Ray Land, Coventry University,
UK, ray.land@coventry.ac.uk
Siân Bayne, University of Edinburgh, UK, sian.bayne@ed.ac.uk
Abstract
This paper considers a little-discussed aspect of online learning - the surveillance
or 'student tracking' capabilities of virtual learning environments (VLEs).
In, at least, the two main commercially available VLEs - Blackboard and WebCT
- sophisticated, powerful, easy-to-use means of collecting data on students'
activities within the learning space are built in as part of its pedagogical
functioning. Where such surveillance tools are often promoted, and accepted,
as useful ways of evaluating course effectiveness through helping us to understand
student usage of the online facility, we wish to probe a little deeper and think
about some of the broader cultural and pedagogical implications of using these
tracking devices.
The paper uses a theoretical framework drawn from the work of Foucault and from more recent theoretical approaches to privacy within cyberspace. It begins by giving a brief overview of the kinds of surveillance tools which we have access to in WebCT and Blackboard, moving on to the application of Foucault's panopticon metaphor to such facilities, and finally examining the implications of their use for educational practice.
The unifying theme of our discussion relates to the way in which the individuality of our learners is affected by the use of cyberspace as a learning environment. We believe that the learning environments we use work to develop certain kinds of learners, thus the subjectivity of the online learner is our central concern.
1.0 Introduction: tracking students in virtual learning environments
Murray Goldberg, WebCT developer, asks in his online newsletter, "It's 10pm, do you know where your students are?" (Goldberg 2000). He goes on to describe how the rationale for the development of the student tracking tools in WebCT grew out of his own experience of teaching online. The tools are, indeed, extensive. WebCT allows tutors to track the date and time of students' first and last logins, which pages each individual student has accessed and when, the total number of times the student has accessed the system, and for every section of the course to track the number of discussion board articles each student has opened and the number and date of each student's own discussion board contributions.
Figure 1: WebCT - date and time of one student's first and last login, total number of accesses and hits to each content page
Figure 2: WebCT - history of pages visited by student, with dates and times
Class records can be generated allowing tutors to organise their students according
to frequency of accesses to the course, by date of first or last access, or
by the number of discussion board items opened or posted.
Figure 3: WebCT - list of students organised by number of times they have accessed course
WebCT's main out-of-the box virtual learning environment rival, Blackboard,
has a similar suite of surveillance tools, enabling records to be generated
showing for each individual user the total number of accesses to the course
as a whole, the total number of accesses to each individual area and page of
content, number of accesses over time, accesses per day of the week and by hour
of the day. With both VLEs the tutor can also, of course, keep permanent records
of the more obviously 'visible' activities undertaken by the student - the number,
time and quality of contributions to discussion boards, emails exchanged between
tutor and student, results from online quizzes (those intended for self- or
formative assessment as well as those which are summative).
Figure 4: Blackboard - number and date of hits to a particular section of course by one user
Figure 5: Blackboard - number of the user's hits to a particular section by hour of the day
These tools are far more than the electronic equivalent of the attendance sheet.
As in so many arenas, computers have enabled us to do things that were previously
impossible or very difficult. VLE surveillance tools record every move a student
makes within the learning space, and provide intimate details of every student's
working hours and patterns of study. Where such a virtual learning environment
(VLE) is integrated with wider institutional information systems to form what
is currently generally called a managed learning environment (MLE), anyone wishing
to generate a student record walks through an even richer information landscape.
Similarly, system administrators may extract information at a similar level
of detail from almost any networked activity, whether undertaken by students
or staff. However, where previously to track activity within a web-based learning
environment would have involved the deliberate, rather complex analysis of log
files and server statistics (something for which the majority of us would have
neither the time nor the inclination), within VLEs surveillance is a casual
act - sophisticated and detailed reports on individual students can be obtained
with a couple of mouse clicks. Further, such tracking tools are included in
learning environments as an integral element of their pedagogical functioning.
