This archaic site features the alleged "First Interactive Class Communication System" which this company developed with Texas Instruments in the late 1990's and now seems defunct. The system they developed is basically a network between student and faculty members' computers that allows interaction between the two. From what I can tell, it is the prototype for what is now the ubiquitous "smart classroom" such as the Avid labs in the basement, where the professor can put any individual computer screen on the big screen, or take control of students' monitors in order to show how a program works. I came across this in a book I am reviewing called .edu: Technology and Learning Environments in Higher Education by Dr. Tracey Wilen-Daugenti. The book reads like an extended PowerPoint presentation full of statistics and anecdotes of how technology is being activated in higher education. She briefly covers pervasive problems such as plagiarism, credible content, and gaps of technical literacy between faculty and students. The major thrust of the book is unproblematically celebratory (a la Jenkins) and taking into account the author's position at Cisco Systems and her degree in Business Administration leads me to pessimistically speculate as to how much the push toward integrating as much technology into classrooms as possible is a result of late global market capitalism's push to outsource training to universities, with little regard for liberal arts education, critical thinking skills and other intangible, qualitative aspects of the "traditional" classroom. As such, the focus seems to be on how students learn much more that the actual content of the class, or that different disciplines will require comprehensive structural revisions in order to specifically address disciplinary concerns. In the book, she describes how libraries could form the basis of "centers of excellence" where the lines between on and off campus learning are blurred, and the corporate university will flourish as these spaces will have retail spaces built into their design in order to become self-sufficient entities. This also makes me think that the corporate dream for American institutions of higher learning to look more like giant shopping malls with wi-fi all over, perhaps like the spaceship in Spaceballs. A later chapter in the book by Lev Gonick problematizes her teleology of techno-tyranny with some historical contextualization-positing a "complicated and nuanced" corrective that takes into account how at different moments in the 20th century, film, correspondence, radio, television, video and computers were alternately valorized as the media forms that would revolutionize education-and claims that we should look at the development of technology and education as and evolution instead.
I realize that I rambled for a while explaining a book and not the digital media source-but reading this has all this (relevant?) issued bouncing around my head and I would like to hear what others have to say. Am I just an antiquated Marxist whose expiration date has arrived?
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