Is Past Prologue?

Is Past Prologue?

Gene V Glass
Arizona State University

It's not clear that you should ask old people to project the future; we have a much smaller stake in it than young people.

In 1995, I participated in a Past-presidents panel. I boldly entitled my talk "AERA & Educational Research in the Next Century." I tried to describe how education researchers would work in the year 2010. I must warn you that my track record in making predictions is not very good. A couple years before the 1995 panel, I had predicted that commercially produced scholarly journals would disappear in favor of open access online journals by the year 2000. I was a little bit off on that one. But I don't think I was too far off in my prediction about how researchers would work fifteen years hence:

"I will be working at home more than in my university office because it is cheaper for me and the university and I'm as accessible one place as the other. "…[I'll have] instant real-time voice communications with students and colleagues…anywhere in the world at no cost [beyond a basic broadband connection]. "Within seconds I [will download] an article published by a peer-reviewed scholarly journal …[that] contains hypertext links to related work. "I will be able to perform computer searches of thousands of documents … in university libraries…. "I [will] direct my …computer to … a site that provides a complete listing of US Census variables; I [will] click … on 'Highest Level of Education Attained' and 'Country of Origin.' Within two minutes I am mailed …a contingency tabulation of the US population on the two variables."

Now the irony in my crystal ball gazing back then was that everything I mentioned—and there was more—was already possible in 1995. Possible, but hardly simple. Today, these wonderful affordances are commonplace. And they are shaping the way we work and much more than that in ways not altogether clear.

Researchers—the Cosmopolitan faculty to use Robert Merton's name for them—have long identified with their "invisible college" more than their Local colleagues. Cheap, worldwide telecommunications has intensified this. Cosmopolitan faculty don't come to their campus offices as often as they used to; they are now "closer" to those elsewhere who share their scholarly interests than to the person assigned the physical office next door. A colleague recently asked me, "How many of the faculty in your college work primarily out of their office on campus?" "Maybe a third," I said—but on second thought I think I overestimated. "25% of mine," she replied. "It's all about email," she said; and she was right. Two grad students use my campus office; the notion of an office is becoming obsolete; my son-in-law, a web developer for IBM, supervises 6 web workers in Sao Palo and recently closed out his office at IBM in preference to working entirely from home.

Before the internet, we were in close contact with colleagues and students. Perhaps we flatter ourselves to think that others benefited from this.

Students are probably the biggest losers in this new arrangement. They may receive more emails than ever before, but the nature of the interaction is different. How many, like me, have often sent an email that read "This is too complicated for email; phone me"? Skype is a wonderful invention. But different things happen when you are in close proximity all day and there's the possibility that a conversation once opened could go on for hours, or at least 30 minutes. I love my Skype, but those audio-video conversations are nearly always as abbreviated as the emails we exchange. It would take a microethnographer to analyze all the ways that our communications have changed, but all I know is that meeting face-to-face like this is decidedly different…usually much better.

Organizations have usually meant more to the Cosmo faculty than their local affiliation. So scholarly organizations can be expected to play an even greater role in the lives of research oriented faculty than in the past. The vast majority of us have experienced AERA in two ways: 1) as a publisher of many papers and a few books, and 2) as a convener of an annual meeting. The former function—publishing house—is changing radically. The new contract with SAGE will in the long run first change the day-to-day labors of the Central Office, then spark an identity crisis: What do we do now that we are not mainly a publisher? AERA's identity will have to change in the new era of scholarly communications.

What might new roles for organizations like AERA look like? Let me suggest one.

Technology can't replace physically coming together in meetings like this. Maybe that should be AERA's primary role. Why not two meetings, one on each coast each year. (Sorry, Chicago; but if my proposal were put to a vote this week, it would probably pass overwhelmingly.) It's pretty clear that west coast meetings draw far fewer east coasters and vice versa. And then there's the issue of program time. There simply isn't half enough time in the five days that the Annual Meeting takes place for all that should be presented to be presented. If this sounds like a complaint about the jurying of proposals, that's exactly what it is. Far too many papers and symposia are rejected—not given program space. And the process of peer review is far from the winnowing of wheat from chaff ["ch" as in "chug."] that we pretend it is. Other scholarly organizations—representing the hard sciences, for example—reject very few persons who wish to talk about their research with their colleagues. Educational research isn't high energy physics, you say? So what? What is lost if a presentation less than stellar happens at an AERA meeting? Do we really think that isn't happening now? More meetings; more poster sessions; more roundtables; fewer august assemblages (like this one?). It has always been a source of great pride to me that this organization, unlike so many others, did not bring people like Mike Ditka (sorry again, Chicago) and Katie Couric to speak at its meetings. AERA is all about participation. And we should have more venues for people to participate. The creation of the SIGs—which incidentally was initiated back in the early 1970s when I was a member-at-large of the Council—was one of the most important steps in the evolution of the Association.

Technology is revolutionizing the publication of research in ways so numerous and radical that they hardly need mentioning. Print newspapers are under intense pressure to adapt to the modern world. My doctoral student, who was once a baseball reporter for the Chicago Tribune and is now the lead baseball writer for the Arizona Republic, recently had to reapply for his job along with every other reporter and editorial writer on the paper. Several writers have left the paper; others have had their jobs downgraded. The size of the printed edition has shrunk; the 30-50 demographic is reading news online. Old commercial publishing houses are feeling the heat of open access scholarly publication via the internet. AERA will have to find a role for itself in the future other than as publisher of paper journals. It may survive and even prosper without meeting the needs of its members. But think how much more it could do if it saw itself as providing what no other organization or company can: fostering more authentic face-to-face interaction of the type that no new technology will ever replace.

Notes

1. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Tuesday, April 10, 2007. 8:15 am - 9:45 am Sheraton / Chicago Ballroom, Section IX, Level 4. Session title: "Educational Quality: AERA Presidents Looking Forward and Back," Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Chair.
2. Glass, G. V (1995). AERA and Educational Research in the Next Century. Paper presented at the AERA Ex-Presidents Panel at the AERA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, April 1995.
3. Merton, Robert K. (1949). Social Theory and Social Structure. NY, NY: The Free Press.