"Early this month, it was off to the NEA Higher Ed conference to learn
something about how to negotiate contracts. There, the big issue this year was the "creeping corporatization of Higher Ed" and how to fight it. For most, that apparently entails fighting, resisiting, or otherwise critiquing computer instruction of every stripe, which is considered to be somehow both the main pipeline for the corporatization everyone fears and the chief instance of it. As is often the case at conferences, I was struck by how this unexamined analogy has taken over: "CEI/CAI/Online Ed is akin to every over 'Big New Thing' that was supposed to rock our teaching world. Like television, radio, video, audio, and correspondance before it, it will (it must!) fail to revolutionize what we do. (And we'll gladly help it fail.)"

This even though IP rights, online class loads, and payment for development of online materials were the topics of the day at nearly all of the contract language oriented sessions."

From Kafkaz on techret@yahoogroups.com

Moi: Unfortunately I am often subject to *layers* of disdain--one layer comes from various (not all) professors of literature who already view Composition as the untheorized toady of corporate America, and then discover hypertext about, oh, 15 minutes ago and insist on using their supreme authority as arbiters of all things textual to reinvent the wheel using "their own" scholars. Zzzzzz.