Volume 8, Number 7: April 29, 2002
Book
Review: The Social Life of Information
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press (2000)
Reviewed by Glenda Morgan,
Office of Learning and Information Technology
To say that we live in the information age has become a truism--so much of a truism, legal scholar James Boyle notes, that we can get away with talking about the information revolution without using citations. In our foot-note obsessed culture, we can barely discuss evolution or the fact that the earth revolves around the sun without reference reference to Darwin and Copernicus, Boyle quips.1 In a remarkable book, The
Social life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid argue
against much of the hype being written about the information age and
against a reliance on information for its own sake. Their argument,
although subtle, poses some interesting questions for higher education,
particularly about the use of technology in education. It is these implications
I want to explore in this review.
Implications for higher education Seely Brown and Duguid's book gives those of us involved in teaching and learning with technology a great deal to contemplate. The book offers two very
important insights. First, the book points out the important role of
information literacy.2 In talking
about information and its complex nature and how we cannot rely simply
on the "transmission" of information (particularly where information
technology is concerned), Seely Brown and Duguid make a case for more
reflexive use of information technologies and the information they help
us access. One example the authors provide is a description of bots
and other software tools used for finding specific kinds of information.
Because these technologies and their limitations are often not readily
understood by users, they frequently do not grasp the limitations of
the information they obtain through these means. A vitally important
part of our role in promoting the use of technology in teaching and
learning needs to involve promoting the awareness of the ways particular
kinds of technologies shape, constrain, and influence the information
and knowledge that we obtain through theses technologies. Second, the book makes a strong case for learning, given its relationship to information and knowledge, as a social activity. This has a number of distinct implications for the authors. They see the social nature of learning as pointing to the incredibly important role played by learning communities and communities of practice. These terms have become commonplace in discussions of online learning, and they are used, or perhaps over-used, seemingly without much thought. Seely Brown and Duguid make an insightful point about the role communities of practice play in learning. Contrary to "futurologist" Alvin Toffler's claims that information technology means that you "no longer need to huddle," communities of practice become more important than ever.4 But Seely Brown and Duguid also see the social aspects of learning as having important implications for changes in higher education in the face of developments in information technology. They see huge problems involved in the sort of "plug and play" approach that many are now taking to distance education, where courses can be taken one at a time, independent of one another. They see the same kind of 6-D vision at work in discussions about higher education that they see in discourse about information in general. That is, there is an emphasis on disaggregation and disintermediation where the end of the conventional university is predicted and a future where learners can connect directly with discrete packets of information. Seely Brown and Duguid argue that this kind of view is blind to the kind of roles that universities play (in credentialing) and is based on a narrow and instrumental view of education. If we look at education as a form of training and as the transmission of closely defined skills, then we run the risk of losing all the activity on the periphery--the implicit and social learning, and the perhaps less marketable but still valuable learning. What is more, Seely Brown and Duguid argue that if we go too far in the direction of disaggregating higher education, taking out the profitable parts, then the survival of universities themselves will be in question because of the way that the more "profitable" large lecture courses cross-subsidize some of the other parts of universities and higher education. While I think that the points that Seely Brown and Duguid make here are important, I do not think that they develop their argument especially well. If we take seriously their notion of information being inherently, importantly, and inescapably bound to its social context, I believe they have overlooked some of the more profound challenges that the growing use of technology in education poses. One such issue concerns the increased emphasis on learning objects and content objects. These are discrete chunks of content or learning materials to which learning objectives and sometimes even assessments are attached. They are seen in many quarters as being the major direction in which content provision in education is evolving. It is argued that one of the major advantages of using learning objects is their reusability. Being small discrete chunks of information, they can be stored in repositories and reused by many different faculty members in a range of disciplines.5 In the light of Seely Brown and Duguid's warning about how information cannot be understood as discrete packets independent of their moorings or social context, it is interesting to wonder what they would have to say about the move to the "learning object economy" and to consider what means we could develop to incorporate more of the social context of information into learning object repositories. |
1
See James Boyle, "A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism
For the Net?" Duke Law Journal, 47 (1997): http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/intprop.htm.
2 Some prefer the phrase information fluency.
For a discussion of the concept and the debates, see the Association of College
and Research Libraries Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher
Education (http://www.ala.org/acrl/ilcomstan.html)
and the American Library Association, Information Literacy (http://www.ala.org/acrl/infolit.html)
as well as the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering Being Fluent with
Information Technology (1999) at http://books.nap.edu/books/030906399X/html/index.html.
3 See Janette B. Benson, "Teaching with Technology
and Generation E," National Teaching and Learning Forum, 11 no.
2 (2002).
4 Seely Brown & Duguid (2000): 79.
5 See David Wiley, ed. "The instructional use of
learning objects," Association for Educational Communications and
Technology, (2000).