Chapter 8: The end of Higher Education: Assumptions, Implications, and Impacts of Apocalyptic Narratives

Apocalyptic narratives professing the end of higher education as we know it are not new. Often sparked by new technologies or techniques, such narratives tend to define education within the narrow confines of the workings of the new technology. Buzzwords like disruption, innovation, and reform are often employed to support multiple, sometimes competing agendas which carry with them very different but often unstated assumptions about what learning is, who is learning, how learning works, what is most important, and why. In this work, I examine the ways in which limited and simple understandings of education as simple information transfer are necessary for and continuously reproduced by education technology reformers, but also how such simplified understandings continually become manifest in our educational institutions that such technologies promise to improve. Throughout the work, I build on insights gathered from ongoing longitudinal fieldwork, surveys, and interviews of students at a large Midwestern state university.