A well-written and comprehensive overview of the pitfalls of advocating for technological change without due consideration of faculty expertise. Highly recommended.

This helps to explain why many predictions of the future fail: not because the technology itself will not materialize, but because the people doing the predictions are not experts in the situations or domains they are aiming to affect. They develop tools without watching the way people work. This is why their visions strike us as funny, odd, or even offensive. And it’s why, when a technologist tries to tell a designer, a doctor, or a teacher “you will work like this in the future,” they laugh.

[embeddoc url=”https://blogs.uoregon.edu/edtechknowledge/files/2015/11/Against-the-Natural-Order-of-Things-Baldwin-12h5dni.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Baldwin, Jonathan. “‘Against the Natural Order of Things’: Why E-Learning Refuses to Take Off.” In Centennial Conversations: Essential Essays in Professional, Continuing, and Online Education. UPCEA, 2015.