Digital Technologies in Higher Education: Sweeping Expectations and Actual Effects, Sarah Guri-Rosenblit. (New York: Nova Science, 2009, 178 pp.).
VOL. 25, No. 3
Sarah Guri-Rosenblit has crafted an excellent introduction to the implementation of digital technologies in higher education, aimed particularly at administrators and other decision makers, rather than classroom teachers. If you are looking for a book on incorporating digital technologies into your classroom, this is not the book for you. However, if you are interested in learning about the institutional conflicts and struggles concerning digital technologies, this is certainly the book for you.
The subtitle of this book is “Sweeping Expectations and Actual Effects”, and Guri-Rosenblit does a good job of summarizing the somewhat lofty expectations around digital technologies, and the real nuts and bolts of implementation.
Chapter 1 begins with a brief but efficient discussion of the problem of terminology in digital technologies. This chapter is an important beginning, since later chapters use many terms that have clouded meaning. For example: “distance” education and “e-learning” are often used to mean the same thing but of course not all distance education involves e-learning, nor is all e-learning at a distance. Guri-Rosenblit refers to this mixture of terms as the “Tower of Babel Syndrome”, which causes considerable confusion when different participants in technology discussions are using the same words to mean something different.
Chapter 2 introduces a retrospective view of digital technologies in higher education, including a discussion on the changing role of faculty over time. It also discusses what the initial expectations were for these technologies, and some of the difficulties in fulfilling those expectations.
Chapter 3 directly tackles some of the assumptions made by many in higher education about digital technologies, such as student preferences for online versus face-to-face settings, and the always controversial issue of profit making in higher education. In particular, it deals with errors of assumption, attempting to show why a certain approach is wrong, and uses the literature to support taking a different approach to the issues.
Chapter 4 explores the diversity of environments in higher education. Here again, the author does not shy away from discussing the, sometimes, adversarial relationship between academia and the business world, which often come into conflict with e-learning. Along with this, the author also touches on issues in the developing world; the issues are introduced, but not explored in any great depth.
Chapter 5 attempts to compare contrasting influences on the use of digital technologies, such as “Competition versus Collaboration”. The inclusion of this chapter is very useful but it is very short, so the topics can be only briefly covered. I would have liked to see further exploration of these topics, as Guri-Rosenblit really only scratches the surface, but she presents the arguments efficiently, given the length of the chapter.
Chapter 6 looks to the future, and presents the changes around digital technologies as the author sees them. This may be the most important chapter for institutions looking at budgets and deciding where to spend money. Once again, these issues are explained in a very direct manner.
This is an excellent book but many of the issues deserve more in depth coverage. For example intellectual property, is covered in a single page. Guri-Rosenblit’s writing style is easy to read, and she chooses an excellent set of references to back up her points, so expansion on some topics would have been welcome. Having said that, the material presented provides good summaries of the topics covered in each chapter.
I found this book to be a good starting point for the issues facing implementation of digital technologies in higher education but due to its short length (175 pages, which includes references and index) it does not explore any items in great depth. It is better to think of this book as a starting point for further exploration of the items introduced here. The book is extensively referenced, so further literature on each topic is readily available for anyone wanting to continue their reading.
Gavin Park is an Instructional Designer in the Centre for Flexible Teaching and Learning at Nipissing University. E-mail: gavinp@nipissingu.ca
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