A politics for interactivity: Progressivism and its limits in federal congressional deliberations of distance education policy

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Computers and Composition 24 (2007) 404–420

A politics for interactivity: Progressivism and its limits in federal congressional deliberations of distance education policy Jeremiah Dyehouse College Writing Program, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, Rhode Island, USA

Abstract This article analyzes federal congressional discourse on distance education policy, describing progressive reformers’ use of the term, interactivity. Isolating congressional records of deliberations that treat interactivity, rhetorical analysis first traces progressive legislators’ and educators’ attempts to use the term to eliminate a restriction on financial aid funding for distance education students. Next, critical analysis describes how legislators and educators have advanced interactivity as a simple educational good. Contrasting legislators’ and educators’ views on interactivity with perspectives drawn from emerging computers and composition research, this article discusses what the field has to contribute to public deliberation of this issue. A conclusion notes opportunities for researchers’ participation in progressive reform efforts. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Distance education; Interactivity; Technology policy; Progressivism; Public deliberation; Federal congressional discourse; Rhetoric; Technological literacy

In February 2006, with the formal, legal retraction of Congress’s so-called “50 percent rule,” distance and for-profit higher education interests achieved one of their major goals for the reform of education law (Burd, 2004; Carnevale, 2003, 2006). The elimination of the 14-yearold restriction on the disbursement of federal education aid—a restriction originally adopted by Congress to curb fraud associated with correspondence-based programs—means that schools offering courses via distance education have gained substantially increased access to public federal financial aid. This change also means that traditional higher education institutions will face more competition for aid funding, an especially troubling prospect for under-funded public universities.1 ∗

Email address: [email protected]. The elimination of the 50 percent rule will reduce federal funds available to traditional higher education institutions by increasing the number of institutions to receive federal funding. In addition, while traditional colleges and universities may choose to offer their own distance education programs, elimination of the 50 percent rule reportedly encourages these institutions to “spin off” such programs (Carnevale, 2006), potentially further reducing the federal funding available to these schools’ on-site operations. 1

8755-4615/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2007.08.001

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The implications of Congress’s elimination of the 50 percent rule are not only economic, however. In the legislative process leading up to this decision, congressional conservatives defeated progressive reformers’2 attempts to orient reform around the improvement of distance education, effectively abandoning leadership in this area to the activities of educational accreditors. Progressives, for their part, offered a flawed and oversimplified case for interactivity as both the means and end of distance education policy reform. For educators, and particularly for computers and composition specialists, this legislative outcome represents a significant defeat. First, conservative reform has effectively rejected the proposition that the federal government ought to have a role in the development of high quality distance education pedagogy. Second, Congress’s progressives have bungled a promising political and educational initiative in their particular advocacy for online interactivity. In the reform of distance education policy, a focus on online interactivity might have helped decision makers to confront the complex social, rhetorical, and literate challenges facing students and teachers today. Instead, reform efforts focused around interactivity failed to win attention for educational participants’ real needs, and they misused, oversimplified, and generally squandered their key term’s rhetorical and conceptual potentials. By describing congressional progressives’ advocacy for interactivity in the case of federal distance education policy deliberations, this article seeks to stimulate academics’ involvement in progressive reform efforts. Using computers to facilitate online interactivity, as specialists in computers and composition well know, alters education without necessarily improving it. Yet, progressive reformers in Congress have advanced interactivity as a simple educational good, neglecting attention to the diverse social and material resources it presupposes. This article offers an analysis of these reformers’ discourse as a means for better understanding—and, eventually, contesting and improving—the kinds of arguments educational progressives have made about online interactivity. Offering better-informed arguments about interactivity and its complexities, I will argue, can offer improvements to contemporary educational progressivism, including progressive policy proposals.3

1. Interactivity in deliberations of the 50 percent rule In 1992, Congress passed legislation limiting the disbursement of federal financial aid to students whose college or university either (a) offers more than 50 percent of its courses using 2

In this article, I use the phrase “progressive reformers” to identify a loosely affiliated group of legislators and educational leaders—including Michael B. Enzi, Robert E. Andrews, Dale E. Kildee, Frank Mayadas, and Stephen Shank—engaged in the reform of distance education policy. On the one hand, I use the term, “progressive,” to mark a general similarity between the reform efforts I describe and the values and reform projects of educational Progressivism in the 20th century (described, e.g., in Cremin, 1961). On the other hand, I use the term, “progressive,” to contrast with “conservative,” which helps to delineate the group whose activities I describe from a more dominant group associated with John Boehner and Howard P. McKeon. 3 In this aim, I seek to follow a model for engaged scholarship set by Cynthia Selfe (1999), whose critique of the Clinton Administration’s Technology Literacy Challenge advocates the improvement of that (progressive) educational initiative. Such attempts to improve existing reform efforts—to make progressivism more progressive—have long been central to the tradition of educational progressivism in this country (see Cremin, 1961).

