Nsse%5B1%5D. Hyping classroom technology helps tech firms, not students. Something sounded familiar last week when I heard U.S.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski make a huge pitch for infusing digital technology into America's classrooms. Every schoolchild should have a laptop, they said. Because in the near future, textbooks will be a thing of the past. The Future of Undergraduate Teaching - WorldWise. Many a university president has felt a frisson on reading the news that various consortia are intent on forging an online teaching presence that will reach out in what might seem to some like a quasi-imperial way (not just MIT and Stanford but also Embanet/Compass, 2tor, Coursera and the Minerva Project).
No one I know thinks that these online consortia will have immediate effects in the manner of the raft of books that are direct descendants from the dot.com days, with all their corporate techno-hype (see the recent piece by Hiltzik on this agenda). But no one I know thinks that things will just stay the same either. So what might happen?
Here is one possible scenario.