Preserving the Heirarchy

The critique of traditional institutional learning put forth in The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age hinges around a few key words: hierarchy, distribution and access. This doesn't encompass the entirety of the authors' interests or points, but I will focus on them because I believe they can be further distilled in order to shed light on the epochal change that the authors' are preparing (themselves, us, and institutional learning) for. If we strip down the aforementioned highlighted terms we notice that the unifying terms are those of position. Hierarchy defines, like a flow chart, the position of intercommunicating or interrelated nodes to one another; distribution is the cartography and composition (density, proximity) of those nodes; access demarcates the links (number and speed) belonging to each node. Thus, these properties, while differing in quality between institutional and collaborative learning, are still shared between them. They define the ordering, transmission and potential spread of ideas - they define learning itself.

The shift from classic institutional learning and collaborative learning is, the article argues, the shift in ratios. A decrease in hierarchy, an increase in access. The hinging variable here is the middle factor, distribution. As distribution becomes uncontrolled, faster and more widespread, access becomes easier to attain and, producing a positive feedback loop, widens the opportunity for further distribution. On a small scale, this shift is already evident. A rather specific example is explicated in this article, about the end of the Oink peer to peer network, a digital martyrdom that points to the dialectical struggle our subject article points to in subject of pedagogy. Our subject article does, in fact, begin to broach the question of what will change in the very meaning of 'learning' as we reduce hierarchy and increase access, but it remains somewhat reactionary. It's position is 'adapt or die', a wish to allow institutional learning to survive by merging its stability and resources with the techniques that, by sheer dint of distributive force, will almost necessarily overwhelm previous modes of information exchange.

I use, now, the term 'information exchange', though it, like its correlative term 'learning', carries with it the weight of value, a relic from the institutional mode of teaching that, I contend, remains heavily present in the subject article's ideological position. Information bears a dual meaning, both as 'facts provided or learned' and as 'what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things'. The link between these definitions is in sequence and arrangement, for it is in the ordering of representation that 'fact' emerges (think Heidegger, here). We should turn to the latter definition as revelatory of the hierarchical relic of institutional 'learning', a redundancy since 'learning', insofar as it is the providing of facts, is necessarily institutional since it relies on this ordering, and ordering that, traditionally, institutionally, is dictated by a hierarchical and guarantory authority. While in many regards the article seems to stand against this 'top down' procedure, its proposed program is more or less explicitly suggested as a cure for social ills such as criminality and poverty; it presents the arrival of the collaborative mode as redemptive. This redemptive angle, its preservation of value, is intrinsically tied to the oppressive aspect of hierarchy as controlled ordering and thus the institutional mode of learning, in a way that is best revealed in a quotation from the text itself:

'The Web has also facilitated the proliferation of information, from the inane and banal to the
esoteric and profound, from the patently false, misleading, even (potentially) dangerous and destructive to the compelling, important, and (potentially) life-enhancing and life-saving.' The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, pp 24-25

A binary is being set up here a, as is found in many redemptive narratives, separation of the just and unjust, the 'dangerous and destructive' and the 'life-enhancing and life-saving'. The article's wish to preserve institutional learning under the guise of reducing the digital divide (in the favor of access and, ostensibly, in opposition to hierarchy) preserves the valuation of information, siding, ultimately, with information's first listed definition as fact-learned, covering up the underpinning of information as things-ordered. The fear of 'destructive' information is held up as a bogey that requires the presence of a new form of institutional learning, one that prevents genuine revolutionary restructuring of 'learning' as a concept, a restructuring that is correctly identified by the article, but never actually embraced.

The article is afraid of distribution, that central factor, central term, central variable, because it does not want the dissolution of hierarchy, the end of institution; it wants institution and hierarchy to survive, to continue to perform its task of ordering, emphasizing the 'work' in networking (ibid p. 32), maintaining the present economy (promising reductions in poverty and [economically motivated] crime, ibid p. 21) into the emergence of the information economy.