Technology is a transformative force. It has multiplied our channels of communication, has provided unprecedented access to information, and has freed people and organizations from the geographic bounds that once limited their circle of influence. Technology’s prophets have long envisioned a world in which all people will have access to virtually unlimited information and where learning will be limited only by individuals’ natural abilities and ambitions. Technology is the most oft-cited means to this end. The Truman Report, which laid the groundwork for the G.I. Bill (one of the great engines of access to institutions of higher learning), focused considerable attention on the promise of AM radio as a means of democratizing and universalizing learning. Similar claims were made about television as an educative force. But the hype has never quite squared with the hope. Why?

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, in The Social Life of Information, point out that the futurists’ flights of fancy — which emphasize technology’s potential to free people from the encumbrance of traditional organizational structures — tend to crash headlong into the mountain of societal convention. We are social creatures. To the extent that technology fails to take into account our humanity and our tendency to operate within "rich social networks" (p. ix), it will meet with resistance.

Brown and Duguid are well poised to make such claims. Brown serves as chief scientist at Xerox Corporation and director of the well-regarded Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Duguid is a historian and social theorist affiliated with University of California, Berkeley, and PARC.

Their book is divided into eight chapters. Each addresses a specific topic and each may be read on its own. The topics of greatest interest to educators include the limits of "unlimited" information (ch. 1); the social characteristics of work and learning and the challenges faced by organizations who attempt to "free" their members from more conventional, place-based work settings (ch. 3-5); and the future of the university and the promise (and limitations) of technology as an educative tool (ch. 8).

Brown and Duguid serve up a wealth of concrete examples to support their assertions. One fascinating account is that of the advertising firm Chiat/Day. In 1994, the firm was featured in Wired magazine for its efforts to dismantle the traditional office by "hot desking" — providing employees with laptops and cell phones and refusing to designate work spaces. CEO Jay Chiat monitored the floors and moved people who occupied any given space for more than a day. The result? A kind of micro-revolution occurred, accompanied by "office-based civil disobedience" (p. 73). People found the arrangement destabilizing rather than liberating. They began building "stealth departments," sending in team members to stake out office space, and they refused to turn in their laptops and cell phones at the end of each day:

One metaphor for the Chiat/Day office was the campus. Students on a college campus don’t have offices, the masterplan argued. They move from classrooms, to libraries, to lounges. The same model was expected to work for the office. . . . The daily unsettled space created daily turf wars. Departments tried to pull rank on each other, each claiming favored areas because it was "more important." (p. 73)

Brown and Duguid conclude that technology and its management must "reflect the social character of work — the way in which people act as resources for one another" (p. 75). There must be a balance between the centrifugal forces of technology, which tend to atomize and individualize, and the centripetal forces of social processes.

Distance learning (ch. 8) presents similar challenges. Although Brown and Duguid engage in hyperbole by raising the specter of the "extinction" of colleges and universities as we know them (p. 208), they qualify the assertion by acknowledging that, among digital providers of education, "here as elsewhere in the digital world there is much hype. . . . As with many of the institutions and objects we have discussed so far, one reason that the conventional university may last is that its apparent alternatives are more vapor than virtual" (pp. 212–213). The problem, according to Brown and Duguid, is that purveyors of virtual education insist on seeing education as a simple transaction "delivering information to comparatively passive learners" (p. 213). Instead, Brown and Duguid assert that education is a process of enculturation — students are not only learning facts, they are "learning to be" (p. 219). The place-based assets of many institutions (e.g., Cornell’s veterinary school in upstate New York and the University of California, Berkeley’s well-regarded computer science department near Silicon Valley) will be impossible to replicate online. Brown and Duguid view technology as a means of building on existing structures. For instance, they point to the efficacy of peer education, which technology can support by such means as keeping students in contact through listservs. Websites are another means for teachers to share documents with students outside of class. Even asynchronous learning — in which certain material is presented for review on a website — can reduce the number of lectures and free up class time for discussion.

Technology will continue to influence the ways we learn and teach. However, it must be embraced in ways that uphold and support the social dimensions of learning. Educators will find Brown and Duguid’s book an informed perspective on the wise use of technology.

M.H.