It's been almost two months since I've found my way back to school, back into a formal classroom and I'm loving it so much more than I had expected to.
There's an underused muscle there trying to figure out familiar rhythms again. I can feel it trying to get back into the habit of weekly or biweekly submissions, with each problem set presenting a fresh start, a new chance to tackle a problem, for learning new things and having your mind blown by paradigm shifts on the regular.
And since I'm no longer exclusively focused on studying computers and tech, there's an unexpected exhilaration that comes with approaching a new field, trying on frameworks for size and seeing how people in a different rhetorical tradition struggle with the same problems.
This time around, though, I'm noticing a marked difference in the use of technology in the classrooms. I'm not too surprised to see power point slides and video recordings of lectures even through the latter were uncommon during my time as an undergrad.
No, what I am most surprised by are the number of gatekeepers to educational material that seem to have cropped up (or strengthened their footholds) in the intervening half decade.
The last time I was studying, I was in a comp sci and tech focused program. There were programming assignments that we submitted through the CMS (content management system) that I was fairly certain was coded up and duct taped together by professors and TAs in the CS department. It made grading easier since the system could check the submitted code against an automated test script, sparing the poor TAs having to go through each submission by hand.
We used a question and answer service called Piazza for class discussions where you could ask questions, and either the TAs or your fellow students would respond. Most of these forums were semi public: you needed university credentials to log on, but once you were in, you could see what people in other classes were chatting about too. If memory serves right, some classes were completely public, and you could peak into what other schools were discussing without having to be enrolled at all. Essay submissions for classes that needed those happened via Blackboard, and education management software, or email when Blackboard inevitably crashed.
For many of my classes, syllabi were publicly available, along with links to the required readings and subsequently, lecture slides once, the class had been taught. This was especially common for CS classes, and for the newer interdisciplinary media thought and sociology of tech courses.
I remember math was submitted to letter boxes in the math building for hand grading. Heck I even had a few public assignments that included Tweeting at a class handle on Twitter (rip!) about what we thought of the readings.
The benefit of modern tech is that digital goods need not be scarce. So why are we so bent on enforcing a scarcity and regulating them as such?
I’ve been able to go back to those class webpages, to review the notes in much the same way I had first learned them, to recall topics I’ve studied and find researchers I had come across. I’d been able to follow these researchers, many of whom were on social media and had interesting things to say about other things I found interesting too.
In short, as a student, you played out in the world, committing your code to GitHub, participating on StackOverflow much like all the other professionals, and generally being a part of the community that your were learning from.
The classroom was a space where we went to learn how to interact with the world, ask questions, and make mistakes. Outside the classroom, in assignments, in projects, we went out there and interacted with the world we were about to join. The boundaries on "real life" were a lot less fluid.
This time around, though, everything feels much more boxed in. The classroom feels much more like a sandbox, with much stricter boundaries between "the real world" and classroom. I would have thought that a graduate program would try to dissolve those lines as much as possible since many people come in with prior work experience and an intention to go right back out there.
One of the biggest reasons for that seems to be the proliferation of access controls. Now, most course resources are only available to you if you're enrolled as a student in the class. It is only the syllabi that are publicly available, and even the course websites have been absorbed into this education management system called Canvas.
No longer can one just cruise along to see what the chatter is, collect reading materials, or even refer back to the ones that have previously existed. Those course websites I used to frequent from undergrad have been absorbed into Canvas, limiting overall access. Submissions are handled entirely by Canvas too, leaving absolutely no room for negotiation on deadlines, or on formats.
By using a technocratic system of enforcement, there is less space for negotiation in general, as you would expect from any other standardised system. I can imagine that it makes professors' lives a lot easier with a when they have a single place for hw collection and class communication.
But I wonder if we're thinking about the human tradeoffs in this quest for efficiency.
One of my most vivid memories from undergrad comes from a math class I was enrolled which had a purported deadline for homework submission around 5pm. But news quickly went around that the teaching staff had usually left the building by then and would only pick up the submissions from the boxes the following morning. And as long as you were able to get the submission in there before a TA picked it up, you were good.
Cue us procrastinators camping out in the building till wee hours of the morning finishing that problem set. I've also personally been the person running across campus at 7am to get those few sheets of paper in before the day officially started , and I've also been someone pleading with the TA as they pick out the stack of sheets for grading.
With the platforms now mediating this relationship between students and teachers, I wonder if we are formalising rules into law that we don't quite have a strong opinion on.
Would we recognise those norms if they were explicitly spelled out for us?
And further, is technocratic standardisation really a goal we should be aiming for in higher education at all? Isn't the point here to be your own person negotiating your own way through the world?
The tragedy is that we're slowly doing away with human communication in favour of convenience, and it's not a tradeoff most people spend much time thinking about. I've only seen it being framed as inevitability in popular media, rather than a conscious choice made by people.
There is indeed a graveyard of unmaintained knowledge websites that could have hosted the library, could have acted as nodes and centres of learning, all for free. And now we’re spending all that money again, on things that we already have, in order to organise power in the hands of a few corporations.
It breaks my heart now to see that even when professors record videos explaining concepts as pre-class prep, those videos are only present within the bounds of an access controlled platform.
The fact that these insanely smart and busy people have spent all this time and energy into creating a multimodal form of learning, but will probably never use these once the class is over is heartbreaking. I’d love to be able to go back to these notes and slides as primary materials out in the world instead of in my hoarding of this knowledge as private property that sits on my hard drive.
The benefit of modern tech is that digital goods need not be scarce. So why are we so bent on enforcing a scarcity and regulating them as such?
Moreover, this has the side effect of making higher education feel all the more exclusive, when access to both the content and your peers is mediated through your presence. If the default is to just store resources in a class closet, you never have to think about opening them out to the rest of the world at all. Congratulations! We’ve successfully enforced the tower-ness of the ivory tower. The gatekeepers are back, this time with more access controls!
This is a trend not only in education, but all across the web. We're rapidly loosing online public spaces in favour of groups chats, private servers and opt-in broadcast channels. The decline of Twitter and the proliferation of Gen AI provided the accelerant, and I don't think we're grappling enough with the fact that we're in the middle of abandoning the closest thing we've had to a collection of all of human knowledge.
In this situation, universities are in a unique position to create, curate and sustain the knowledge commons and they should think long and hard before they give up control of their hard earned knowledge resources.
Until next time,
Divyansha