Cyborgs, Nurses, and Distance Education:
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VOL. 5, No. 2, 59-69
In this paper, the author identifies the cyborg, a combination of machine and organism, as a fruitful model through which to understand distance educational technologies. Offices and hospitals are compared to distance education workplaces, and ways in which gender is related to the use of technology in these workplaces are indicated. Finally, ways in which women distance educators and students can make cyborgs of themselves are discussed.
Dans cet article, l'auteure voit dans le cyborg, qui combine la machine et l'organisme, un modèle utile par lequel comprendre les technologies de l'instruction à distance. Elle y compare les bureaux et les hôpitaux avec les lieux de travail de centres d'éducation à distance, et y indique les manières dont le sexe est relié à l'emploi de la technologie dans ces lieux de travail. Finalement, elle y discute la façon dont les éducatrices à distance et les étudiantes se transforment elles-mêmes en cyborgs.
In a groundbreaking paper for the new millenium, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's," Donna Haraway identifies the fruitful possibilities of the cyborg, "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction." In this paper, following Haraway (1989) and Menzies (1989), the ways in which the new technology and the global information economy have redefined office and hospital work will be described briefly. Then, implications for distance education workplaces and delivery systems will be outlined using experience at Athabasca University as an example. Following this, ways in which women distance education workers and students can create cyborgs of themselves and their computers so as to subvert what Haraway calls the Informatics of Domination will be specified.
Computerization usually starts in the back offices of corporations, and is used to perform discrete functions such as accounting. Eventually, computers penetrate the front office and begin interacting with customers (witness the instant teller). Once computer equipment, including hardware and software, has been purchased and used in this way, companies often then begin to ask computers to "talk" to one another. So begins the "integration stage" of computerization. At this stage major changes occur in the workplace. A study by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (Menzies, 1989) reports that at this stage layoffs occur, full-time work decreases, and part-time work increases. Work previously done by union members is taken over by management and there is increased monitoring of employees' productivity. It is at this point, too, that computerwork is pooled and standardized.
However, it is not just corporations that have been affected by computerization, hospitals, too, have felt their impact (Menzies, 1989). Some hospitals, for instance, now require all patient information to be entered into a main-frame, and all decisions regarding patient care now emerge from computer programs. Such integrated systems break down patient care into small discrete parts, which are authorized centrally, and monitored constantly. In some hospitals, nurses cannot perform any treatment, not even a bed bath, which has not been authorized. Menzies (1989) cites one study in which it is reported that as computer systems are introduced nurses often spend more time with computers than with patients (p. 87). Simultaneously, reliance on semi-skilled staff increases and full-time employment of professionals decreases. In general, nursing is transformed from a social process "involving personal judgement within the context of a relationship with the patient to a technical process, executing preset `patient care tasks and orders'" (p. 88).
Not all changes brought on by technology are negative, however, and some of the positive have been adopted by distance education. The use of part-time rather than full-time structures is, for example, a characteristic of distance education. The opportunity for part-time study is often attractive to an adult student who is working full-time. Similarly, part-time telephone tutoring is convenient for some Ph.D. students. However, for another group of distance education workers - clerical staff - computerization has had the same adverse effect it has had in other offices. Anecdotal evidence from Athabasca University shows that as computerized data storage has been introduced, secretarial work has become less creative, with more data entry responsibilities and less opportunity to complete a work process from start to finish. As well, the clerical workforce in an educational institution, such as a university, can be just as susceptible to layoffs and shifts from full-time to part-time as those working in non-academic settings.
Another aspect of the computerization of distance education, which students, tutors, secretarial staff, and full-time faculty are all subject to, is the monitoring and standardization of work processes. For the student, increased monitoring may or may not be beneficial. For instance, while some students may appreciate the frequent on-line testing and evaluation that computerized learning provides, other students may wish to proceed at a different pace and in an order not prescribed by the course package. A computer program requiring a particular order and pacing of assignments would fail to meet the needs of these individuals.
For tutors and clerical staff, increased monitoring is potentially problematic because these educational workers have less control over their work environments, and are much more subject to hierarchical relations in the workplace. They are unlike full-time faculty who have more personal control over their work and who may choose to benefit from or ignore collegial monitoring, just as they often do in the noncomputerized environment.
Just as monitoring has its advantages and disadvantages, so, too, does standardization. A standardized marking scheme, for instance, would help secretaries input marks for each student as they are submitted by the tutors. Tutors, however, often wish to vary the number of assignments or the percentage weighting of each assignment. For instance, in teaching students for whom English is a second language and who are attempting to improve their essay writing skills, a tutor may wish to increase the weighting of the essay assignment, so as to direct and reward the student who puts more energy into the essay.