Goldberg, for example, describes how by enabling continual evaluation, such
tools simply help him to be a better online educator, providing higher quality
web-based courses:
[the] benefit is all in the name of continually trying to improve my course offering, not only in response to direct student comments, but also in response to the way students are interacting with the course. Without this activity tracking I would be in the dark… (Goldberg 2000)
The aim of this paper is not to deny the usefulness to tutors of such facilities, and we wish to avoid succumbing to the techno-paranoia which sometimes accompanies explorations of the impact of 'dataveillance' (Clarke, 1991). Rather we wish to render strange an element of online learning which risks becoming banal, a matter of 'common sense', and to explore what we see as some important cultural and pedagogical implications of using such tools, from which we might hazard some tentative recommendations for practice. As McLuhan argues, technology is not neutral: 'technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike' (McLuhan 1962, p.iv). The wish to avoid accusations of technological determinism should not prevent us from looking closely at how our technologies change the way we work and the way we experience ourselves and others.
The framework for our discussion is provided largely by Foucault, and it is his perspective which perhaps most usefully indicates our approach:
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. (Foucault 1983, p.231-32)
2.0 The panopticon as metaphor
The imagery of the panopticon is regularly drawn on in discussions of cyber-surveillance (for example see Bowers 1988; Zuboff 1988; Provenzo 1992; Lyon 1993; Spears and Lea 1994; Gandy 1996; Poster 1996) and does indeed provide a powerful metaphor for thinking about the way in which power relations are constructed in online environments.1
In 1791, the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of the architectural innovation of the panopticon as a way of achieving conformity and order within a 'humane' prison system (see Bentham 1962). The panopticon is a circular building, in which the cells of the prisoners occupy the circumference. The cells are divided from each other in such a way as to prevent any communication between prisoners. At the centre is the 'inspector's lodge' or observation tower from within which prison guards can see into every cell, without themselves being visible. The goal is the achievement of control through both isolation and the possibility of constant (invisible) surveillance.
Figure 6: Plan view of the panopticon
For Foucault (Foucault 1979a) the panopticon encapsulates in its form the shift in the nature of power relations which took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Where previously what Foucault refers to as sovereign power had exercised dominion through punishment of the physical body (physical torture, public execution), during this time a different, less visible, power mechanism emerged which Foucault calls disciplinary power. Disciplinary power is exercised over individual and collective bodies 'through surveillance and via a grid or network of material coercions which effected an efficient and controlled increase (minimum expenditure, maximum return) in the utility of the subjected body' (Smart 1985, p.80).
The panopticon, as one of the 'technologies of power' of this regime, functions less through the imposition of physical force than through its ability to bring about conformity through self-regulation. As subordinates are never sure when they are being observed, they have no alternative than to assume an unwavering surveillance and hence internalise the 'normalising regime'.
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault 1979a, p.203)
Disciplinary power is not only manifested in the workings of penal institutions. For Foucault it is identified with the power-knowledge nexus which is inherent in the workings of institutions throughout the social sphere, including educational institutions. It is important to note, however, that power is not, for Foucault, simply a matter of repression or domination, the property of a particular individual, or group, or class. Rather it is a constituent element of contemporary society - it circulates throughout social relations like an energy. Hence Foucault's famous claim that 'where there is power, there is resistance' (Foucault 1979b) - an issue we would like to return to later. Power, like surveillance, is not necessarily 'bad', but it is dangerous, with effects which are both positive and negative. As Ball points out, for example, 'Education works not only to render its students as subjects of power, it also constitutes them, or some of them, as powerful subjects' (Ball 1990, p.5).
It is not surprising that those theorising the place of privacy in the information society have seized on Foucault's analysis and the panopticon metaphor, seeing in computerised and video surveillance a full realisation of the principles of the panopticon. Computerised student tracking systems like the ones described above do appear to represent the perfect disciplinary apparatus, the single gaze that constantly observes everything.
Surveillance for Foucault is an element of the hierarchical observation which is a key instrument of disciplinary power. Hierarchical observation binds the concepts of visibility and power. There is an unequal power relationship between the seer and the seen - the visibility of the seen enables the seer to 'know' them, to alter them. Access to this knowledge, to this power, is of course unevenly distributed.
