Issues in Web Based Pedagogy: A Critical Primer (review)

This book examines two public purposes of higher education—instruction and student learning—and links them directly to emerging technologies. The outcome is a comprehensive collection of essays that describe how teaching in the academy has become reconfigured and technologically driven and how student learning has become distributed and digital, unbound by traditional limitations of time and space. Cavalier (2002) recently posed a fundamental question about the role of information technology in higher education when he asked: "What does the institution want to do with or accomplish through technology?" This question represents an important framework for understanding the central issues imbedded in each of the twenty-seven essays contained in this book.

Analysis of where to locate Web-based pedagogy within the broader transformations of higher education reflects one of three common ways to consider the question posed by Cavalier. Some of the authors argue that technology holds great promise because of its power to transform the academy in ways that could not have been otherwise realized before the advent of the Internet and other digital technologies. For example, McDonald describes how the design of Web-based instruction "is well positioned to realize the opportunities of emancipatory pedagogies" (p. 127) in relation to teaching a course in professional ethics to mental health care providers. Grubb and Hines describe how the Internet provides an innovative forum for developing learning communities. Also included in many of these essays is a healthy skepticism about the ability of Web-based technologies to enhance student learning and to reconfigure teaching in a manner that is both manageable and cost effective. The contribution by Blasi and Heinecke presents a well-designed argument that Web-based technologies have contributed to the commodification of education and transformed students from learners to consumers.

For still others, the answer to Cavalier's question should not be framed in these terms at all. Web-based instruction is simply a neutral instrument of opportunity with a potential that can be realized only if cogent strategies for applying technology are developed and supported with the adequate allocation of resources based on empirical evidence. Navarro outlines this dynamic in his essay describing research studies of students enrolled in both traditional and "cyberlearning" courses at the University of California, Irvine in 1998.

The essays in this book provide both a simultaneous look back at how information technology applications have influenced higher education and also multiple perspectives on what the future may hold. The first set of essays considers philosophical and theoretical issues. Collectively, these contributions help to frame the broader issues related to the design and implementation of Web-based instruction. Essays by authors such as Kilker, who offers insight into the meaning of appropriateness as applied to the application of digital technologies in the classroom, give the reader multiple contexts from which to consider, for example, how technology influences different modes of learning.

Many of the theoretical and philosophical contexts outlined in the first set of essays are then applied to the second group of essays. These contributions analyze the practical applications of Web-based instruction based on empirical evidence. A variety of topics are included among the second set of essays, such as teaching research skills using the Internet, copyright law, and ways to enhance learning for the disabled.

The book's introduction points out three insightful themes: (a) technology's power to transform education into a commodity of exchange, (b) digital technologies' ability to facilitate innovative modes of instruction, although it is least effective when technology is used only to facilitate traditional styles of instruction, and (c) the fact that technologies in higher education have not occurred in isolation from social, political, and economic interests; therefore, the impact of Web-based instruction must be understood within these often competing frameworks. This third theme is the recognition of the past...