The Ethics of Using Technology as a Medium in Higher Education:
Framing Questions for Empirical Investigation

Susanna Priest, Ph.D.
Associate Scientist
LEAD (Learning through Evaluation, Adaptation, and Dissemination) Center
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Associate Professor, Journalism
Interim Director, Center for Science and Technology Policy and Ethics
Texas A&M University

May 1997

	Web-based instructional approaches, "real time" distance video
classes and conferences, hypertext and multimedia courseware are
capturing a lot of attention in higher education and have become the
center of the future vision among key educational leaders (e.g.,
Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley; 1995). The ubiquitous
question seems to be, "Do these technologies work?" The underlying
assumption is what media scholars refer to as "magic bullet" thinking:
the unconsidered belief that a medium of communication in and of
itself will have dramatic effects on such things as public opinion,
lifestyles and values, the "democratic process," or education. The
same assumption was apparent in early studies following the appearance
of film (see Lowery and DeFleur's review of the early Payne Fund
studies; 1995), radio (e.g., Cantril's study of "The War of the
Worlds" broadcast; 1940), television (e.g., the oft-cited "Surgeon
General's Report" on televised violence; Surgeon General's Scientific
Advisory Committee, 1971)-even comic books-and be seen in key
historians' retrospective analyses of the impact of print (e.g.,
Eisenstein 1979). Media do have "effects," but the most apparent ones,
despite about over a half century of research on this issue are either
indirect ("agenda-setting effects"; McCombs and Shaw, 1972), long-term
("cultivation effects"; Gerber and Gross, 1976), or both. Media call
our attention to certain issues and invite us to think about the world
in certain ways, but they are not "magic bullets" (or "hypodermic
needles") for instant "delivery" of specific, short-term, changes.
	So it is not surprising to a media researcher that data
demonstrating (or refuting) the existence of remarkable "impacts" or
"effects" of the new technologies in education is hard to come
by. Empirical data on the effectiveness of these new technological
experiments are limited and likely to remain so. Comparing
technology-based learning with more traditional classroom approaches
is no easier than comparing the "effectiveness" of a film versus a
book; to some extent, Marshall McLuhan was right in that the medium
certainly changes the message. Straightforwardly "translating"
traditional lecture or textbook material into an electronic format
probably holds limited advantages at best. Most of the time, the
material itself, along with the entire structure of a course, will
change to take advantage of the technology. Otherwise, why use it at
all? As a result, however, controlled comparisons of the type of
learning that takes place with and without a particular technology
will remain rare, and are in fact going to be of limited use
anyway. Many studies (e.g., Markwood and Johnstone, 1994; Liu and
Reed, 1995; Raidl et al., 1995; Williamson and Abraham, 1995) do
demonstrate that new technologies can be effective teaching tools, but
the results are typically compounded in such a way as to make the
observed "effects" equally attributable to the adoption of active or
collaborative learning strategies and/or outreach to different higher
education "audiences."
	This discussion has its parallel in the education and
educational technology literature. Here Clark (1983) argued some time
ago that we will never have the answers to questions about whether
particular technologies are "good" or "bad," "effective" or
"ineffective" in education, because-essentially-media do not have
unique attributes; that is, to build quite loosely on Clark's
perspective, there is little we can teach or communicate with a
certain technology that we cannot also communicate without that
technology. Kozma (1994) responds that on the contrary, if we moved
beyond a behaviorist/experimentalist framework to a more "systemic"
approach, we could indeed learn important things about how specific
communication technologies interact with particular educational
strategies and settings, teachers and students. This may be true, and
in fact computer technology may well structure (and thus limit) our
fundamental understanding of the world in subtle but important ways
(Weizenbaum, 1976). But neither a more systemic nor a more
philosophical approach will answer the pervasive questions about the
"effectiveness" (let alone cost-effectiveness) of contemporary
educational media.  In recent months publications such as the
Chronicle of Higher Education have given space to both what we might
call the "technological imperativist" (or pro-technology) and
"neo-Luddite" (or anti-technology) perspectives on these issues as
they pertain to college and university settings. Here again, however,
the empirical evidence is, and will remain, rather scanty. What fifty
and more years of media research has taught us about approaching
issues having to do with communication technology and its "effects" is
that these are not questions that easily or appropriately lend
themselves to experimental treatments. But all is not lost. Perhaps it
is time to frame a different set of questions about "the new
technologies" that social science can answer without being "magic
bullet" theorists or encamping among either the imperativists or the
neo-Luddites. In fact, all of the attention to "whether technology
'works'" has probably diverted us from a range of alternative, but at
least equally compelling, issues.