We have to bear in mind that in the everyday functioning of the virtual learning environment, the tutor, or 'course designer', has access to extensive surveillance tools, and the student does not.2 Whatever truth there may be in the much-vaunted claims that computer mediated communication has the potential to do away with many of the cues through which hierarchical relationships and status differentials are inscribed (Dubrovsky, Kiesler and Sethna, 1991; Kiesler and Sproull, 1992; Sproull and Kiesler, 1991; Wiesband, 1992), the relation between teacher and learner is still (and perhaps necessarily) a hierarchical one, not least where the teacher is also the assessor. How comfortable should we be, however, with such ready, casual access to tools which so starkly represent the 'power of mind over mind' (Foucault 1979a)?
3.0 The subject
Hierarchical observation is only one of the instruments through which disciplinary power exercises itself. The two main others - normalising judgement and examination - are also well known to educators. Their collective effect is one of classification and division, rendering the subject 'knowable' through the collection of data relating to them. For Foucault, the file, the document and the record are powerful tools representative of the exercise of disciplinary power. It is partly through these that the individual is constituted, the subject objectified. The power to classify, to collect data relating to students, is hardly new in education, yet in the use of online surveillance tools we see it reaching a new level of depth and detail, representing a further extension of what Foucault calls the 'progressive objectification and the ever more subtle partitioning of individual behaviour' (Foucault 1979a, p.178). As Provenzo points out, 'this desire to partition individual student behaviour into ever more subtle units - to systematically collect data - is built into the structure of many computer education programs' (Provenzo 1992, p.185).
Foucault writes against the idea of the sovereign subject, the world view which sees the individual - the subject - as the foundation of knowledge and meaning. For Foucault, the subject does not exist prior to the exercise of power, the process of subjectification. Hence, within the panopticon, individuals are made to internalise the gaze of power, to adopt its values as their own, to conform. They are thus formed by power - rather than seeing it as an external force being applied to a pre-existing, stable subject, it is power which makes us who we are. Disciplinary power is an element of what Foucault calls discourse, in which individual subjectivity is seen not as the possession of the conscious self, but as something which is dispersed throughout a network of external structures and practices:
…discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed. (Foucault 1966, p.55)
It follows that discourse and practice are inseparable. Discourses are "practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak" (Foucault 1974, p.49) - in other words, the discourses of pedagogy create both the teacher and the taught; the discourse/practice of technology-assisted learning creates both the online learner and the teacher or facilitator of online learning.
In this scheme we can see disciplinary apparatuses or 'technologies of power' (of which the virtual learning environment is an example) as being about creating a certain type of subject; in using these technologies we are therefore also involved in creating a certain type of subject, a certain type of learner. For Lyotard, predicting back in 1979 the impact of technology on education, the kind of learner being produced would be one who, in the name of enhanced performativity, would be an efficient, skilled user of information (Lyotard 1979, p.51). In the current discourse of learning technology we would be more likely to describe the kind of learner we are trying to produce as one who is 'active', 'independent', 'lifelong', 'flexible'. Applying the Foucauldian approach in any case problematises the notion that it is possible to place 'the learner' at the centre of the learning process. Instead, it would see the subjectivity of the learner as constituted through and by the learning environment and the discourses/practices within it. The practices of 'student centred learning', particularly perhaps in their online manifestations, normalise students through surveillance, observation and classification but rarely explicitly acknowledge that the developing individual is an 'object' produced by those same practices, rather than a secure, pre-existing subject.
4.0 The 'superpanopticon'
Cyberspace theory building on the work of Foucault highlights the way in which the virtual environment works to constitute the subjectivity of its users, restructuring the nature of individuality in the process. Poster (1996) analyses the particular impact on subjectivity of electronic databases, characterising the surveillance function of such technologies as a 'superpanopticon' (Poster 1996). The superpanopticon constitutes individual 'subjectivities' according to its own rules. For example, within interlinked electronic databases, the fields and records containing an individual's details (name, age, sex etc), highly limited by the determinations of the technology, actually become the 'retrievable identity' of that individual. In other words, the data held on an individual become, to borrow a term from Baudrillard, a 'simulacrum' of that individual - a copy which, as far as the imperative of the technology is concerned, has no original. For Poster therefore, computerised databases are 'nothing but performative machines, engines for producing retrievable identities' (p.186). What is more, the individual has no control over, or even awareness of this 'other identity' which is circulating throughout the electronic network:
Now, through the database alone, the subject has been multiplied and decentered, capable of being acted upon by computers at many social locations without the least awareness by the individual concerned yet just as surely as if the individual were present somehow inside the computer. (Poster 1996, p.184)
The data represented in the discourse of the database comes to stand for the subject in 'a highly caricatured yet immediately available form.'
