The War on Learning ─ Gaining Ground in the Digital University

Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, onlinequizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In theseats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and socialnetworking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each other, they are really bothtaking 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 andlearning. She finds that many of these initiatives fail because they treat education as a productrather than a process. Highly touted schemes -- video games for the classroom, for example, or thedistribution of iPads -- let students down because they promote consumption rather than intellectualdevelopment. 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 mightactually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), thegamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to "the BakedProfessor"), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles ofdigital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will beessential reading for campus decision makers -- and for anyone who cares about education andtechnology.

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.