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distance education methods or (b) enrolls more than 50 percent of its students via distance education. Soon thereafter, in line with the interests of distance and for-profit education’s advocates, congressional reformers began the process of reworking this 50 percent rule for schools that employ online and satellite-based distance education methods. In directing the U.S. Department of Education to waive the 50 percent rule for select schools (e.g., Western Governors University), Congress designed the Distance Education Demonstration Program to test whether it should eliminate this and other regulations like it. In 1999, Congress authorized the work of the Web-based Education Commission, one of whose goals was to evaluate the need for reworking federal financial aid regulations like the 50 percent rule. After 2000, legislators offered a series of bills for eliminating the 50 percent rule. Eventually, in 2006, an enacted version of Senate Bill 1932, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, eliminated the 50 percent rule altogether. Public records preserve the deliberative processes leading up to each of the legislative actions described immediately above, providing a rich archive of reform discourse oriented at eliminating the 50 percent rule.4 This article focuses particularly on analyzing reform discourse advancing arguments about online interactivity; as a consequence, it ignores much that is potentially important in this archive. In particular, this analysis excludes most of the discourse preserved in records of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce, arguably the primary congressional location for conservatives’ work on this issue.5 Instead, by following arguments offered and advocated by Congress’s progressives—such as Senate Republican Michael B. Enzi and House Democrats Robert E. Andrews and Dale E. Kildee—this article traces an alternate reform project. In its use of government power and oversight to curb so-called diploma mills’ exploitation of students (and of federal financial aid), the 50 percent rule was an expression of progressive values. Yet, as a regulation, it was a fairly crude measure, identifying only quantitative thresholds (50 percent of courses, 50 percent of students) beyond which, ostensibly, no reputable school would go. Progressive reformers, recognizing reputable schools’ interests in expanding their distance education offerings, sought to rework the 50 percent rule for the benefit of these schools and students. Bills offered by Enzi, Andrews, and Kildee proposed eliminating the 50 4 Records of congressional activities published by the Government Printing Office (e.g., transcripts of hearings) make up the bulk of this archive. In the case of the Web-based Education Commission, a privately maintained Internet archive preserves extensive (but not complete) records of testimony and deliberation (see Web-based Education Commission, 2002). 5 Contemporary conservatives have aggressively sought the elimination of the 50 percent rule as a means for stimulating the development of distance education in this country. Like progressives, conservatives understand distance education as a means for expanding access to education (and to postsecondary education and training in particular). Unlike progressives, however, conservatives also understand distance education as a means for stimulating more free enterprise in this country’s educational system. As James Aune (2001) has observed, socalled cyber-Republicans have, since the 1990s, idealized the Internet as a tool for realizing political libertarians’ estimates of the powers of the free market, and conservatives’ reform work on distance education is consistent with this vision. To these reformers, especially for-profit distance education ventures in particular represent one area in which public control of education can be effectively challenged and an alternate market-based system nurtured. Correspondingly, conservatives have tended to seek a reform of distance education policy that maximizes the public monies available for for-profit educational ventures while minimizing the government’s interference with educational markets and their workings.

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percent rule, replacing that regulation’s quantitative prohibition with a qualitative requirement for educational interactivity in online courses (e.g., H.R. 2913, 2003; S. 1203, 2003). In such bills, technology-enabled educational interactivity—for instance, asynchronous chat via the World Wide Web—was proposed as a guarantee for the quality of distance education supported by federal student aid. Such (failed) proposals would have almost certainly appealed to for-profit and distance education interests, one of whose main reform goals has been the elimination of existing limitations on federal financial aid funding.6 Adopting an analytical perspective on progressives’ reform efforts, I focus on the rhetorical genesis and critical significance of policy proposals. Two distinct methods of analysis reveal different aspects of interactivity’s importance to progressives’ reform project. Rhetorical analysis reveals the strategic role that progressives’ appeals to interactivity played in the development of arguments to eliminate the 50 percent rule. That is, such a “relentlessly functional” approach to progressives’ deliberations reveals the argumentative uses to which congressional reformers put the concept (Fahnestock & Secor, 2002, p. 177). In particular, rhetorical analysis reveals that reformers used a variety of appeals to online interactivity to justify revisiting and eliminating the 50 percent rule and, in doing so, distracted attention away from substantive questions about appropriate pedagogy for distance education. Critical analysis of progressives’ reform discourse reveals the meanings that interactivity takes on in the course of reform deliberations. Unlike rhetorical analysis, which concerns itself primarily with the ends of discursive acts, critical analysis evaluates the meanings that terms gain within a given discourse. In this case, critical analysis reveals reformers’ extrapolations of interactivity’s regular educational meaning.7 Assuming interactivity’s link to authentic learning and, furthermore, to educational quality, educators and legislators established a connection between online interactivity and excellence in workforce and adult education. Such an expansion of interactivity’s meaning makes this complex literate phenomenon into a simple educational good. These assumptions about the meaning of interactivity also suggest its status 6 It is difficult to know with any certainty why progressive reformers should offer proposals so favorable to distance and for-profit education providers. One explanation argues that progressive lawmakers have largely accepted what Chris Werry (2002) called the “rhetoric of online education” as promulgated by “industry boosters” like Educause, a professional association for higher education administrators (p. 147). Another explanation points to the influence of congressional lobbying and campaign donations. Stephen Burd (2004) has demonstrated, for instance, that Representatives Andrews and Kildee accepted campaign contributions from for-profit colleges, the studentloan industry, and loan-consolidation companies in 2003–2004, suggesting that these contributions influenced their sponsorship of H.R. 2913 (2003). 7 Enzi’s and his collaborators’ attempts to encourage interactivity in distance education programs drew centrally on professional educators’ enthusiasm for interactivity in education. Joseph Petraglia (1998) characterized the pursuit of educational interactivity—specifically, dialogue among teachers and students—as one of most basic goals of education associated with constructivism, an influential philosophy among progressive educators. Constructivist approaches stress authentic learning, positing interactivity, which allows for feedback, interchange, and questioning among learners, as a way to reach that goal. In fact, as Petraglia has argued, educators tend to assume that their (often technological) attempts to encourage interactivity guarantees authentic learning. Here, a technocentric (Hawisher, 1989) view of educational technology is partially to blame: Educators mistake the presence of technologies facilitating student-teacher interaction for both authentic learning and the interactivity that should help students achieve it. In Petraglia’s terminology, these educators seek to preauthenticate student learning through the inclusion of technology-enabled interactivity.

