The Age of Automation: The Technical Code of Online Education to 1980

Abstract

In identifying a logic of commodification, commercialization, and automation as the essence of educational technology, critics of online education partake in a well-established tradition, stretching from Plato’s declamations against writing in the Phaedrus to post war worries that television prophesied the era of the automatic student and the robot professor (Plato 1973; Smith 1957). Indeed, Plato’s discussion of writing mirrors critiques of later educational media in its focus on the way in which a new medium offers a static embodiment of knowledge outside lived social relations. Plato may well have been thinking of educational computing when he predicted that “pupils will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction” (Plato 1973, 96). The equivalency of “information” and instruction is the key idea here—the medium is perceived to reflect learning as an external substance rather than a reflexive process. “Proper” instruction, as Plato volubly demonstrates, requires social interaction in contexts of copresence—anything else puts the endeavor at risk.