In his interview with CNN this week, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said (in part),
The new realities are technology has changed our lives forever, the world’s moving faster, we’re in a globalized economy … and yet the institutions, mostly public, that we’ve asked to be able to equip us have been mired in the past (emphasis added; transcription from St. Petersburg Times education blog).
There is a long history of the idea that we need to break with history, and evangelists of education reform have used this argument on a consistent basis for more than a century. I’m tempted to coin a Yogi Berra-ism, but I’ll settle for pointing out that it is the mirror image of the standard conservative argument that we shouldn’t mess with legacy institutions and social patterns because they have stood the test of time. ((Yes, that means Jeb Bush is not really a conservative in the older meaning of the word.)) And that utopian justifications for whatever self-anointed reformers think of as radical often are unjustified by what happens in the process of reform.
More on education technology tomorrow or over the weekend.
I have no idea what he is talking about. We were using e-mail within and between universities before anyone in the investment businesses the Bush family is involved with ever heard the word. I used the web for a class I taught ages ago, back when Altavista was the best search engine.
I remember Altavista well — and now that Google ignores the use of quotation marks, I sometimes go back to it. Ah, the good old days!
Historically, from about 1750 in France onward, technology has meant one thing — the elimination of the worker. Even Fred Taylor advocated the elimination of worker “initiative” from production. The role of technology in the class struggle conveniently gets pushed aside in America, but only because we are blind to it, or made to believe that it doesn’t exist. Just because it is invisible to us doesn’t make it go away.
The whole trajectory of using technology for scaling instruction upward makes abundant use of part-time service workers — themselves the result of the over-production of degrees and the lack of full-time positions. The early success of Sperling and others is itself the result of (or a response to) this over-abundant supply, an example of Say’s Law.
From Nixon’s funding of vo-tech on par with the colleges to now, the road to online instruction by for-profits has been paved by federal subsidies — money being the ultimate proof of legitimacy.
That everyone else in academia, including the public schools, is now chasing this particular ‘eidolon’ bespeaks more of the role of the perception of success and legitimacy in driving mimetic isomorphism in the diffusion of innvoation.