Resumen de The Production and Distribution of Knowledge through Open and Distance Learning
Open and distance learning (ODL) technology offers a new form of market mechanism for the distribution of knowledge which is increasingly presented as a commodity like any other. Information technology (IT) is also having an impact on the technical and social production of knowledge and higher learning in general. This paper will explore a range of issues arising from this ‘mercantilization’ of learning, by which is meant the tendency for knowledge and learning to be seen as products, skills and competencies produced for sale by what Berger (1987) has called the ‘knowledge industry’ The paper argues that the nature of knowledge is changing under the impact of IT and ODL, as, for example, the Renaissance and subsequent scientific revolution replaced divine revelation with personal human speculation, conjecture and refutation; the current proliferation of new technology is replacing the agency of human speculation with a kind of impersonal, disembodied, free‐floating, public dissemination of information.
It is also argued that the purpose of knowledge is changing too. Since the eighteenth century American and French revolutions, education has been used to induce knowledge in learners on a mass scale as a necessary social prerequisite to political democracy. Members of society were inducted into a knowledge of their culture as a ‘thinking system’ and were free — indeed encouraged — to understand and criticise its basic socio‐political and cultural forms, for the sake of freedom, liberty and emancipation. However, ‘knowledge’ and information are increasingly produced and sold to contract in a market economy ruled by an international class of decision‐makers in governments, multi‐national companies, public institutions, world relgions, and media. The purpose of this new form of ‘knowledge’ is ‘performativity’ — that is, the capacity to efficiently augment power by producing ‘competitive edges’ for the decision makers. The role of social, moral or even spintual critique has been vastly reduced compared to pre‐scientific revolution emphasis on theology, medicine and law—then the staple curricula in European universities.
It is further debated that post‐modern knowledge and open and distance learning have an ambiguous relationship. On the one hand ODL as an educational movement often espouses a rhetoric of ‘learner‐centredness’, ‘open access’ and ‘freedom to learn’ which harks from the social goals of the revolutionary eighteenth century. On the other hand, it espouses ‘life skills’, ‘self‐help’, ‘self‐development’ and ‘continuing vocational education’, which echoes the nineteenth century rhetoric of the utilitarianism of Bentham and Samuel Smiles. It is ambiguous whether ODL as an educational movement has thought through the implications of its activities since; it seems to quote even‐handedly from these two traditions. Is it for enlightened social critique or rampant industrialization — rapidly becoming post‐industrialization? It seems that the large ethical and social issues are being effectively lost in the technological race. Several questions are left hanging.
The paper also argues that Larsen (1986) has reasoned that there is need for a ‘revised “educational sociology'”. In the light of the preceding discussion, this paper suggests two directions for such an approach vis‐a‐vis education and training technologies such as ODL and expert systems: first, a micro level of analysis employing ethnographic (participant observation) methods and interpretive (e.g. ethnomethodological, conversation‐analytical and pheno‐menological) perspectives, and second, a macro level of analysis, utilizing the emerging body of social critique found in the current debate on ‘postmodernity’ which seeks to explore the cultural effects on the changes being wrought by new information and communicational media.
The paper concludes by observing that IT, in the production of knowledge, and ODL in its distribution/dissemination, is hastening disciplinary specialization within the institutions of higher learning. This leads to a fragmentation of the cultural core of Western civilization — universities no longer provide a unity of learning, and Renaissance man ('homo umversale') — as an idealized product of the humanistic educational mission and regime — has been replaced by communities of specialized experts and their students, employed by a class of decision‐makers who themselves have risen through specialized ranks without a general education in the sense that it was meant earlier in this century Those ‘specific intellectuals’ who are at work within the open and distance learning educational movement are likely to be the architects of the educational institutions of the twentieth century (such as electronic universities and learning organizations). If they cannot rise to the task of social and educational critique and tackle the big moral and social questions to which their industry gives rise, almost a thousand years of humanism will end in collapse.
