THE TEACHER IN THE MACHINE

Follow the money.

This well-researched, fluently written, and ultimately disheartening book charts a history of American higher education’s fascination with technology. Tracing the use of computer-assisted teaching in the 1960s at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois, the author shows convincingly the pitfalls of trying to offload learning onto machines. Trumbore offers a series of case studies (some of which she was involved in) over the past 50 years: how attempts at television lecturing tried to broaden student engagement; how interactive programming sought to change the way young people processed information; how big universities became seduced by Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs); and how the different cultures of university professors and corporate managers are rarely bridged successfully. The lesson of the book is this: “Universities are, by definition, filled with very smart people. Yet, their response to online education over the past decade has resulted in them being taken advantage of by for-profit companies.” The consequence of that process is that a few prominent schools, professors, and entrepreneurs try to dictate what and how to learn. “The elite are creating the conditions for the non-elite to have access to education in a way that benefits the former rather than the latter,” the author writes. Quoting Gordon Gekko from the film Wall Street, the author distills higher education’s relationship to technology: “What’s worth doing is worth doing for money.” In the end, the real “gold standard” for education at all levels should be face-to-face teaching, interpersonal learning, and classroom-based conversation.

A stunning exposé of how universities made, and lost, the Faustian bargain with big tech.