New Tools

In his landmark work, "Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians", Lauriston Sharp* chronicled the collapse of the aboriginal Yir Yoront culture -largely in response to the introduction of a new technology: the steel axe. More than a half century later, higher education’s struggles with the information revolution bear frightening parallels to the tale of Australia’s ill-fated Yir Yoront, leaving those of us who make our livelihoods here to search for new forms of organization as others cling insecurely to familiar ways. Like it or not, technology is changing higher education by empowering students and conditioning what they need to learn, want to learn, and how they prefer to learn. Now that powerful new tools of our trade are multiplying, the adaptability of our institutional/tribal culture is being put to the test.

All cultures revolve around some system of ideas, not all of which adapt well to changing circumstances. The Yir Yoront tribe shared a totemic belief system that was well suited to a stagnant stone-age technology, but poorly suited to handle technological innovation. The stone axe was integral to the traditional Yir Yoront lifestyle, which restricted ownership but not use of the axe to adult males. Once missionaries and their steel axes arrived, everything changed. In Sharp’s own words:

In …. aspects of conduct or social relations, the steel axe was …. at the root of psychological stress among the Yir Yoront. This was the result of new factors which the missionary considered beneficial: the simple numerical increase in axes per capita as result of mission distribution, and distribution directly to younger men, women, and even children. By winning the favor of the mission staff, a woman might be given a steel axe which was clearly intended to be hers, thus creating a situation quite different from the previous custom which necessitated her borrowing an axe from a male relative. As a result a woman would refer to the axe as "mine," a possessive form she was never able to use of the stone axe. In the same fashion, young men or even boys also obtained steel axes directly from the missions, with the result that older men no longer had a complete monopoly of all the axes in the bush community. All this lead to a revolutionary confusion of sex, age, and kinship roles with a major gain in independence and loss of subordination on the part of those who now owned steel axes when they have previously been unable to possess stone axes.

Americans revel in the newfound power of the Internet much as the Yir Yoront did with their new steel axes. The ‘net allows consumers to take a position of unprecedented bargaining strength through websites that will query the prospective customer for requirements and preferences, then spit out a list of providers, often arranged by cost. It will not be long before such web-based consumer search services (or "bots") cater to students worldwide seeking transferable online education. The Commonwealth of Virginia participates in an Academic Common Market, a limited example of a multi-state educational alliance designed to broaden student choice. Geographic distance between student and instructor is not the barrier to competition that it once was.

Perennial student problems with transportation, parking, care of dependents, and shifting work schedules make "telecommuting for learning" much more attractive. Shifting enrollment trends force colleges to recognize society’s growing preference for asynchronous web-delivered learning experiences, even as a part of traditional face-to-face courses. Yet many faculty lack the skills necessary to use powerful new tools of our trade effectively, and even those who do sense unsettling erosion in our traditional stature as the keepers of the keys to knowledge. We are the products of a less technologically advanced era when the focus of education was not so much on the means of delivery, but the content. Technology threatens the security of a familiar way of life –just as it did for the adult males of the Yir Yoront, whose social prestige slipped away quickly.

College faculty are thereby exposed to competing objectives as the guardians of academic integrity in an era of unprecedented competition. Sufficient enrollment to fill sections offered can no longer be taken for granted in a day when students are, for practical purposes, highly mobile. We wince when the word "customers" is used to describe our students, but increasingly recognize the importance of our colleges evolving toward more student-oriented institutions in the services that we provide. If students want to speak to a counselor in person, by phone or by Internet, we must cater to their preferences. If students want to register for courses via the Internet, our colleges need to deliver those services. If students are more attracted to courses that utilize the skills and technology that they expect to be using in the modern workplace, we need to provide those kinds of courses—but without sacrificing important learning objectives.

