The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University

by Elizabeth Losh

Overview

An examination of technology-based education initiatives—from MOOCs to virtual worlds—that argues against treating education as a product rather than a process.

Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each other, they are really both taking part in a war on learning itself. In this book, Elizabeth Losh examines current efforts to “reform” higher education by applying technological solutions to problems in teaching and learning. She finds that many of these initiatives fail because they treat education as a product rather than a process. Highly touted schemes—video games for the classroom, for example, or the distribution of iPads—let students down because they promote consumption rather than intellectual development.

Losh analyzes recent trends in postsecondary education and the rhetoric around them, often drawing on first-person accounts. In an effort to identify educational technologies that might actually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), the gamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to “the Baked Professor”), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles of digital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will be essential reading for campus decision makers—and for anyone who cares about education and technology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262323260
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	05/02/2014
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth Losh directs the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press) and the coauthor of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 What They Learn in College 17

2 The War on Learning 37

3 On Camera: The Baked Professor Makes His Debut 77

4 From Reality TV to the Research University: Coursecasting and Pedogogical Drama 91

5 The Rhetoric of the Open Courseware Movement 115

6 Honor Coding: Plagiarism Software and Educational Opportunism 151

7 Toy Problems: Education as Product 169

8 The Play's the Thing: Games and Virtual Worlds in Higher Education 187

9 Gaining Ground in the Digital University 221

Notes 241

Index 291

What People are Saying About This

Ian Bogost

As an entomologist uncovers creatures previously hidden underfoot, Elizabeth Losh offers a scrupulous and bracing account of the tumult facing contemporary education by uncovering the unfamiliar forces that inhabit it. Parents, students, and teachers alike won't see higher education in the same way once they've caught a glimpse of the critters pinned to these pages.

Siva Vaidhyanathan

This is an essential book that takes seriously all the furious pressures on college teachers and students to play with shiny new toys rather than immerse themselves in the projects of mutually teaching and learning. Losh gets to the heart of all the nonsense that digital utopians and dystopians have been shoveling at us for decades. It's a must-read for educators, administrators, and students.

Cathy N. Davidson

Elizabeth Losh's The War on Learning is the rare book that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of writing on technology and writing on education. We hear too much that technology will save us or damn us, that education is wonderful or terrible. For Losh, learning is a process, not a product—and so is technology, and so are the institutions of education. She derives as many lessons from the failures as the successes and, more importantly, is able to show us how we can all learn from the most experimental, creative, daring, and sometimes ill-fated attempts to do better, to strive higher, to be bolder. In short, Losh as theorist, critic, and practitioner exemplifies the best methods of learning. If there is a war on learning, I want to be on Losh's side. She's a winner.

Henry Jenkins

Elizabeth Losh's The War on Learning makes an invaluable intervention into current debates about the role of digital media in higher education by adopting an approach that is at once hopeful and skeptical, that rejects technological euphoria and moral panic alike, that challenges the promises made by corporate vendors but also those made by educational reformers, and that insists that core principles of inclusion and mutual respect should govern the relations between faculty and students.

Endorsement

This is an essential book that takes seriously all the furious pressures on college teachers and students to play with shiny new toys rather than immerse themselves in the projects of mutually teaching and learning. Losh gets to the heart of all the nonsense that digital utopians and dystopians have been shoveling at us for decades. It's a must-read for educators, administrators, and students.

—Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)

From the Publisher

Elizabeth Losh's The War on Learning is the rare book that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of writing on technology and writing on education. We hear too much that technology will save us or damn us, that education is wonderful or terrible. For Losh, learning is a process, not a product—and so is technology, and so are the institutions of education. She derives as many lessons from the failures as the successes and, more importantly, is able to show us how we can all learn from the most experimental, creative, daring, and sometimes ill-fated attempts to do better, to strive higher, to be bolder. In short, Losh as theorist, critic, and practitioner exemplifies the best methods of learning. If there is a war on learning, I want to be on Losh's side. She's a winner.

—Cathy N. Davidson, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University; Cofounder, HASTAC (hastac.org); and author of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn

Elizabeth Losh's The War on Learning makes an invaluable intervention into current debates about the role of digital media in higher education by adopting an approach that is at once hopeful and skeptical, that rejects technological euphoria and moral panic alike, that challenges the promises made by corporate vendors but also those made by educational reformers, and that insists that core principles of inclusion and mutual respect should govern the relations between faculty and students.

—Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education, University of Southern California; and coeditor of Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom

As an entomologist uncovers creatures previously hidden underfoot, Elizabeth Losh offers a scrupulous and bracing account of the tumult facing contemporary education by uncovering the unfamiliar forces that inhabit it. Parents, students, and teachers alike won't see higher education in the same way once they've caught a glimpse of the critters pinned to these pages.

—Ian Bogost, Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies, Georgia Institute of Technology

This is an essential book that takes seriously all the furious pressures on college teachers and students to play with shiny new toys rather than immerse themselves in the projects of mutually teaching and learning. Losh gets to the heart of all the nonsense that digital utopians and dystopians have been shoveling at us for decades. It's a must-read for educators, administrators, and students.

—Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)