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as a thing in itself, a “deliverable,” which distance education makes available to key student populations.

2. Interactivity in progressive reform efforts: Rhetorical analysis Archives of progressives’ efforts to eliminate the 50 percent rule demonstrate several functional or strategic uses for appeals to online educational interactivity. First, in the overall context of legislative efforts to ease restrictions on aid for distance education, arguments citing online distance education’s interactivity provide a compelling justification for revisiting such rules. Second, insofar as educators could be summoned to substantiate the link between interactivity and quality, legislators gained a justification for eliminating restrictions. Finally, discussions of interactivity served to distract attention from more substantive questions about appropriate pedagogy for distance education. In 1999, Congress convened the Web-based Education Commission (WBEC) to investigate the Internet’s educational potentials and to recommend federal policy initiatives appropriate to these potentials. Sixteen commissioners, including Senator Enzi, met with “hundreds of education, business, policy, and technology experts” in five different hearings (Web-based Education Commission, 2002). WBEC witnesses were asked in advance to testify on a selection of the 13 policy issues under consideration: technology trends; pedagogy; access and equity; technology costs; teacher training and support; regulatory barriers; standards and assessment; accreditation and certification; intellectual property protection; online privacy, protection, and censorship; new learning institutions; research and development; and the marketplace (Webbased Education Commission, 2002). Witnesses speaking before the commission covered a wide variety of issues, but, even given the scope of these investigations, discussions of interactivity figured very prominently. A survey of the Web-based Education Commission’s online archives shows that 23 of the 114 witnesses who testified in person sought to alert legislators to online distance education’s special interactivity (Summary of Hearings, 2000). More than a few WBEC witnesses made a special effort to mention the importance of interactivity for considerations of Webbased education, and several witnesses discussed the importance and educational significance of interactivity in online distance education in some detail. For instance, Nitza HernandezLopez, then Executive Director of the Hispanic Educational Telecommunications System, argued that, “Web-learning entails a knowledge construction process resulting from the interactions of learners with instructors and other learners,” calling for “the use of highly interactive communication and teaching strategies that engage learners in a virtual, dynamic-learning environment” (Hernandez-Lopez, 2000). Sasha Barab, a professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, argued, “the [W]eb allows students to move beyond having isolated human-computer interactions and instead to have rich human-to-human interactions that are mediated by computers” (Barab, 2000). Witnesses like Hernandez-Lopez and Barab praised the interactive potentials of Internetbased communication for education. Framing their final report so as to enable the elimination of the 50 percent rule, the WBEC commissioners stressed the centrality of interactivity for realizing the educational potential of online distance education. In its introduction, this report,

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The Power of the Internet for Learning, found that The interactivity of this new [Internet] technology makes it different from anything that came before. It elicits participation, not passive interest. It gives learners a place for communication, not isolation. . . . It is the beginning of a new way of learning. (Web-based Education Commission, 2000, p. 5)

