Summary notes on W. Wayt Gibbs, "Taking Computers to Task," Scientific American, July 1997, 82-89.

All quoted material copyright, 1997, by Scientific American.

Despite the now "near millenial" fervor with which proponents extol the advent of new computer systems and applications - there are several reasons to be skeptical about such claims:

the [information] explosion is well under way, and its economic blessings so far appear decidedly mixed. For all the useful things computers do, they do not seem, on balance, to have made us much richer by enabling us to do more work, of increasing value, in less time. Compared with the big economic bangs delivered by water-, steam- and electricity-powered machines, productivity growth in the information age has been a mere whimper....Recent studies of computer use in offices reveal that much of the time saved by automation is frittered away by software that is unnecessarily difficult, unpredictable and inefficient. Design experts warn that current industry trends toward increasingly complex programs and new, untested ways of presenting information could do more harm than good - and will almost certainly do less good than advertised. (82)

Much of Gibbs' article focuses on the startling disparity between the growing investment in information technology (IT) and actual productivity gains: in fact, the slowdown in productivity gains (from 4.5% in the 1960s to 1.5% more recently) has shown up most significantly in precisely those industries which have invested the most in IT. There are a variety of efforts to explain the disparity - ranging from the inability to accurately measure productivity gains in certain areas (including education), through time-lags of various sorts to a frank recognition that computers remain mediocre tools (including the oft-touted 3-D virtual environments, autonomous software agents, speech recognition and understanding, the Web, and Videoconferencing, which fall far short of proponents promises in a variety of ways). As well, there are tremendous costs in terms of technical support, replacement costs for obsolete equipment (80-90% of the total outlay for IT, on one estimate), costs associated with ever more complex but thereby ever less useful software, nontechnical employees' time given over to helping co-workers, and - perhaps most of all -

..."futzing" with their computers rather than working on them. That costs employers another $5,590 per computer each year, the group [the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn.] estimates. Its guess may be low. SBT Accounting Systems in San Rafael, Calif., found in a 6,000-person survey that office workers futz with their machines an average of 5.1 hours - more than half a workday - each week. One fifth of that time was wasted waiting for programs to run or for help to arrive. Double-checking printouts for accuracy and format ran a close second. Lots of time goes into rearranging disk files. And then there are games; Microsoft Windows comes with four preinstalled. All told, SBT estimates, futzing costs American businesses on the order of $100 billion a year in lost productivity.

There may be little that companies can do to reduce hardware and futzing costs. Boeing removed Windows's solitaire game from all its machines, Landauer notes. Sun Microsystems reportedly banned its managers from using presentation software to create fancy slides for meetings. (87)

The bright spot in all of this is that productivity gains can be demonstrated for computer uses that involve human-factors engineering to custom fit interfaces and applications to specific tasks. But this lesson is being learned only slowly: in a recent computer-human interface conference,

...only nine of those 83 projects compared workers' performance on real tasks using the new interface with their current way of doing things. Four offered no gains at all. Radiologists completed their reports faster without the computer. Video offered no improvement over audio for collaborative writing or design. Only three new interfaces - an interactive blueprint program, the combination of a keyboard joystick with a mouse for two-handed input, and a "wearable" computer - sped work significantly. (89)

While this report focuses on productivity gains in business, some analogies may be drawn for computer-use in education. At least, this report reinforces my concern that students can waste far more time on computers - between game-playing and spiffing up their web pages - than they may spend taking advantage of the many tremendous learning opportunities made possible by computers and networks. It further reinforces my sense that we run into serious questions of balance the more we focus on the _means_ of presentation (Web pages, PowerPoint, etc.) vis-a-vis the _content_ being presented.

Finally, all of this reinforces my sense that academics - e.g., the President of a major state university down the street - who think that the future of education lies in "every faculty member putting his/her courses on the Internet" are painting with very broad and highly misleading strokes. My own experience - ranging from disappointing experiments with videoteleconferencing to somewhat successful (because, this article suggests, they were highly focused and specific) uses of e-mail and the Web - tells me that these technologies can indeed powerfully supplement more traditional classroom approaches (including readings, discussions, indeed - lectures!). But only supplement, not replace.

If this is true, those institutions that have jumped on the distance learning boat in the belief that the Internet and the Web will replace bricks-and-mortar institutions may have jumped just a wee bit too soon.