College to a new degree of goofiness

http://www.sltrib.com/04172001/utah/89489.htm

College Taken To New Degree Of Goofiness
Tuesday, April 17, 2001

BY KIRSTEN STEWART
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Are you being priced out of a college degree? Having trouble squeezing daily trips to campus into your busy schedule? Frustrated that conventional university courses don't prepare you for today's rapidly changing job market?
Lament no more. Techno-critic Langdon Winner has engineered a device he says will replace the out-of-date programs and costly institutional ballast of traditional colleges with knowledge-dispensing terminals that work like your bank's ATM.
The fictitious Automatic Professor Machine, and its inventor, L.C. Winner, a charismatic New York entrepreneur (and Winner's alter-ego), have been traveling the country on a mock publicity tour that pokes fun at academe's growing love affair with online education.
Universities today are obsessed with bandwidths that purport to deliver education economically and efficiently, said Winner, a political science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, N.Y., who since 1977 has been publishing popular and scholarly articles exposing the politics behind technology.
"Technologies are so fascinating that people fail to notice the heart of the matter," he said Monday in a telephone interview from California. "What are we supposed to be learning and teaching?"
So, Winner thought, what better way to divert the establishment's attention from technology than with a technological gimmick?
Appropriately, Winner's satirical sales pitch for the Automatic Professor Machine is available in video format on his Web site at www.rpi.edu/~winner.
The spot features L.C. Winner, president of EDU-SHAM, who describes how the APM works in a Silicon Valley-style "PowerPoint" presentation.
It's simple to operate the "attractive, low-cost, flexible and user-friendly" APM, available soon in fast-food restaurants and shopping malls, L.C. says.
Students insert their money and select from a menu of thousands of "preschool to post-doc" class offerings, download the course materials onto a disk and complete the exercises at their leisure. When the student is finished, he can go to the nearest machine and upload his homework.
In minutes, L.C. says, the computer will grade the material and issue a digitized mini-diploma certifying the student has passed the course.
"We call these mini-diplomas Partner's Degree Quickly, or PDQs," L.C. says. Collect 32 and APM will issue a diploma from "Glow-Ball University."
Does Glow-Ball, pronounced global, actually exist? Don't be silly, L.C. says. The college is composed entirely of "software, digital bits and communication links."
Winner said faculty and administrators who watch the presentation, live or on video, tell him it's almost impossible to distinguish from the real-life marketing tactics of virtual universities and companies pitching the latest in educational technology.
Almost, he says, like most on-line universities. "It is a joke."