	The remainder of this paper will explore how attention to
ethical and values issues can help us to frame new, empirically
researchable, questions about the use of these and related new
technological alternatives in higher education. Four approaches are
identified that seem to hold promise along these lines: (1) a
rights-based approach that addresses access to information and
education; (2) a utilitarian approach that asks questions about
cost-effectiveness; (3) a values-based approach that calls our
attention to issues about the quality of education, scholarship, and
knowledge in the "Information Age"; and (4) a stakeholder approach
that looks at economic "winners" and "losers." None of these
approaches leads to (or assumes) either a pro-technology or an
anti-technology stance; each of them calls our attention to both
advantages and disadvantages of the current trend toward relying on
electronic, largely computer-based, technologies as alternative or
supplementary tools for outreach and education. These issues are
inextricably interrelated, but it seems useful to start out by
considering them separately.
	(1) Access issues. U.S.-style democracy is built on the
premise that all citizens, as voters, have fundamental rights to
education and information. In recent decades, the systematic extension
of this premise to women and to ethnic and racial minorities has had
profound ramifications. It also applies, of course, to Anglo males. On
the one hand, new educational technologies in theory hold the promise
of assuring universal access across all kinds of social barriers. On
the other hand, in practice access to these technologies and the
skills and sophistication necessary to make the best use of them are
anything but equally distributed in the population. Technology may
make it possible, in a university context, for students from
disadvantaged educational backgrounds vis-a-vis a particular subject
to "make up for lost time" by accessing background material that is on
their level-and without the psychological penalty of being identified
as a "remedial" student. Alternatively, however, it is also possible
that the student of limited financial means who is not a position to
purchase his/her own personal computer will increasingly fall
behind. This is clearly not a problem that will be randomly
distributed but represents an important new barrier to equality of
educational access.
	Distance education using Web-based and other emergent
technological alternatives holds the promise of reaching alternative
audiences with higher education services and facilitating life-long
learning, not only for those who are already engaged in professional
work (nurses, engineers, teachers and so on) that they cannot
interrupt to pursue a degree, but also for those isolated from such
opportunities due to (for example) living in an isolated rural
location or having family responsibilities or physical disabilities
that affect mobility. Are these audiences likely to receive the same
educational experience as traditional, on-campus, in-person students?
Definitely not. Will their experiences be better-or worse? That is a
much harder question. It is also possible, perhaps even likely, that
women and minorities educated in cyberspace may find their work judged
more on its merit than on their own visible demographic
identities. Attacking instructor bias at its root (by changing the
instructor, rather than hiding the student) seems more socially just
in the long run, but may not do as much for the success and
self-confidence of particular individual students pursuing degrees
right now in institutions and disciplines that continue to be
dominated by Anglo males.
	Nevertheless, the neo-Luddite fear that technology-based
distance education will be second-rate is probably not without
foundation. The concept of the university (even the university without
physical walls, whether or not it is to be found in cyberspace) has at
its core the concept of the learning community. Good teaching involves
social interaction; good universities provide a rich environment for
student-to-student and student-to-community interaction as well. Can
technological alternatives (email, electronic discussion groups,
virtual classrooms) provide "adequate" substitutes for learning
communities centered on geography? Much depends on what we compare
them to. Where electronic alternatives facilitate the formation of
alternative learning communities, and particularly where they reach
students who have limited or no access to appropriate, geographically
centered, learning communities, they are (at a minimum) better than
nothing. Can cyberspace prosper to the point that virtual learning
communities are as vibrant for students as these are, at least
sometimes, for university faculty whose academic interests are shared
only by colleagues who are physically far away? Only time will
tell. But academic researchers continue to hold conferences in "real"
as well as virtual time and space for a reason. It seems likely that
distance learning will not develop into a total substitute for
in-person educational experiences either. Research might productively
focus on identifying an appropriate mix.