This finding provided legislators with a good reason for revising restrictions like the 50 percent rule. It also almost certainly influenced later congressional proponents of online distance education’s interactivity. The WBEC report’s finding suggested one way to emphasize a distinction between older, paper-based correspondence courses and contemporary Web-based distance education programs. In its section on “Moving from Promise to Practice: A Call to Action,” The Power of the Internet for Learning proposed that “federal action” might be necessary to remove “barriers to students enrolling in online and higher education courses,” calling for “a full review and, if necessary, a revision” of the 50 percent rule in particular (Web-based Education Commission, 2000, p. 132). To support this assertion, the report cited the testimony of the Commission’s witnesses, who are summarized as arguing that “federal, state, and local education regulations written for an earlier education system no longer work in today’s borderless, timeless ‘anywhere, anyplace’ learning environment” (Web-based Education Commission, 2000, p. 132). The WBEC report offered up the argument that new technological environments for distance education have occasioned new federal aid regulations. One of the Commission’s witnesses took this argument one step further, linking the policy implications these new environments were supposed to raise for federal legislators with a claim about the educational significance of online distance education’s interactivity. In response to a question about the 50 percent rule posed by the Commission, Laura Palmer Noone, then President of the University of Phoenix, claimed that the “highly interactive” character of online distance education courses should help to distinguish them from the correspondence-type distance education programs for which regulations like the 50 percent rule were designed (Noone, 2000). Linking this argument about policy to another argument about educational quality, Noone went on to cite “sound pedagogy” as the other feature of online distance education programs that should justify their exemption from the 50 percent rule (Noone, 2000). Subsequent progressive policy proposals (e.g., H.R. 2913, 2003; S. 1203, 2003; S. 1715, 2005) agreed with Noone’s two-part reasoning. Senate Bill 1715 (2005), for instance, would have required of distance education programs “regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor” (S. 1715, 2005, p. 19). In such proposals, federal oversight of interactivity was supposed to substitute for a proper public safeguard against the abuse of federal aid investments. In such proposals, and in the deliberative process leading up to them, interactivity took on a clear strategic significance: Arguments featuring interactivity not only justified the reconsideration of federal distance education rules; they also helpfully distracted attention away from questions about what sound distance education pedagogy might actually be. Enzi, the principal author of the Senate proposals cited immediately above, put a special emphasis on interactivity’s strategic significance for deliberations of distance education policy. Specifically, Enzi emphasized the argument that interactivity makes for high-quality distance

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education. For instance, in 2002, the year before he introduced Senate Bill 1203 (2003), Enzi led a Senate hearing on Internet education: Exploring the benefits and challenges of Webbased education. As records of that hearing demonstrate, Enzi underscored the specifically policy-based import of interactivity’s link with educational quality (Internet education, 2002). Following a series of questions oriented at revealing the limitations the 50 percent rule placed on distance education students’ eligibility for federal financial aid, Enzi led Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program Director Frank Mayadas into a discussion of interactivity and educational quality. Enzi began by asking whether Mayadas had “any ideas on ways that a distance-only institution can ensure quality?” (Internet education, 2002, p. 42). Enzi’s follow-up question to Mayadas stated as its premise an argument linking interactivity with educational quality and directed Mayadas to speak more on the topic. Speaking to Mayadas, Enzi asked, You talk about two distinct forms of online learning: the broadcast and the interactive. And one of the characteristics of the interactive model which you believe provides higher-quality instruction is that the course begins and ends on a particular day. In your opinion, is it possible to have quality interactive online programs that are self-paced, or is that a conflict of terms? (pp. 42–43)

Mayadas answered Enzi noncommittally. Enzi, however, in his premise had already made his point: According to Enzi, Mayadas believed “the interactive model . . . provides higher quality.” Other questions, too, reveal Enzi’s focus on linking interactivity and quality in this hearing and in the congressional record. Introducing the issue of adult learning (discussed below) in a question to Capella University’s Chancellor, Stephen Shank, Enzi once more repeated the key claim that interactivity makes for quality: “You mentioned that adult learners are better if there is some interaction. Can you explain that a little bit? We are not talking about programmed learning, are we?” (Internet education, 2002, p. 44). In addition, two other follow-up questions (one on student isolation and one on school accreditation) led Enzi’s respondents to discuss the importance of online interactivity (pp. 45, 48). Enzi appeared to have been aware of the rhetorical purpose served by his hearing’s witnesses’ discussions of the link between educational quality and online interactivity. After the hearing’s witnesses had delivered their prepared statements, Enzi remarked, “I am just so pleased with the comments you have had. You have gone into some of the basic things that we will have to explain again and again, I am sure, as we go through the process” (p. 40). The “process” to which Enzi refered is the legislative process, the process, in this case, of changing federal rules governing distance education programs’ participation in federal financial aid funding. In his remark, Enzi openly acknowledged the rhetorical difficulty of making policy changes, stressing the need for marshalling one’s key arguments “again and again.” The above-cited interchange between Enzi and Shank can suggest interactivity’s meaning in these discussions of distance education. More generally, however, the discourse I have analyzed points to a strategic—rhetorical, argumentative—significance for discussions of interactivity. Early on in Enzi’s process, legislators and proponents of distance education valued claims about interactivity for what they could accomplish: help justify revisions to federal distance education rules, warrant claims for online distance education’s special potentials, and focus attention away from questions about potential variations in the soundness of a programs’

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pedagogy. More recently, however, as in Senate Bill 1715 (2005), interactivity has appeared as a value in its own right—not as a means but as an end. Policy proposals redefining distance education in terms of interactivity put the term’s substantive significance into question: What do legislators mean when they discourse on interactivity?

