Critic Of Technology-As-Religion To Question Value Of Learning Technologies In Higher Education

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Respected historian and technology gadfly David F. Noble is a controversial and outspoken critic of attempts to "automatize higher education" by setting up extensive distance-learning systems and "online universities" that he says are no more than diploma mills.

On Jan. 28, Noble will present the second in a series of lectures sponsored by Critical and Cultural Studies in Information Technology (CCSIT), a UB interdisciplinary graduate initiative.

The talk will take place at 4 p.m. in 280 Park Hall on the UB North Campus. It will be free of charge and open to the public. A reception will precede the lecture at 3:30 p.m.

Noble is professor of history at Toronto's York University and co-founder of the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest. He is well-known as a critical analyst of educational technologies and as the author of the book "The Religion of Technology." His recent -- and notorious -- journal series, "Digital Diploma Mills," continues to provoke much debate in the world of higher education.

The first four parts of the journal series are available online at http://www.communication.ucsd.edu/dL/.

"All discussion of distance education these days invariably turns into a discussion of technology, an endless meditation on the wonders of computer-mediated instruction," Noble says. He claims, however, that neither the technology cult nor those who buy into it are prone to acknowledge the many problems associated with its application to the task of providing a university education.

Hank Bromley, CCSIT co-founder and assistant professor in the UB Graduate School of Education, describes the CCSIT lecture series as one that presents different ways of assessing information technologies in order that we better understand their complex effects on a culture and its institutions, systems and people.

"We want to provoke discussion and debate," he says, "which Noble tends to do."

Noble points out: "The public has been told that technology is a bold departure from tradition, a signal step toward a preordained and radically transformed higher educational future.

"Online universities, distance-education programs and the like (are) now identified with this revolution in technology and have assumed the aura of innovation and the appearance of the revolution itself."

That untested assumption has provoked the production of ill-conceived and unnecessary information-technology programs in higher education, according to Noble.

"Recent surveys of the instructional use of information technology in higher education clearly indicate that (it has resulted in) no significant gains in either productivity improvement or pedagogical enhancement," he claims.

He adds that, despite the futurist hype, the online university of 2000 "is nothing more than an updated version of the correspondence school."