For the culturally rebellious Yir Yoront and modern-day instructional technology pioneers, allegiance to tradition wanes as new alliances and trade patterns form. Faculty who work for colleges unresponsive to their particular needs (for technical support, procedural reform, etc.) will turn much of their attention toward organizing with those of like mind—mainly via the web. It is on the web that we do business, meet new people, exchange ideas and work, obtain software, take courses, and occasionally even get a chance to teach for a college far away from our traditional "tribal" home. The contemporary equivalent to steel axes makes faculty—not just students—more mobile, and the revolution assumes the form of a quiet parting of ways from less-progressive cultures that fail to accommodate for shifting needs.

The contagious excitement of new teaching capabilities is thereby harvested by new organizations, often without the loss to the traditional tribe becoming immediately evident. Just as rapidly declining interest and participation in out-of-date rituals reflected the abandonment of the traditional Yir Yoront world-view, so the energies of our most progressive faculty are shifting to where we are more recognized, embraced, supported, and utilized. Traditional authority wanes, replaced by new organizations that have not withstood the test of time. As Sharp noted of the Yir Yoront,

A scene was set in which wife, or a young son whose initiation may not yet have been completed, need no longer defer to the husband or father who, in turn became confused and insecure as he was forced to borrow a steel axe from them. For the woman and boy the steel axe helped establish a new degree or freedom, which they accepted readily as an escape from the unconscious stress of the old patterns—but they, too, were left confused and insecure.… With the collapse of the system of ideas, which is so closely related to so many other aspects of the native culture, there follows an appallingly sudden and complete disintegration, and demoralization of the individual such as has seldom been recorded elsewhere. Without the support of a system of ideas well devised to provide cultural stability in a [dynamic] environment, but [with a system of ideas] too rigid for the new realities pressing in from outside, native behavior and native sentiments and values are simply dead. Apathy reigns.

To learn from the experience of the Yir Yoront, we may cultivate the habits of routinely re-examining not only our world, but also the lens through which we view it. As Thomas Kuhn** identified in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, unorthodox new ways of viewing the world were prerequisite to almost every major scientific breakthrough in modern times. As many individual perspectives change, a new cultural worldview is born: this strenuous process is underway in colleges and universities worldwide. We are adapting philosophically and organizationally as we revise the way we do our work.

Students and progressive faculty are the missionaries/revolutionaries of a new worldview, and our most fundamental task is to introduce others to a new lens with which we can more accurately view our transforming world. What the unconverted see through this lens will be both exciting and disturbing, as it calls for basic changes to the ways in which we make our livelihoods, with tremendous advantages for those who adapt and potentially devastating consequences for those who hesitate. Only leaders aware of the need for change will find the political will to take the risks of going with the flow of shifting consumer demands, of adopting new and dropping certain old cultural traits.

Successful adaptation to the rapidly changing technological environment requires guarding against innate denial of the need for fundamental change. We cannot afford to cling to the security of familiar but outdated methods, thinking, and organization, but some rough seas and major decisions lie just ahead. We need to re-examine who our “customers” are in a world where “community” has lost its traditional geographical barriers. We need a systems office that senses danger in centralized control and that can boldly encourage decentralized innovation. We need faculty who are willing to work collaboratively to produce educational content of a quality that will rival that of our well-heeled competitors. And of course we must be emotionally prepared for techno-savvy future students who will appreciate less how far we’ve come since our own introduction to today’s steel axes.

Jim Roberts is a 42-year-old Assistant Professor of Economics at Tidewater Community College. He started graduate school in Anthropology at Michigan State University and has served as chair of Tidewater Community College's Teaching & Learning Technology Roundtable.

*[Editor's Note: Lauriston Sharp's original article, "Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians," (Human Organization 11.1 [1952] has been reprinted in several anthologies on anthropology, such as E.H. Spicer, ed. Human Problems in Technological Change: A Casebook [New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1952: pp. 69-91]. More recently, the essay has been anthologized in J.P. Spradley and J. W. McCurdy, eds. 1994. Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural
Anthropology, 8th ed. [New York: HarperCollins, pp. 376-390].)

**For a synopsis of Kuhn's entire book and an outline see the web at Emory University by clicking the highlighted words in this sentence.