3. Interactivity in progressive reform efforts: Critical analysis In the course of Congress’s deliberations of distance education policy, interactivity gained substantive significance as a thing, a product—a “deliverable” for education. Congressional records demonstrate legislators’ and educators’ clear attempts to portray interactivity in this way, especially in their remarks on workforce and adult education. Rather than a communicative process open to multiple ends, interactivity in this discourse comes to signify an educational product of great value to the country and its people. In particular, interactivity, delivered via online distance education, becomes an ingredient in education with enormous potential for non-traditional—here, “adult”—students. Recent trends in education reform exerted a strong shaping influence on how legislators and educators—here, quite explicitly, reformers—discussed the meaning of interactivity in these deliberations. Adult education was one of the priorities of Lyndon B. Johnson’s progressive Great Society plan, providing a moral emphasis on all forms of adult education that, even today, favors educational reforms that target adult students (Eurich, 1990). In contemporary education reform politics, adult education is more commonly valued as workforce education in which members of an adult workforce are educated (and periodically re-educated) for industrial, service, and professional work (Watkins, 1998, 2000, 2003). Distance education has long been promoted as particularly useful in the project of delivering workforce education (Noble, 2002), and this tendency held true in the deliberations of distance education analyzed here. Particularly, reformers discussed interactive distance education in terms of its fitness for professional, service/industry, and adult education. House records of a hearing on The Internet, Distance Learning, and the Future of the Research University (2000) provide a particularly clear example of how discussions of interactivity in distance education are linked with reformers’ visions of workforce—in this case, engineering—education. In this hearing, James Duderstadt, President emeritus of the University of Michigan, argued that when online distance education is interactive, it prepares professional students to “think and to learn” (The Internet, 2000, p. 13). In response to a question posed by Republican Congressman Nick Smith about education for engineers, Duderstadt, an engineer himself, responded with a philosophy of professional education that puts “interactivity” at its center. Engineering graduates, Duderstadt argued, must have “the capacity to think and to learn,” a capacity that is best developed when engineers are “interacting and being challenged by colleagues” (2000, p. 13). Online distance education, far from hindering such formative processes, according to Duderstadt, actually enables a “very robust form of interaction,” one that may be superior to traditional classroom instruction (2000, p. 13). Duderstadt amplified his claims about the special potentials of distance education beyond engineering education specifically. In the testimony he submitted to the committee, Duderstadt made a general argument about the fitness of distance education to the challenge of providing

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“citizens” with usable skills: [T]oday it has become the responsibility of democratic societies to provide their citizens with the education and training they need throughout their lives whenever, wherever, and however they desire it, at high quality and affordable cost. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when we were in a space race, today we are in a skills race. This issue of our skills of our population and their education, I believe, will become the dominant domestic issue for our Nation in the years ahead. And I believe that information technology has now provided us with the tools we can use to address this challenge. (The Internet, 2000, p. 11)

Information technology provides “the tools we can use” in professional education precisely to the degree, in Duderstadt’s argument, that it enables educational interactivity. Unlike previous attempts at large-scale distance education (broadcast via television, for instance), this technology “demands interaction” (p. 19). And interaction, in turn, Duderstadt argued, can enable the expansion of colleges’ and universities’ capacity for supplying industry, business, and government with knowledgeable worker-citizens. Duderstadt highlighted the applicability of online distance education to professional engineering education, claiming that online interactivity engages learners in valuable educational processes. In the course of reform deliberations, however, such arguments were actually more likely to be applied to online distance education for workers entering less highly compensated occupations. Working schoolteachers and their assistants, for instance, are another group singled out as ideally suited for distance education, as are industry-specific workforces (Internet education, 2002). Describing the successes of an “entirely interactive” telecommunications industry education project, for instance, Frank Mayadas argued the importance of expanding such initiatives: Industry-specific offerings are an important way to ensure workforce learning, and offered in asynchronous online fashion, anytime, anyplace, they are a solution to the need for more family-friendly ways for workers to acquire education and training. Many more such programs are needed, far more than Sloan or any other private funder can provide. (Mayadas, 2000)

In this statement, Mayadas implicitly argued for public funding for interactive, industryspecific, online distance education programs. By focusing on the telecommunications industry—as opposed to engineering or even teaching—Mayadas highlighted the general appropriateness of this particular form of education not only to comparatively highly compensated professional work but also to industrial and service work as well. In their movement from discussions of professional education (Duderstadt) to service/industry education (Mayadas), reformers’ claims about the meaning of interactivity gain a potent generality. Technologically mediated online interactivity, reformers suggest, is good for working citizens. This conclusion is underscored by appeals to interactivity for adult education, which reformers treat as a radically generalized form of occupational education. Demographically occupying some imagined “middle” (of achievement, of occupational or professional attainment [Watkins, 2000, 2003]), adult students are associated with the appeal of ordinary Americans, also an imaginary construct. In deliberations of distance education, reformers link the most powerfully general significance for interactivity to discussions of adult students. In turn, in their discussion of adults, these reformers reveal their most grandiose hopes for online distance education’s interactivity.