To the database, Jim Jones is the sum of the information in the fields of the record that applies to that name. So the person Jim Jones now has a new form of presence, a new subject position that defines him for all those agencies and individuals who have access to the database. (op.cit. p.188)
Lyon (1994) characterises these representations as 'complementary selves' who are 'the sum, as it were, of their transactions'.
New individuals are created who bear the same names but who are digitally shorn of their human ambiguities and whose personalities are built artificially from matched data. Artificial they may be, but these computer 'selves' have a part to play in determining the life-chances of their human namesakes. Thus are subjects constituted and deviants defined within the Superpanopticon. (p.71)
We should not underestimate the extent to which this power to constitute and disperse the subject can be applied in virtual learning environments. While humanist ways of knowing might resist the idea that identity formation can take place outside the skin of the individual, we need to consider the possibility that the online student may be starkly objectified in her virtual construction, that 'the learner' may be, as far as our systems are concerned, to some extent constituted by records of their first login, last login, frequency of login, number of discussion board submissions, pattern of page visitation across the site, and so on. Such an identity might exist not only beyond the control of the individual learner, but its very existence - and the possibility of 'judgement' being applied to it either wittingly or not- might remain unknown to them. The literature is full of claims to the emancipatory potential of online communication in educational and other contexts, particularly in the way it enables us to reformulate ourselves and experiment with new identities. In our focus on the way in which we are able to 'make ourselves' in cyberspace however, we should not neglect the ways in which cyberspace technologies may also make us.
5.0 Implications for Educational Practice
5.1 Paradigmatic contradiction
The ethos of the MLE can be viewed in many ways as essentially managerialist. It is about order, efficiency, identified outcomes and control. The attraction of databases to the organiser of the MLE is not just their retrieval speed but their relational abilities and totalising nature. In its concern for control and managerial efficiency the MLE reveals its essentially modernist nature and its notion of an individualised rational and stable learner. The cultural technologies on which it is predicated however (web-based learning environments, relational databases) give rise to discourses/practices which constitute the subject in a decidedly different fashion, as multi-faceted, heterogeneous and dispersed.
Despite such heterogeneity and multiplicity however, the archival permanence promised by MLE databases militates in the opposite direction. Within such archival fixity and retrievability students will never be able to escape their past. There is a loss of redemptive possibility from the digital database which, according to Poster (1996, p.182) is 'perfectly transferable in space, indefinitely preservable in time' and 'may last forever everywhere.' There is here no Whitmanesque notion of the subject as a perpetually reinventing 'self', self-redeeming.
'Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).' (Whitman, 1975, p.123)
Within a managerialist paradigm the learner may be individualised, a unified subject, but is not the Romantic self. What is offered, rather, is a disempowering and constraining constitution of the subject. And yet the poststructuralist interpretation of these technologies, as interpellating the subject within a primarily linguistic environment (in which even the databases themselves are a form of writing, of language) offers a multiplicity, fragmentation and re-signification of the subject which, in its uncertainty and instability is the antithesis of the certainty and permanence that managerialism endeavours to achieve.
