Diploma Mills vs Natives & Immigrants

From the learning resources of week 1 of #EDCMOOC https://class.coursera.org/edc-001/wiki/view?page=DeterminingThePast I read "Digital natives, digital immigrants" by Marc Prensky (2001) and "Digital diploma mills: the automation of higher education" by David Noble (1998). These two authors take a standpoint almost opposite of eachother. Prensky's utopian view of students whose brains are altered by the ubiquitous environment of internet contrasts quite starkly with the warnings of Noble who warns us for "driving this headlong rush to implement technology" and "risk of student and faculty alienation". Privatization of public education will turn universities in "patent holding companies' and rising tuition fees must 'subsidize the commercial infrastructure'. Already in 1998 Noble notes Lehman Brothers, an investment firm that was at the center of the 2008 banking crisis(1), as stating that:"investment opportunity in education has never been better". Universities were rapidly being taken over by commercialization, forged ahead by 'ubiquitous technozealots who simply view computers as the panacea for everything.' The darkest vision here is described in a quote from Educom president Robert Heterich: "the potential to remove the human mediation in some areas and replace it with automation - smart, computer-based, network-based systems - is tremendous, it's gonna happen.' The origin of this quotes is difficult to find, I found a scholarly reference in Weaver, 1999 in Libri Journal(2) which gives Noble 1997(3) as a source. Prensky's article also lacks references. His argument uses the metaphor of immigrant and natives to illustrate the difference between tech-savvy students and internet-deprived older folk 'who print their e-mail'. Prensky's enthousiams can work inspiring, to try out new things, and try multitasking 'at higher speed'. But his assumption that 'their brains may already be different' remains unreferenced. His part 2 article is reported to present evidence(4).

upper Marc Prensky - theage.com.au and under: David F. Noble cla.umn.edu (1) Baba, N.& Packer, F. (2009) From turmoil to crisis: dislocations in the FX swap market before and after the failure of Lehman Brothers; Journal of International Money and Finance. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/subjects/finance/confpapers09/baba_packer_paper.pdf. (2) http://www.librijournal.org/pdf/1999-3pp142-149.pdf. (3) Noble, David F. 1997. “Digital Diploma Mills” (October) [article on-line]; URL: http://www.hronline. com/forums/labour/9711/0271.html; accessed October 6, 1998 [not online anymore, feb 2013]. (4) Digital natives, digital immigrants Part 2: Do they really think differently? M Prensky - On the horizon, 2001 - emeraldinsight