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On one occasion, a discussion of adult students revealed something less than complete faith in online distance education, as in testimony offered by Corinthian Colleges’ CEO David Moore (The expanding, 2003). In response to a prompt by Congressman Kildee—“The 50 percent rule, you just feel this is a means to really better educate students, it’s a new technology . . .”—Moore contended that distance education, online or not, is always “second choice” (The expanding, 2003, p. 37). Yet, Moore continued, in adult education, second choice is better than nothing: [F]or a lot of students, second choice is their only choice, and there are hundreds of thousands out of that 75 million adults that have never been to college, who have never had any postsecondary training, that’s the only way they will ever get access to it. (p. 37)

Moore’s adults are not only non-traditional students in the sense that they are likely to be older than the average first-year college student; they are also non-traditional in that they have limited access to post-secondary training. For these adults, distance education is, Moore suggested, a much more feasible choice. If Moore argued the limitations of online distance education for adult (and other) students, most participants in distance education policy deliberations argued something quite opposite: that online distance education is uniquely suited for educating adult students. Senate records of the hearings led by Senator Enzi in 2002 provide a clear example of such arguments. In that hearing, Stephen Shank argued in prepared testimony that online distance education particularly meets the needs of adults. Enzi, leading the questioning, helped Shank to develop this thesis, asking Shank several times to identify online distance education’s students’ “ability to talk back and forth” in class as especially important (Internet education, 2002, p. 44). Shank, in his response, emphasized the “active” quality of learning in online distance education (p. 44). Adults, Shank argued, learn most effectively if “they can be actively engaged in the instruction as a peer” and if they “are able to interact with the faculty and interact with other peers” (p. 44). In his prepared testimony, Shank advocated an even more elaborated view of the benefits of interactive distance education for adults: Beyond the benefit of educational access, online learning may, in fact, become the preferred method of learning for many. Adults benefit from an educational model based on participation, mutual respect, and small group work. They need socialization with peers and engaged faculty, and education that is timely and experience-centered. Online learning offers the flexibility to address these varied educational needs. (Internet education, 2002, p. 9)

Shank’s position disagrees with Moore’s assessment of distance education as second choice. Educational participation and educational socialization can be delivered even more effectively online than in classrooms, Shank suggested: Online distance education allows adult students to get what they need from their education notwithstanding any barriers that may stand in their way. What is the meaning of interactivity in this particular strain of federal deliberation of distance education? At its most general, interactivity, as an ingredient in education, means the difference between education-as-usual and successful learning for non-traditional, adult students. Less generally, interactivity means quality in workforce education, which may be delivered to many

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classes of worker-citizens. Finally, interactivity means the extension of best teaching practices beyond the confines of college campuses. Interactivity’s substantive significance assumes a process but describes a product: In these deliberations, interactivity appears as the main “deliverable” of a reformed post-secondary educational establishment. Unfortunately, despite what these reform leaders have led one another to accept, interactivity is no simple thing. Far from guaranteeing educational quality across diverse educational sites, technologies facilitating interactivity are regularly difficult for students and teachers to work with. Even in the most predictable of educational situations, teaching and learning online is a challenging proposition. Online distance education poses significant literate and communicative demands on students and teachers, demands that exceed those posed in classrooms if only because they are new. With students or teachers who are not well prepared, well supported, or well socialized (e.g., with non-traditional or adult students) such demands exceed those posed in classroom instruction even more greatly.

4. Contrasting perspectives on online interactivity emerging in computers and composition Arguments about the relationship between online interactivity and education have long interested computers and composition specialists, who have developed understandings of online interactivity at considerable variance with those advanced in federal deliberations of distance education policy. In general, computers and composition specialists have stressed the differences, not similarities, among different kinds of face-to-face and computer-mediated educational interactions. Inquiry into distance education (e.g., De Pew, 2004; Hewett, 2000; Ragan & White, 2001; Stroupe, 2003; Tuzi, 2004) and online writing labs (e.g., Anderson, 2002; Coogan, 1995) has looked at how pedagogical communication in electronic writing environments differs from pedagogical communication in other settings. Similarly, theoretical considerations of distance education (e.g., Brady, 2001; S. Miller, 2001) stress the novelty of—and challenges attending—the task of adapting education to online communication environments. Beginning with considerations of electronic networks for interaction (Batson, 1993) and continuing through research into collaborative learning (e.g., Sirc & Reynolds, 1990), computers and composition specialists have stressed the complexity of teaching in interactive online environments. Scholars like Marilyn Cooper, Lester Faigley (1992), and Gail Hawisher have led research into the complex communicative dynamics of educational “electronic conversation” (see Cooper, 1999), inaugurating continuing inquiry into the topic. Research on these interactive educational environments has also shaped the field’s emerging research concerns, two of which I recommend here as vital to contemporary discussions of interactivity in distance education. Offering contrasts with progressive reform leaders’ focus on interactivity, researchers have increasingly concerned themselves with (a) the rhetorical complexities of educating students in online environments and (b) the imperatives for technological literacy online environments can force on students. Such concerns draw out the difficulties inherent in the online interactivity that federal deliberations on distance education policy simplify. They might also inform attempts to offer improved, research-based understandings of online interactivity.

