Technology and the Politics of University Reform: The Social Shaping of Online Education [Hardcover]

Do new technologies mean the end of the university as we know it? Or can they be shaped in a way that balances innovation and tradition? This volume explores these questions through a critical history of online education.

1. Online Education and the Politics of Technology
2. From Constructivism to Normative Critique: Technology, History and Politics
3. The Age of Automation: The Technical Code of Online Education to 1980
4. The Age of Ambivalence: Early Experiments in Educational Computer Conferencing
5. The Age of Evangelism: From Online Education to the Virtual University
6. The Age of Openness: From Critical Interventions to the Encoding of Online Education
7. The Ambivalence of Openness: MOOCs and the Critical Practice of Online Education

Edward C. Hamilton is Chair of the School of Communication at Capilano University, Canada.

Examining cases in educational technology from computer assisted instruction to MOOCs, this volume shows how social interests frame reform programs and realign organizational and pedagogical strategies around them to produce a particular environment for change in higher education. Technology is a contingent product rather than a driver of such changes, suggesting that the politics of reform in higher education is not a struggle against technology, but for it, and that the critique of online education could be re-imagined as a basis for innovation.

Most histories of technology trace progress from primitivebeginnings to contemporary achievements. Not this extraordinary book. Applyingthe methods of Science and Technology Studies, Hamilton depicts the history ofonline education as a conflict over the nature of education embodied in avariety of sociotechnical systems. These systems are distinguished by thephilosophy of education they support. Will education adapt to technology orwill it adaptlS1