The problem of standardization is that it demonstrates the way in which the computer can dominate the work process and create conflict. The secretary must fill "screens" of data, which can only be input in a certain way. The tutor must provide accurate and helpful assessments of students' work which must then be entered on a computer. The requirement that marks be entered into a computer, rather than just recorded once by a tutor, creates conflict.
The course production process in distance education illustrates a further similarity between the computerized hospital and the distance education workplace: work in both places is broken down into small discrete parts. In a traditional campus-based university, course production is controlled by one professor from start to finish with little external input. The professor usually designs her own courses, gives her own lectures, evaluates her own students, and organizes her own photocopying. However at Athabasca University, a nontraditional distance education institution, after the professor proposes a course outline, she then waits for feedback from her colleagues, writes a draft of her course, works with editors and other colleagues on that draft, and finally sends "her" course off to media services for production. When production is completed, a tutor takes over, and the professor is left to "coordinate" the course at a distance from the tutor, the student, and the materials.
In this instance, computerization can be beneficial and can solve some of the problems that the discretely divided nature of distance education tasks create. One can envision the professor and her computer united as a "cyborg" following the progress of her course as it enters printing services, proceeds to media, then to materials management, and out to small town Alberta. The cyborg could send a message to the tutor in Edmonton and her computer (another cyborg), who responds by saying that the small town Albertan student is doing well, or that the student has not done an assignment in four months. Then, forming another cyborg with her telephone, the professor could call the Albertan (forming another cyborg with her phone) and help her with course-related problems.
Of course, standardization, the breakdown of work processes, and increased monitoring of course production encourage the central authorization of distance education work. In traditional universities, because work is less public, and changes hands less frequently, there are fewer opportunities for administrators to comment on work done, or order new work. In the distance education setting, however, a senior administrator can request approvals at various stages of course development. At Athabasca, this possibility is variously seen as an intrusion, an opportunity, or a responsibility. When course writers or editors are overburdened with work, they may find monitoring and central approvals an intrusion; when workers in the print shop are patiently awaiting materials they may see central administrative control as an opportunity to make the work process more efficient; administrators themselves may see authorization of work as their central responsibility. As central control increases, of course, worker autonomy decreases. In the university socio-political environment, however, which traditionally has been located somewhere on a continuum, the end points of which are a benevolently administered liberal individualism and anarchy, centralized authority is not easily accepted. Thus, though new technologies and the associated work processes push the distance education workplace toward a hierarchic, centralized structure, an older tradition militates against this movement. Sometimes a frustrating set of mixed messages and incoherent actions results.
Just as nurses in the computerized environment spend less time with their patients, it is possible that should telephone tutors come to rely on computerized exam marking, programmed learning via computer, and time-delayed electronic mail, they may spend less time talking to students. Whether this occurs depends, largely, on the costs of computer assisted learning. Scanlon, Jones, and O'Shea (1987) point out that computer assisted learning is very expensive and a one-hour CAL exercise takes "about the same person power as is needed to produce a thirty minute television program" (p. 265). Paul (1989) states that: "elaborate networks for computer assisted learning...are expensive to acquire and operate, especially if they are to be made equally accessible to students outside the urban centres, a vital component of (Canadian distance education universities') mandate." Institutions such as Athabasca University, Télé-université and the Open Learning Agency, because they are relatively small, have lacked the resources for experimentation in this area, and have not been able to assume the risk of being on the leading edge of technology (p. 156).
Of interest and of possible concern is the British Open University's recently instituted home computing policy which requires that "responsibility for providing access to computing equipment has shifted from the university to the students themselves" (Kirkwood, 1989, p. 5). This sort of policy raises questions about the accessibility of computer assisted learning to lower income students.
The costs of computerization, however, change moment by moment, and they must be assessed relative to labor costs. As educational workers, such as tutors, unionize and become more militant in wage and salary demands, they may find their jobs have been taken over by machines in order to maintain profit margins. Menzies (1989) points out that new computer-controlled manufacturing technologies are reducing the number of jobs and the skill, satisfaction, and involvement of workers in those that remain. The reason for this is "cost-efficiency" or simply profit motivation. But
One person's effort to save labour puts another person out of work....In context, what might make economic sense on individual business ledger-books does not make equal sense on the larger social ledger. The social price of displaced people and their skills and energy can be seen as externalities only for as long as we refuse to raise our eyes and calculate the negative effects on children, families, communities and the social environment at large. (Menzies, 1989, p. 130)
The business of distance education is affected not only by the same cost efficiency motivation of other industries, but also by similar losses when clerical staff, tutors, and faculty members are made redundant by narrowly costed attempts at efficiency.