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In their attempts to reform distance education policy, progressive reform leaders have proceeded as if the mere inclusion of online communication technologies can guarantee high quality distance education. Joseph Petraglia (1998) has critiqued such thinking as preauthenticating, offering in response a rhetorical account of teacher-student interaction. Teachers help students achieve high quality, authentic learning, Petraglia argued, by attending to their social and other particularities, persuading students that what they are learning is worthwhile. Theorists like Craig Stroupe (2003) and Kevin E. De Pew (2004) effectively extended the field’s understanding of Petraglia’s insight. Stroupe, writing as a course designer, criticized distance education’s omnipresent dialogue, calling for what he described, following Bakhtin, as a dialogism that “mutually illuminates and animates each linguistic consciousness” (2003, p. 259). Echoing Petraglia’s emphasis on education’s rhetorical dynamics, Stroupe called for (and offers) “attention to and theorization of the formal and social possibilities of language” in online education environments (p. 261). De Pew, for his part, treated online writing instructors explicitly as teacher-rhetors, probing, especially, the situational constraints that racially or otherwise “marked instructors” must face (2004, p. 104). In the research examples I have provided, an emphasis on the rhetorical complexities attendant to education in online environments can challenge reformers’ simple notions of online interactivity. In Petraglia’s and Stroupe’s accounts, neither technology nor dialogue can guarantee quality. De Pew, emphasizing the rhetorical constraints teachers face in their attempt to construct identities online, similarly contested the idealized portrait of online educational communication presumed by reformers’ accounts of interactivity. Ongoing research into technological literacy also challenges simple understandings of online interactivity in education. Students’ print literacies, of course, affect their success in online education, a point raised in WBEC testimony and excluded from the WBEC’s final report.8 Technological literacy researchers take a broad view of the learned behaviors required of participants in activities like online education, attending especially to the socio-economic factors that render scarce some technological literacies. Extending research that describes limits on technology access, Jeff Grabill (2003) suggested how class affects individuals’ acquisition of technological literacies. Stuart Selber (2004) has reminded the field of the importance of teaching—and not merely assuming—functional technological literacy, which enables students to “control technological resources” and “to understand the ways in which writing and communication activities are organized in online environments” (2004, p. 35). Finally, Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher (2004) have studied how “specific conditions of access [to computers] have a substantial effect on the acquisition and development of digital literacy” (p. 227). With their idealizations of online student-teacher communication, reformers’ accounts of interactivity assume educational participants’ sophisticated technological literacies. Accounts

8

In her testimony before the WBEC, Julie Young, a high-school principal, argued that “individuals that can’t read and write well will most likely struggle in on-line classrooms” (Young, 2000). Young went on to point out the fallacy in thinking that online education can be employed to help students whose life circumstances have already put them at an educational disadvantage: “Heavy reliance on text-based communications inhibits the extent to which the Internet and on-line learning environments can equalize educational opportunities, especially for disadvantaged populations, which are also, most often minority populations” (Young, 2000). Young’s arguments were nowhere acknowledged in the WBEC’s (2000) final report.

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like Grabill’s, Selber’s, and Selfe and Hawisher’s begin to challenge such assumptions, pointing out the economic, educational, and social disparities that affect technological literacy development. This emerging research literature, like emerging inquiry into online education’s rhetorical dynamics, offers a new perspective on key questions in distance education policy—on political deliberations that, as Ruth Flower (1998) has observed, include potentially far-reaching decisions about “the development of distance education as a teaching tool.” Contemporary educational progressives, although they are currently limited in their ability to affect policy, might both learn from—and learn to employ—the concepts and claims advanced by these researchers.

5. Conclusion: What academics can do Academics specializing in computers and composition are not likely to be satisfied with congressional progressives’ use of or assumptions about online interactivity. Nor are they likely to be pleased with the policy solutions these reformers offered in deliberations of the 50 percent rule. Progressives’ proposals would have added little to effective public decisionmaking since their simplifications of online interactivity render largely meaningless their policy proposals’ demands for it. Moreover, progressives’ proposals would have done little to address how the elimination of the 50 percent rule hurts traditional public colleges and universities economically.9 Forcing progressives in Congress to offer more satisfactory policy proposals will be a difficult task, yet it is a task to which academics can contribute. First, researchers can offer thoughtful, carefully prepared studies that document the complexities of interactivity in online (as well as “distributed”) educational environments. Second, both researchers and teachers can work on persuading others to consider more complex accounts of the phenomenon. Online interactivity, a matter of central concern to computers and composition specialists, holds real promise as a central concept for progressive educational reform. Insofar as highquality online interactivity is understood as a social and educational goal, the concept can highlight social and educational requirements for achieving it. With a perspective on online interactivity that respects its complexities, students’ and teachers’ real needs—for rhetoric and literacy education and for social and material resources—can become perceptible to others. Focused, careful research is needed to better document these complexities. Susan Kay Miller’s (2001) review of distance education research in Computers and Composition called for “more empirical research, both quantitative and qualitative, examining the nature of writing courses taught with distance-learning technology” (p. 429). Insofar as specialists in computers and 9 Put in other terms, contemporary progressives’ proposals would have done little to contest the ongoing privatization of higher education in the U.S. On one hand, progressives’ proposals would have done little to stop processes in which public educational aid is being transferred to privately controlled companies (see American Association of University Professors, 2006). On the other hand, progressives’ proposals’ aim to eliminate the 50 percent rule shows their correlative willingness to strengthen the position of privatization advocates, who have long foretold—and earnestly sought—precisely the sort of competition over available resources that reforms like this one make possible (see, e.g., Duderstadt, 1999). For more on this latter aspect of higher education privatization (and of related analyses of the “corporatization” of universities), see Werry (2002).

