Information and its use

By enabling new possibilities for students to enter information and for machines to respond, teaching machines were received as new capacities of extended interactivity that allowed new forms of “personalized” instruction, with better responses to the different needs of individuals. Those new possibilities immediately gave rise to fear, mixed with certain political concerns, that such improved technological capacities would lead to replacement in educational work. The mid-twentieth-century fervor surrounding teaching machines eventually declined by the mid-1970s, as institutions began to recognize the costs and the persistent lack of guidelines and materials capable of supporting programs. Now that digital technologies concerning the practice and work of teaching and learning echo the fears of past decades, there is still a curious lack of reference to the developments or lessons of that not-so-distant past. In fact, despite the scale of state and institutional investments around the world to make contemporary digital education programs visible — today expanded across the planet through international conferences, programs launched by governments, or carefully prepared product launches and campaigns aimed at education — it is evident that this recent history continues to be omitted from contemporary accounts.

In this chapter, we explore those historical silences and that omission of memory from the record as symptoms of a growing “computational ideal” of the digital age, an ideal increasingly expressed in the emergence of state strategies adopted around the digital as a way of managing populations and avoiding the labor of governing in the information age. This ideal is related to an “industrial ideal,” which historian of technology Deborah Fitzgerald indicates was used to promote efficiency and the amplification of production results through the application of modern machinery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (2010). This ideal is also related to an ideology of high modernism that political scientist James Scott indicates could be felt in modern practices of government, which strengthened state intervention through the use of planning models that idealized and stylized future projections of firmly rationalized populations and territories (1999). While extending that logic, contemporary state strategies, particularly through policies developed around new educational technologies, also increasingly emphasize the greater creation of human capital modeled according to the contemporary computational ideal. Such strategies are based on new investments in material architectures and devices whose function is to silence history and omit memories from the record, but which also include the promotion and acceptance of what researchers in digital studies call the idealization of modularity in the information age, a central feature of planning models and practices. Rather than emphasizing improvements in production outcomes or social order as their main benefits, they present the ability to apply rapid, and even radical, changes that respond dynamically to conditions of specific external uncertainty as one of their essential advantages.

Such recognition of the benefits of modularity has not always been explained beyond specific sectors of technological design. Derived from code-design practices developed by programmers in the 1960s, the modular principle emphasizes the value of deliberately converting separate data parts, or input parts, of large coded systems — previously treated as a single block entity — into disposable, non-interdependent parts that can be segregated and even made invisible to other parts (McPherson, 2012). These principles were increasingly received as new management techniques in the computer industry during the 1970s, a sector that was becoming more competitive and expansive. Under those conditions, the impacts of modularity on organizational and technical practice produced design evolutions that could “sha