Informated Teaching & Learning

It's been nearly 25 years since Shosana Zuboff published In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and introduced the term "informate" as a contrast to "automate" to describe how technology transforms work and working conditions. To automate is to consciously and systematically transfer both the skill and the responsibility for routine work practice from a human to a non-human agent. To informate is to enroll a non-human agent in work practice such that it provides feedback to the human agent.

I've written a lot about informating technologies in my career as they apply to writing, knowledge work, and to the knowledge work of teaching writing. That last topic is something I care deeply about as a teacher of writing myself. With Tim Peeples, I wrote a chapter called "Techniques, Technology, and the Deskilling of Rhetoric & Composition: Managing the Knowledge-Intensive Work of Writing Instruction." In that chapter, Tim & I warned that the costs of writing instruction were so high that we would soon see technologies arise to automate as much of the work associated with it as possible. Automated grading, outsourcing, and other things were part of this gloomy forecast. Worst of all, we argued, student learning would suffer.

But we saw another way too, suggested by Zuboff's alternative path, to create informating technologies that not only improved working conditions for teachers but also helped to demonstrate, via the information generated, that our pedagogies were working. To demonstrate, in other words, that students were learning.

Tim & I first presented the work that informed that chapter when we were still graduate students. And it was a bit strange looking out into a crowd of experienced faculty and issuing what surely seemed, at the time, to be dire warnings and equally Quixotic exhortations that we must immediately get to work building new kinds of software, new writing systems oriented toward learning. I've done that a lot in my career too.

But here lately, with help from my colleagues at WIDE, I've started to act on that call. We even have a little company now. We make software that informates teaching and learning. We do this as a deliberate, emphatic alternative to those making software that automates teaching and learning. We do this because we think it serves learners better. And we know it serves teachers better too.

I wanted to say this - as plainly and clearly as I could - because I am guessing some of you would like to know what we are up to and why when we talk to you about Eli. So that's it. What and why. We think learning to teach writing well is tough but it is worth it because it is the best way to help students understand themselves as learners as well as writers. We think helping students to understand themselves as learners - not merely as writers trying to get a paper done - is hard work, but well worth it too.

There are many others out there making software that does exactly the sort of thing Tim & I predicted all those years ago. If you read that post I linked to, you won't recognize the names of folks working on that software as rhetoric and writing studies scholars. You WILL recognize the names of the companies funding those projects as the same folks that buy you hors d'oeuvres at the 4C's. I am not happy that this prediction has come true. But I am doing something about it. You can too.