	(2) Cost-effectiveness. Electronic technologies such as
computers are expensive, and they are expensive to upgrade and
maintain, but so are professors! The idea of replacing the latter with
the former probably strikes few of us as particularly desirable. On
the other hand, there is a certain intuitive appeal to the assertion
that the wise use of electronic media can extend the reach, and
perhaps the effectiveness, of the overworked university professor who
too often appears to have too little time for individual students. If
technology (such as email) can allow more students to have at least
some interaction with their professor, isn't this (once again) better
than none? On the other hand, could technology act as an additional
barrier to interpersonal interaction in this context? Such a barrier
would not be without its "silver lining," however: some computer-based
instruction seems to "work" because it facilitates, or even forces,
students to interact with and to learn from their peers (see, e.g.,
Schutte, 1997). A strategy of using technology as a barrier to
instructor-student interaction seems ethically indefensible (as
opposed to using it as a facilitator or supplement); in practice, this
won't be such an easy distinction. Might the professor who hands out
his or her email address to students feel justified in reducing office
hours available for in-person consultation?  A related issue: if
technology (such as Web-based instructional material) can teach
routine or remedial material, will professors be freed from the
constant necessity of repeating background material and answering more
fundamental questions in order to concentrate on more substantive,
higher-level teaching? On the other hand, will this tempt them to
focus ever more exclusively on what Sheila Tobias has called the
"first tier" student, that is, the up-and-coming scholarly star, while
the run-of-the-mill, tuition-paying student gets the electronic
alternative? The answer to the question of whether new electronic
media are a cost-effective way to enhance higher education will depend
heavily on questions like this about how that technology is actually
used.  Costs are, and will remain, difficult to isolate. Not only will
cost-benefit analyses remain plagued by issues about who is actually
getting what, but the dollars-and-cents costs themselves will remain
largely hypothetical because systems of technology-based instruction
use infrastructural resources that are already there (e.g., student
and faculty computers, the Internet, faculty time), and when these are
supplemented with technology-dedicated dollars, multiple sources may
be utilized to support the same programs and projects. Rothstein
(1994) estimates that connecting all K-12 programs in the U.S. to the
internet might involve one-time costs of anywhere from $80 million to
$145 billion, and ongoing annual costs anywhere from $160 million to
$11 billion, (Somewhat ironically in this context, Rothstein
recommends that K-12 administrators seek university partnerships to
minimize their own start-up costs.) Note that the top end of the
estimated one-time cost range is over eighteen hundred times the
bottom end. Presumably, a similarly broad range could be defined for
higher education applications.  In other words, no one really knows
the costs, and it seems unlikely this will change. Yet the argument
that technology is not competing with other instructional needs
(faculty salaries, books for libraries, building budgets) needs to be
approached with skepticism. Even where there is no conscious intent to
substitute technology for teachers, most institutions will remain
dependent on about the same income from tax and tuition dollars,
endowments and donations. External funding for projects involving
technology may help ease this strain, but all external funding tends
to go to one-time "pilot" experiments. In the case of technology, such
experiments may entail hidden commitments to the adoption of a
technology-based approach, or to a particular form of technology,
without providing the resources to support such commitments on a
long-term basis. This is, of course, sometimes why the external
dollars are made available in the first place.  At a minimum,
estimates of costs and of their relation to perceived benefits should
take into account the often hidden costs of maintenance, support,
upgrading, and faculty courseware development, whether initial costs
are funded by internal or external dollars.
	(3) Educational values. At least two distinct sets of basic
education-related values are challenged by the emergence of the these
new technologies. First, university education is not just about
mastering content; it is about developing social skills and personal
relationships. In other words, it is about learning interpersonal and
"group work" skills; it is about having the experience of belonging to
a scholarly or "learning" community, as has already been mentioned; it
is about networking with other students and with faculty members who
share one's interests; and it is about having the opportunity to be
guided or "mentored" on an individual basis by someone older and
wiser, as well as more knowledgeable, than oneself. Some of those
using technology-based instruction in university contexts have argued
that "group ware" can enhance the collaborative learning experience;
others have noted that it is hard to see how students can develop
strong, meaningful, mentoring relationships in a non-face-to-face
environment. The notion that university education might become
redefined as the mastery of certain very discipline-specific skills
and information (as opposed to "knowledge"), rather than the
development of the "whole person" in a social context, is a sincere
challenge to what has traditionally been seen as the important goals
of that education.
	Second, universities have been traditional champions of free
speech generally and academic freedom specifically, but they also seek
to pass on to students the skill to distinguish false claims from
reasoned ones, propaganda from news, charlatanism from scholarship. In
a society without these skills, free speech could be a weapon of
destruction. As everyone knows by now, the Internet is a medium in
which rumor is not easily distinguished from fact, experts are not
easily distinguished from amateurs, knowledge is not easily
distinguished from opinion, and the ultimate origins of statements
made can be very hard to determine. The ability to widely disseminate
information and opinion independently from traditional authority
(academic peer review, editorial judgement, and so on) might sound
glorious from a "free speech" point of view. But I am reminded of the
experience of a former colleague of mine, a history professor who also
happens to be Jewish, when messages claiming that the Holocaust never
happened appeared on an electronic bulletin board she had organized
for her class. Not only was this offensive to her personally, it was
offensive to her as a scholar. The mechanisms traditionally used in
science and scholarship to distinguish truth from falsehood (peer
review of grant proposals and academic publications, reliance on
institutional and personal reputation, and so on) have been attacked
as instruments for maintaining the power of "good old boy" networks in
academia, and in some cases rightly so. But the complete loss of
mechanisms for distinguishing reliable from "fringe" opinion (for
example, in terms of medical advice) is a rather terrifying prospect.
