Political Theorist Langdon Winner to present "Introducing the Automatic Professor Machine"

For several years, the academic community at UB, as elsewhere, has debated why, how and by whom computer technologies are selected and applied across campus. When it comes to these questions, the influence of end-users-faculty, some professional staff and students-often pales beside the power and authority of systems operators and the administration that oversees them.

Political theorist Langdon Winner, professor of political science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and author of several studies in contemporary social thought, challenges the assumptions that technology is necessarily "good," more is "better" and that the curriculum must be computerized as quickly as possible.

Stressing that computers are no more than a new tool in service to political ends, he points to ways in which out-of-control technology clashes with assumptions about the learning experience, ownership of intellectual properties, choice of teaching methodologies and tenure as a defense of intellectual freedom.

Winner will explore these issues in a performance titled "Introducing the Automatic Professor Machine," a parody of technology in education, at 2 p.m. on Tuesday in the Student Union Theatre. The event is free and open to the public.

The performance will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Hank Bromley, assistant professor, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, Graduate School of Education, and associate director of the GSE Center for Educational Resources and Technology.

Panelists will be Voldemar Innus, senior associate vice president for university services; Deborah Walters, associate professor, Department of Computer Science; Logan Scott, instructional support specialist, Walkway Technology Node, and Henry Steck, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Political Science, Cortland State College and statewide vice president for academics for United University Professions (UUP).

Winner is the author of "Autonomous Technology" and "The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology." He is the editor of "Democracy in a Technological Age," past president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology and a former contributing editor at Rolling Stone.

He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California-Santa Cruz, The New School for Social Research and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. His homepage, along with that of Langston X. Winter, Winner's long-lost evil twin, can be reached at http://www.rpi.edu/~winner/

The symposium will inaugurate a spring series on issues of technology and education sponsored by the vice provost for faculty development in collaboration with the Center for Educational Resources and Technologies.