To conclude this paper, ways in which women distance education workers and students in health and nursing can create cyborgs of themselves and their computers so as to subvert the Informatics of Domination will be specified. Why women in particular? The reasons may be self-evident. Most nurses and nurse educators are women; women are different from men and women's relationship with technology is different from men's. Women have been excluded from, or have met barriers to their participation in technological education, development, and use (see Rothschild, 1983; Kramarae, 1988; Wright, 1987). In schools and universities, machines are often assumed to be within the male domain (Turkle, 1988). Even when women have used new technologies, such as voice amplifiers, they have been constrained to uses which did not challenge stereotypical gender roles: "when they attempted to use it in ways that would lead to change in the traditional order and in women's customary roles, their right to use it was challenged" by both men and women (McKay, 1988, p. 188). If we are to make cyborgs of ourselves, we must consider our gender and how it has affected our relationship with machines.
If women tend to be technophobic, or just less educated than men about technology, a first step toward overcoming this handicap is to become motivated. Donna Haraway's account of the cyborg provides strong motivation. Haraway describes the advantages of the cyborg over the mere human being. A cyborg is anti-dualistic. It challenges the dualism of the human versus the machine. It is a combination, without boundaries, of machine and organism, of the technical and the organic. Secondly, the cyborg opens up the possibility of embodiment. Haraway (1989) asks "Why should our bodies end at the skin or include at best other bodies encapsulated by skin" (p. 201)? Machines can be integrated with our bodies; they can be intimate components, as those people with an artificial tooth, hip, or heart will realize. Perhaps nurses are better equipped than most women for making cyborgs of themselves because they are more familiar with the integration of human and machine in health care. This possibility of merging between a writer and her computer adds a sensual component to Haraway's ideas.
The merging of body and machine is particularly revolutionary for women, because women's embodiment in reality, science, and literature has been so circumscribed by their role in biological reproduction. Haraway points out that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration than with reproduction (birthing). They are illegitimate "bastards" who have no original symbiosis such as that formed by male/female coupling. They can uncouple, recouple, regenerate, but they don't need to be reborn, and they cannot be born whole and reproduced.
These ideas are better read in the original. However, this brief outline serves as a departure for a consideration of cyborgs in distance education. Earlier this paper presented a fantasy about a professor as a cyborg with her computer, entering via the telephone lines the home of a tutor or student who, in turn, were cyborgs with their telephone; this was an account of a cyborg network, or web. Cyborgs regenerate themselves as networks. The cyborg networked, webbed world is more like the traditional women's world than the contemporary men's world. Scientist Ursula Franklin describes the women's world of work:
Tasks arise in context and out of specific needs. This defines them...they are unschedulable and there is a high degree of randomness, both in the reality and in the expectations, since the women's world is to a large measure unplannable. It is horizontally unstructured and full of the unexpected. Diversity in skills is valued as is personal loyalty and sense of continuity. The world of women puts great stock in experience; experience is seen to be translatable to new, unforseen and unforseeable tasks. (Cited in Menzies, p. 234)
Domestic labor, especially childcare, provides the best example of women's work, while nursing, as an ethic of care arising out of a specific context (Menzies, p. 234), also represents a traditional women's world. Men's jobs such as accountant, middle manager, or long haul truck driver provide examples of linear work worlds which are highly planned and measurable, vertically structured, and based more on knowledge or training than experience.
If we as women distance educators and students are to make cyborgs of ourselves, we can begin from our traditional world of relationship and connection in context. Remarkably, we have been thought to be field dependent, while men have been seen as field independent. However, interpreted from a feminist perspective, we are actually context aware, not context blind. Our awareness of context and connection, our general sensitivity to relation-ship as well as task will help us to plan, implement, utilize, and evaluate technological change effectively and healthily.
I would like to conclude by suggesting seven guidelines related to planning, implementing, and evaluating technological change by and for feminist cyborgs. These are not new, but need to be reinforced.
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Catherine Bray, Ph.D., is assistant professor and coordinator of Women's Studies at Athabasca University. She is a feminist and political activist. As a researcher, she is interested in feminist pedagogy and women's play.