Book Review: Looking Toward the Future of Technology-Enhanced Education

This book is edited by Martin Ebner of Graz University of Technology in Austria and Mandy Schiefner of University of Zurich in Zwitzerland. It was published in 2010 by IGI Global (Information Science Reference), Hershey, PA. The book has 526+xxx pages. The ISDN of the book is: 978-1-61520-679-7. A total of 49 authors from 9 different countries have contributed to the book, mostly from Germany and Austria along with those from United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, United States, Canada, and Australia. This book stands witness to the fervors globally of the current stage of technical rationality characterized by a focus on enrollments, reorganization into consortia, followed by the value-added services of social networking and ubiquitous online learning. The book is organized in five sections. First section is an introduction and opens up with the chapter that basically draws the contours of discussions and theoretical assumptions evolve throughout the book. Therefore, a detailed summary of the chapter one is presented below, believing that would illuminate the reader about the book. In section one, the authors challenge the question of how new media be placed into cultural context. Scholars discussed the role of futurology in new media adoption in order to come up with arguable consequences. Nonetheless, new media adoption means cultural connotations. Although there is no “good” or “bad” culture, however from our western perspective, some of us adopt innovations quicker than others, and that explains why culture is so important? From authors’ point of view, we are now entering into a new era in teaching and learning. This era is called as “mediosphere.” The concept of mediosphere represents the oral culture, and that is reasonably weird for some of us. Their standing point is interesting though, given the fact that all of our so called “cumulative knowledge” had only became available to vast number of people by the invention of printing, thanks to Gutenberg. After all, what we had learned so far, mostly from nowhere but from books. Traditional learning system requires books, printing houses, schools and so forth. This is a vicious circle that reproduced itself. Obviously, this system puts the mediator at epicenter for research. As the authors say, “not the media systems themselves are in the focus of research, instead the mediations are.” All of the hypotheses are arguable to some extent. However, one thing is for sure: We are going to consume our own harvest of knowledge but then again would there be education or do we need to be educated?