Select [greater than] Fast Knowledge - Brief Article

The automatic teller machine revolutionized the way the world banks. The automatic professor machine could revolutionize the way the world learns.

That is, if it were real. Political science professor and long-time technology critic Langdon Winner created the APM as a satiric statement against online education. As his alter ego, LO Winner (the C stands for cyberspace), said in a (fictional) radio interview, "The APM is a machine for withdrawals and deposits of knowledge."

Learners would find APMs at colleges, shopping malls, Jiffy Lubes, and other places people gather. After choosing a course or degree and inserting a few hundred bucks in cash or on a credit card, a user would access just-in-time learning. The APM is based on the idea that the essence of education consists not of classrooms, books, teachers, or other students, but information.

LC Winner and his company, EDU-SHAM (Educational Smart Hardware Alma Mater Inc.), say that education nowadays is made up of expensive infrastructure, antiquated approaches, and high-cost, low-productivity workers. But, asserts Winner, education is really only the transport of knowledge from point A to point B through the most efficient, low-cost link possible. In an ideal world, education would consist of connecting a computer directly to a person's brain. In the meantime, the APM is the next best thing.

Students would access lectures, discussions, quizzes, and more on demand. Their degrees would be from Glow-Ball University (global, get it?), which has no campus or faculty, just satellites spread around the world. Forget impersonal and cookie-cutter, though. The computers would know each student's name and such information as classes previously taken, term papers written, yearly income, musical taste, and marital status, so it could personalize the information delivery.

The research facility backing all of this? The (also fictional) Center for Distant Educators.

* Source/The chroniclo of Higher Education and the Automatic Professor Machine Website, www.rpi.edu/[sim]winner/apml.html

COPYRIGHT 2001 American Society for Training & Development, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group