Juxtaposing Different Views of IT and Its Effect on Young People

A friend in Facebook posted a link to this piece in Educause Review, Strategic IT: What Got Us Here Won't Get Us There, by John O'Brien, who is President and CEO of Educause.

Findings from the 2016 EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) studies of undergraduate students clearly demonstrate that students desire more technology and that technology helps them learn (see figure 1). In the 2017 study, at least 80 percent of students report that each of the student success technologies listed in the survey is at least moderately useful. About 6 in 10 students wish their instructors used lecture capture, early-alert systems, and free, web-based supplemental content more often.¹⁶ Technology offers perhaps the brightest hopes for moving some of the hardest-to-move needles in higher education, including student engagement and (timely) success. For this reason, among others, student success was the #2 issue in both the 2017 and the 2018 EDUCAUSE "Top 10 IT Issues" lists, behind only information security in both years.

Unambiguously, the message is that students want IT and IT is good for them.

I'd like to contrast this with a passage from quite a different piece, one of David Brooks' Sidney Award Winners, Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex? by Kate Julian.  I have made it a habit over the winter break to read the pieces that Brooks recommends.  They are not all to my liking, but the batting average is higher than what I get out of my normal magazine reading. Julian's piece makes for quite a compelling read, even though it is somewhat graphic in places.

Anna, who graduated from college three years ago, told me that in school, she struggled to “read” people. Dating apps have been a helpful crutch. “There’s just no ambiguity,” she explained. “This person is interested in me to some extent.” The problem is that the more Anna uses apps, the less she can imagine getting along without them. “I never really learned how to meet people in real life,” she said. She then proceeded to tell me about a guy she knew slightly from college, whom she’d recently bumped into a few times. She found him attractive and wanted to register her interest, but wasn’t sure how to do that outside the context of a college party. Then she remembered that she’d seen his profile on Tinder. “Maybe next time I sign in,” she said, musing aloud, “I’ll just swipe right so I don’t have to do this awkward thing and get rejected.”

Jillian's piece makes clear that many young people are uncomfortable with face-to-face interactions.  They lack the emotional intelligence about how to read other people.  They are very fearful of rejection and just as fearful of mistreatment if not rejected.  They are this way because they lack the necessary experience and the learning by doing that comes from the experience. Here IT is depicted as a crutch, reliance on which blocks the acquisition of essential life skills.  And the thing is, this is not a new argument.  Sherry Turkle has been saying essentially the same thing for a while, for example, Stop Googling.  Let's Talk.  Further, the concern is more than the issue of developing soft skills.  It is also about cognitive development.  Young people with their heads always looking at a screen tend to multi-process and manage tasks that way.  This critique by Peter Doolittle says they are actually blocking themselves in thinking hard about an issue. Concentration demands focus.   So, a reasonable argument can be made that for many young people IT is a crutch, they will express preference for that crutch, but if you are interested in their development you will wean them off of the crutch and require more focused face-to-face interaction, at least some of the time.

Now let me segue to why I'm writing this piece.  I've been retired for more than 8 years.  During the first year or two of retirement, I wrote a couple of pieces that were critical of the profession and they ended rubbing some people the wrong way.  So I decided to let sleeping dogs lie.  But now I'm in the middle of reading yet another piece from Brooks' Sidney Awards.  This one is called The Constitution of Knowledge and it's by Jonathan Rauch.  It's mainly about how trolling and social media are upsetting how we come to believe that things are true.  But, before getting to that, he goes through what might be termed the scientific method, coupled with peer review, further debate, new arguments, and new evidence, with the cycle repeating, perhaps many times. And this is done in a distributed way, not in a closed group.  So, I wondered if the alternative view of IT that was sketched in the previous paragraph would be brought up in response to O'Brien's piece.  Let the Educause community participate in the method that Rauch outlines  It definitely would be better for a currently active CIO to be self-critical of the profession this way, than for a has been to do it.  But I thought it possible that the self-criticism would never emerge.  And I still have some friends who are active in the profession who might read my stuff.  If what is being said here is sensible, they could send the link to their friends and it would get some airing that way.  If, instead, it is ignored, that certainly wouldn't be the first time.

Getting back to the O'Brien article, he argues that CIOs increasingly don't have a seat at the table where the big decisions on campus are being made.  This too is not a new issue.  Back in 2005-06 I was on an Educause committee called 2020 and I know we discussed it then, because I was the one who raised the topic with the group.  At the time I thought that CIOs needed to be bilingual - they had to be able to talk IT with other IT types, and they had to be able to talk in plain English and be conversant with campus issues that are not framed with an IT component, as well as those issues that are so framed, when talking with other campus leaders.

But it may be more than than that.  Most CIOs reading O'Brien's piece might not react this way, but in my reading (I confess I only read up to the start of the section on information security) there is something fundamentally wrong with claiming to take a strategic view of IT, on the one hand, but then not taking on the criticisms regarding IT for young people's learning, on the other.  Those criticisms are out there and need to be addressed in a serious way.  Not doing so, the piece looks like boosterism for IT.  If that is even in the ballpark as an argument, then inadvertently O'Brien may be making the case to keep CIOs from sitting with the grownups in the campus administration.  Real strategic thinking, such as in a SWOT analysis, looks at weaknesses as well as strengths.

It's harder to argue in public about weaknesses.  Others might cherry pick that part of the report and use it to make cuts in the IT budget.  Undeniably, there are attendant risks in taking such an approach.  Yet let's not ignore the potential upside.  Evidence of a self-critical approach is a more likely way to find a seat at the grownup's table. If that is a prize CIOs are after, this is the most likely way to achieve it.

I'm not saying this is easy.  If we're purists, then we're either all in for IT or we're Luddites.  My preference is something more nuanced and invariably harder to articulate as a result. I would be delighted if the profession were to agree with me on that.