The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University
Elizabeth Losh'sThe War on Learningis the rare book that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of writing on technology and writing on education. We hear too much that technology will save us or damn us, that education is wonderful or terrible. For Losh, learning is a process, not a product--and so is technology, and so are the institutions of education. She derives as many lessons from the failures as the successes and, more importantly, is able to show us how we can all learn from the most experimental, creative, daring, and sometimes ill-fated attempts to do better, to strive higher, to be bolder. In short, Losh as theorist, critic, and practitioner exemplifies the best methods of learning. If there is a war on learning, I want to be on Losh's side. She's a winner.(Cathy N. Davidson, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University; Cofounder, HASTAC (hastac.org); and author ofNow You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn)Elizabeth Losh'sThe War on Learningmakes an invaluable intervention into current debates about the role of digital media in higher education by adopting an approach that is at once hopeful and skeptical, that rejects technological euphoria and moral panic alike, that challenges the promises made by corporate vendors but also those made by educational reformers, and that insists that core principles of inclusion and mutual respect should govern the relations between faculty and students.(Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education, University of Southern California; and coeditor ofReading in a Participatory Culture: RemixingMoby-Dickin the English Classroom)As an entomologist uncovers creatures previously hidden underfoot, Elizabeth Losh offers a scrupulous and bracing account of the tumult facing contemporary education by uncovering the unfamiliar forces that inhabit it. Parents, students, and teachers alike won't see higher education in the same way once they've caught a glimpse of the critters pinned to these pages.(Ian Bogost, Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies, Georgia Institute of Technology)This is an essential book that takes seriously all the furious pressures on college teachers and students to play with shiny new toys rather than immerse themselves in the projects of mutually teaching and learning. Losh gets to the heart of all the nonsense that digital utopians and dystopians have been shoveling at us for decades. It's a must-read for educators, administrators, and students.(Siva Vaidhyanathan, author ofThe Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry))