| Summary: | "Why are the fundamentals of education apparently so little changed in our era of digital technology? Is their obstinate persistence evidence of resilience or obsolescence? Such questions can best be answered not by imagining an uncertain high-tech future, but by examining a well-documented past--a history of instruction and media that extends from Gilgamesh to Google. Norm Friesen looks to the combination and reconfiguration of oral, textual, and more recent media forms to understand the longevity of so many educational arrangements and practices. Friesen examines the interrelationship of reading, writing, and pedagogy in the case of the lecture and the textbook--from their premodern to their postmodern incarnations. Over hundreds of years, these two forms have integrated textual, oral, and (more recently) digital media and connected them with changing pedagogical and cultural priorities. The Textbook and the Lecture opens new possibilities for understanding not only mediated pedagogical practices and their reform but also gradual changes in our conceptions of the knowing subject and of knowledge itself. Drawing on wide-ranging scholarship in fields as diverse as media ecology and German-language media studies, Foucauldian historiography, and even archaeological research, The Textbook and the Lecture is a fascinating investigation of educational media"--
"In this era of technological and cultural disruption in higher education, Norman Friesen turns the question around: Why is higher education apparently so little changed in our era of digital media? Is their obstinate persistence evidence of resilience or of obsolescence? Answers to these questions generally come down on the side of obsolescence, with schools depicted as industrial-age antiques, about to go the way of the steam engine. Using media and the changes produced through them as its central reference point, this book reverses this view. It explains why educational institutions, their forms, and practices have lasted so long, and why they show no sign of going away. This book argues that questions like the ones above can best be answered not by imagining an uncertain future, but by examining a well-documented past--one that ultimately extends from Gilgamesh to Google. The book undertakes this examination by focusing on educational media, but not just on new media or mass media. Instead, it sees textual and spoken (or oral) media forms as central to education--as providing the foundation for all other educational media. The book considers the significance and interaction of these basic media in two commonplace instructional forms or genres, the lecture and the textbook. The lecture and the textbook both integrate textual, oral, and, more recently, digital media, and they have also been around for hundreds of years. MOOCs and digital textbooks, argues Friesen, are not a radical break from the past but an evolutionary extension of it"--
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