	These two points about educational values, one involving the
purpose of higher education and the other involving the integrity of
scholarly information, are obviously related. Just as education should
not be reduced to the imparting of discipline-specific skills and
information, so knowledge should not be reduced to a collection of
context-independent assertions in a world in which all truth claims
are considered equal. The computer age could too easily entice us to
do both. Indeed, one of the most valuable all-around citizenship
skills for a technological age that we might reasonably wonder whether
we are doing a good job imparting is the skill to distinguish reasoned
analysis from demagoguery (whether liberal, radical, or conservative).
	A potential advantage, then, of the new educational
technologies is that they are likely to force us, if we think about
them at all, to reexamine our educational values. Let's not lose this
opportunity, nor the concomitant opportunity to research how the
audiences for these new technologies (including our own students)
respond to their content. Can we use the Web (say) to help us teach
students how to make these distinctions? Where (if anywhere) does this
kind of education fit into our existing curricula? And what might this
tell us?
	(4) Stakeholder considerations. In general, technology
assessment has learned to take into account not just whether a
technology is "good" or "bad," "expensive" or "cheap," "risky" or
"safe," but also for whom (that is, from the perspective of what
stakeholder interests) the technology is good, bad, expensive, cheap,
risky, or safe. How are costs, benefits, and risks to be socially
distributed? These issues are related to the issues of access and
cost-effectiveness discussed above. But there is another aspect to the
relationship between technology and social structure that is
applicable to the educational uses of information technology and not
subsumable under access and cost considerations: who benefits from
technological change?  An entire army of personal computer
manufacturers, Internet service providers, software developers, and so
on benefit very directly from the "Information Revolution" in higher
education and elsewhere. (So do technology-oriented support staff in
universities.) I will never willingly give up the convenience of email
anymore than I will give up my telephones, but I sincerely wish I did
not have to buy a new operating system (along with compatible software
and hardware) every couple of years. Less money goes from my pocket to
book publishers these days; much more goes to the computer-industry
"army." Perhaps this evens out. But I find it much more difficult to
gauge the educational value of a piece of software (whether for
myself, my students, or my own children) than the value of a book. I
am not as familiar with the publishers, I cannot thumb through the
index or peruse a title page, I do not find it as easy to "spot check"
the quality of odd passages here and there.  It may be that I am just
a bit old-fashioned-lacking technological fluency in the very skills I
am hoping that my students will develop, or ineffectively lamenting
the conversion of books to compact disks the way some of my colleagues
in journalism lament the dominance of televised news over its print
predecessors. But I do think it is appropriate to at least ask
questions about the net economic impact of the current trends in
educational technology, along with questions about the ways in which
book publishers (who, while definitely out to make a profit, often
seem to have at least an awareness and sometimes a real
commitment-within obvious economic constraints-to the pursuit of
scholarly and literary excellence) are different from members of the
computer industry (in which the "inherent" appeal of the technology
itself often appears, at least, to be the overriding value). If
technology should prove to be "good" in terms of learning outcomes but
"expensive" in terms of real dollar costs, who profits? Isn't this an
important (and researchable) question-one we have largely ignored? And
is there anything we can do to create a market in which "good"
technologies (including software) will outcompete the "bad" ones, or
at least one in which it will be easier to tell the difference?
	Technology is certainly not, in my view, "value-neutral";
decisions about which technologies to adopt and in what forms are
decisions about the characteristics of the society we want our present
one to evolve into. We in the U.S. have a cultural bad habit of
ignoring the impact of our technological choices and our power to make
them-as though individual automobile ownership were somehow a more
"natural" development than mass transit, or (conversely) the
disappearance of the family-owned farm a "natural" outgrowth of
efficiencies of scale made possible by technological modernization. We
probably will never be able to design the definitive study that will
tell us whether our new educational technologies are "good" or "bad,"
but we can engage in meaningful empirical study that will answer some
important questions about equality of access, the real costs of
technology, educational values, and stakeholder self-interest and
thereby empower us to make more enlightened choices.


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