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composition can provide such research on online interactivity, they will be advancing the prospects of an improved educational progressivism. Distributed or blended educational environments, which combine features of online and classroom-based educational models, provide one especially rich set of sites for expanding research on educational interactivity. Addressing themselves to the challenges of teaching and learning in such settings, reform leaders have often simply declared the ameliorative effects of incorporating computers into classroom-based education. Diana Oblinger, Carole Barone, and Brian Hawkins (2001), for instance, claimed to provide an overview of Distributed Education and Its Challenges for policy leaders. Yet, in their brief section on student learning, they merely sketched descriptions of the “Information Age Mindset” and the demands of “e-learners,” concluding, with scant evidence, that technology transforms education for the better (pp. 5–6). Such arguments help to construct a view of distributed education in which educational participants interact effortlessly and in which the learning process is indifferent to participants’ social, rhetorical, and literate backgrounds and preparations. New research, by contrast, can offer more nuanced descriptions of—and more compelling generalizations about—what happens when students and teachers incorporate technologies supporting online interactivity into postsecondary classrooms. Such research would usefully complement research on interactivity in online education. Some educational decision makers may find academics’ accounts immediately compelling. House Representative Vernon J. Ehlers, for one, has recently called for a more detailed study of distance education pedagogy, including study of equivalents for in-person interactivity in distance education programs (Foster, 2006). Other decision makers may be less willing to entertain alternate accounts of interactivity, research-based or otherwise. Not only at the federal level but also in regional, state, local, and even institutional contexts, many higher education leaders have embraced simplifying accounts of technology-enhanced education (see Werry, 2002). Researchers can analyze and challenge these leaders’ arguments, but they will also have to learn to put political pressure on these political actors. In such cases, persuading others to accept alternate accounts of online interactivity will probably involve work through intermediaries. In fact, most reform leaders, including most lawmakers, will need to feel pressure from many constituencies before they change their assumptions or their proposals. Of course, with conservative decision makers in the majority, legislative procedures make persuasion difficult for groups without significant lobbying influence (Burd, 2004). But, more generally, all such actors respond better to political pressure than enthymemes or evidence. So, if computers and composition specialists want to influence current or future deliberations on interactivity in distance education, they must learn to work through intermediaries: teachers’ unions, faculty associations, and local, state, and national education organizations. Strategies for influencing these bodies or their representatives might proceed either through collegial dialogue or active, engaged, research. Chris Anson (1999) suggested that college faculties need “broader, institution-wide dialogues about the effect of technology on teachers, particularly between students, faculty, and administrators” (p. 276). Such dialogues might focus attention on teachers’ interests in interactivity, bringing together technology enthusiasts and progressive educators with those advocating critical perspectives on distance education’s complexities. Beginning with their colleagues, computers and composition specialists can seek to alter the

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regular meaning of online interactivity in education. In order to persuade our nation of the work we should put into developing high-quality distance education, however, we ought first to demonstrate the importance of rhetoric and literacy to online interaction. At the conclusion of an exploration of the challenges facing part-time distance education instructors in composition, D`anielle DeVoss, Dawn Hayden, Cynthia Selfe, and Richard Selfe (2001) called upon rhetoric and composition specialists to prepare a “series of carefully considered and visible professional stands” on distance education issues, including technology access, funding for distance education programs in English studies, assessment, and intellectual property (p. 282). To that list, I would add the necessity for preparing a professional stand on the complexities of educational interactivity. Emerging research in computers and composition can usefully call into question what reformers have left out of their deliberations: the strong, shaping influence that computer technologies impart to processes of educational interaction. What follows from such engaged, research-based accounts will be a matter for the future of educational progressivism. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Computers and Composition’s editorial staff and anonymous reviewers for their insights and suggestions. Chris Werry and Robert Schwegler also read earlier versions of this article. I thank them for their helpful feedback and support. Jeremiah Dyehouse is an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island where he teaches courses in rhetoric, writing in electronic environments, and scientific and technical writing. His work has appeared in JAC and Philosophy and Rhetoric. Dyehouse’s current research interests include educational technologies and the rhetoric of technology development.

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