DL Redux

I'm taking a distance learning course on distance learning courses this semester. We'll be looking over all the research and I'm hoping to make some sort of sense of the mess it all is. DL was one of those things that was caught up in all the euphoria of the Internet bubble. What was Alan Greenspan's felicitous phrase? "Irrational exuberance?" Yup.

Earlier I posted how BlackBoard, the company that markets the widely used software for online courses of the same name, is controlled by the Carlyle Group, a venture capital firm made up of former government insiders from, well, our government as well as that of the UK. It buys companies that are either heavilly regulated by or do business with the government where their influence and rolodex can be used for profit. Education is here in the US very much a government exercise, and even in higher education state universities are a dominant part of the market.

What does this all mean? Well, for starters DL shouldn't be about profit. It should be about access, equity and social improvement. The Internet, while started by scientists and researchers, has just become another gold rush, but one with a difference. It's a capitalist virus that has infected just about everything it touches. DL is now more a story of profit and the market than it is about access and equity.

I still remember when this gentleman ran the ILT. Well, I like what his wife can do with a bolt of cloth...