5.2 Insouciance
Perhaps because our current theories of learning are inadequate to explain and analyse the discursive practices that are now emerging within new technologies there appears to be a lack of critique or even a certain insouciance in regard to the (often occluded) effects of these rapidly developing new practices. We are reminded of President Richard Nixon's confident assertion at the onset of Watergate that 'The country doesn't give much of a shit about bugging…most people around the country think it's probably routine, everybody's trying to bug everybody else, it's politics.' (cited in Marx 1996, p.193) Though the American public were later to demonstrate their concern about his political mendacity his observation about the public perception of surveillance may not have been inaccurate. Provenzo (1992), for example, suggests that:
..students learn that surveillance is part of their education. Mastering the new computer literacy implies the acceptance that information will be automatically collected and that in turn control will be exercised. (p.186)
He cites Bowers, who argues that this kind of student experience might be deemed 'essential to the development of the socially responsible citizen, and thus it could be expected to view it as a normal, even necessary, aspect of adult life'. (Bowers 1988, p.19). Our own interviews with practitioners in UK higher education reveal a similar outlook:
Now students don't mind. We speak to students. They don't care. They expect….they know they're being logged. They're quite astonished to find they're being logged as little as they are. There seems to be, at least with them, an idea that it's acceptable to be logged through their educational activities. There are other activities where they wouldn't, which are more social or more exploratory. But they expect, for every crossed knees and twitch they make, that we try and log that. (Interview Respondent, 2001)
We are reminded too of Poster's characterisation of such responses as 'a complicated configuration of unconsciousness, indirection, automation, and absentmindedness both on the part of the producer of the database and on the part of the individual subject being constituted by it.' (Poster 1996, p.187 )
Insouciance notwithstanding,
it is important to bear in mind that UK Universities have a responsibilitt size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The whole environment
in which we're working is dynamically locking down on our responsibilities,
on what we can and cannot do… I have my doubts at three o'clock in
the morning that we potentially could have a problem under the Data Protection
Act because we don't have a full disclosure. We are very concerned about
it. We keep ourselves as informed about it as possible.
(Interview respondent, 2001)
5.3 Policies of acceptable use
The requirements of the Act, not to mention professional and ethical obligations, give rise to questions of what constitutes acceptable use of such technologies. Any code of practice, we suggest, would need to address a range of issues, principally to:
However these measures, if implemented, probably have limited value. Such ethical responses tend to be those of Marxist analysts or Liberal commentators such as Lyotard (1979) who, in their wish to democratise information, assume a relatively unblurred demarcation of private from public spheres, and a separation of knowledge from power. They posit the existence within these environments of learners who are centred, autonomous subjects, rational actors for whom rationality is equated with freedom or political emancipation. However, from a poststructuralist perspective, databases preclude such agency. There is no direct equation of increased access to data = increased knowledge = increased power.
Postmodern culture configures multiple, dispersed subject positions whose domination no longer is effected by alienated power but by entirely new articulations of technologies of power. The cultural function of databases is not so much the institution of dominant power structures against the individual as it is the restructuring of the nature of the individual. ..the viewpoint that I am proposing posits a different relation of knowledge and power, one in which knowledge itself is a form of linguistic power, the culturally formative power of subject constitution. (Poster 1996, p.190)
5.4 Interpretation of tracking data
Interviews with practitioners provide salutary reminders that the interpretation of V/MLE surveillance data can often be misleading. What does the pattern of logging activity actually mean? What does the data really signify? Using the classifications and divisions provided by V/MLE tracking activity to make judgements of student performance or intention appears fraught with dangers of misreading, misinterpretation and assumption.
The reporting is more important than the actual raw data…It's not terribly useful for us and I really question whether it's particularly useful for Blackboard or WebCT because what you're actually capturing is not what's actually going on. You're capturing what you think's going on. The student may actually just look at a page, print it off, take it away or they can print off three copies for their friends or their friend is sitting next to them or they accidentally go to some pages or they do a quick flick through the pages to make sure they've covered all the things, the questions that they know there might be teaching about. You're not actually capturing what you think you're capturing. What you're capturing is only that that page has at any time been looked at by that student. That can be exceptionally misleading.
(Interview respondent, 2001)
The need to minimise the degree of interpretability of data assumes particular importance when it is used as the basis of assessment or other formative judgements. Caution and active inhibition would appear to be the operative watchwords:
Anybody you interview who's using WebCT or Blackboard, slap them round the face and say 'Do you know what you're doing?' - because I bet they don't! (laughs).
(Interview respondent, 2001)
5.5 The role of the tutor
A final consideration is the way in which the subjectivity of the tutor becomes constituted through the discourses and practices of computer mediated learning environments. Though the discourse of flexible or student-centred learning might position or interpolate the tutor as 'moderator' or 'facilitator', the forms of agency inherent in practice within a surveillant online environment might include more problematic roles of monitoring, recording, interpreting and forwarding online data. Tutors, of course, are 'seers' of their students but 'seen' by managers.
By means of surveillance, disciplinary power became an integrated system … it also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on the individual, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom …and laterally this network holds the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisor perpetually supervised. (Foucault1979a:177).
Another interview respondent described a situation in which study advisors' use of MIS systems revealed which tutors were registered to make use of new university databases to advise their students. One tutor was identified as having never registered or accessed the database and was deemed by managers to be potentially unsuitable to remain within the role, though such deliberations went on unknown to the tutor concerned. This reconstitution of the subject, through the absence of a data record, has a peculiarly postmodern complexion.
Academic staff also need to be aware of both the changes in authority and the more diverse forms of agency that can arise in online learning environments.
There's a major underlying factor which I don't think they'd even admit to but they're afraid of losing their power. By introducing the [name of VLE] system we have introduced into the power equation issues of who controls, who monitors, who watches the [name of degree] progress. We've suddenly got developers in there, we've suddenly got the learning technology section in there who by holding on to, creating and capturing this information are suddenly incredibly powerful because that's the node to where everything goes. So in that respect there are major concerns about whether we should be there at all, about whether the power should be devolved. From personal positions of being threatened, of losing power, of losing influence and control of what's going on, both from their own personal point of view about advancement, responsibility and respect as well as professionally about 'Should we lose this power?'. So there's a fundamental point about when you introduce a V or MLE you are going to change power balances - you can't help doing that in quite a fundamental and significant way, that the power structures will change.
(Interview respondent, 2001)
6.0 Conclusion
The preceding discussion gives rise to a more fundamental concern in relation to learning within virtual and managed learning environments. This concern relates to humanist tendencies within currently predominant theories of learning in higher education (such as phenomenography or constructivism) to posit learners primarily as unified and stable subjects. Such analyses tend to emphasise and privilege notions of interior processing (the 'deeper' the learning the better) and cognitive restructuring. Transformation is sought to a more reflective ie more fully interiorised, individualised and unified subject. Currently available learning theory appears increasingly inadequate to deal with the complexities of agency, discursive practice, identity and subjectivity within virtual learning environments. We suggest, therefore, that we need to identify and understand forms of agency and learning appropriate to the dispersed, multiple subject characteristic of V/MLEs.
Interesting incursions have been made into such a project, for different purposes, by feminist theorists of technology. Haraway's concept of the cyborg self, for example, examines redefinitions of the power-knowledge-body equation through the possibility of disembodied subjectivity, and the merging of self and machine. If, for Foucault, the body held a primary position within the regime of sovereign power (which exercised control through bodily punishment), which was then displaced to a secondary position by the emergence of disciplinary power, we see it relegated now to a tertiary position by the power of new technology to blur the boundaries between self and network, to disperse the subject in cyberspace, to remove 'subjectivity' from the body. For Haraway, it is this very blurring of boundaries which constitutes such technologies as sites for resistance. As she puts it:
[there are great] possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self. It is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities. (Haraway 1989, p.174)
We may, like Haraway, take comfort from the subversive possibilities of the cyborg self, or we may view with disquietude the way in which new technologies appear to represent an extreme manifestation of how a technology of power can achieve control by the total and thoroughly disempowering constitution of the subject. In either case, our chances of developing effective pedagogies for online learning will be greatly enhanced if we are prepared to recognise and work with the new modes of identity formation and new articulations of power/knowledge which cyberspace technologies represent.
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1.The majority of these discussions focus on surveillance and privacy in the
workplace, the marketplace and in the functioning of the State, rather than
on education per se.
2. An interesting exception is the conferencing software FirstClass, in which
the hardly extensive, but functional, 'message history' tool is equally available
to both. 'Message history' allows users to track who has read any given message,
and when.