, what directions to "nudge" people in, as you suggest. One of our arguments is that teachers often don't (hence they give students lots of work that is time-wasting). The value of novice-expert interaction is not necessarily the conscious guidance of a teacher teaching his or her profession, but the unconscious display of expertise by an expert going about his or her profession. These are two quite different things. (We explore this a little in the book when we discuss "stolen knowledge".)

From this perspective, I remain as perplexed as you about the time-intensiveness of teaching. I simply can't see away around it, which is why I think those who promise us quick technological fixes are usually fools or charlatans. TVI, the video method we described, is itself time intensive, and doesn't, I fear, translate into a real-time form. We have a social mechanism for stopping a teacher to ask him or her a question, but we don't have a mechanism for stopping them so that students can debate the topic among themselves. Perhaps you could try and develop one.

To your final question about research into effectiveness of Ph.D. programs: as far as I know, the answer is no. There is actually very little credible, comparative research on any form of distance education. Most of what circulates in anecdotes. (After all, there is very little, except the job market, to tell us about the "effectiveness" of Ph.D. programs in general.)

Once again, thanks for reading the book and for sending your comments.

Good luck in finishing your degree and best wishes,

Paul Duguid