Great comment (you get my comment of the year award ). I don’t think though that it is just in educational technology or education that political sociology is failing us. It seems to me that sociologists have been very slow to understand the impact of the rapid societal changes driven in part by technology over the past ten or fifteen years. Of course that is partly due to politics – in the UK Margaret Thatcher was publicly disdainful of sociology and Labour seems little better. But I also think it is a methodological issue – it is very hard to understand the ‘meanings’ of many of the new technologies without using them. One of my good friends is a sociologist and keeps going on about how books are better than the internet!!!
I also think that we have been slow to listen to learners – with such a high fee it is not surprising that there were few to be seen in Berlin.

I’m wondering where a more critical reflection on the 800eur entrance fee might lead us. I’m wondering, for instance, out of the broad spectrum of technology users, how this 800eur fee (plus flight, hotel, etc.) might have narrowed the spectrum of participants. What percentage have staff positions that depend on the care and feeding of VLE’s? What percentage of participants were students and teachers — what do we call them … “users”? How many IT departments are in the business of giving away travel money to their users? I’m wondering where one might find what I suppose we’d want to call “a political sociology of e-learning”, one that examines technologies as sites of struggle.

Boy, do I feel like an old ’68er or ’80s champion of pomo saying that, but it’s still a good question, isn’t it? Where is David Noble (Digital Diploma Mills) or Martin Heidegger (50s essay on technology) when we need them?

For example, where are the studies examining conflicts between administrations who bought into these strongly hierarchical LMS systems and the faculty who had other ideas: how has technology facilitated changes in relationships of administrative and disciplinary authority?

How about a comparison of institutions where e-learning has been run by the bureaucracies and those run by faculty? How many institutions could produce anything like the Georgetown University “Reimagining Tradition” video: http://cndls.georgetown.edu/

What about the role of “e-learning” in the current upset of bildung and ausbildung furthered by the Bologna fiat, the destruction of lehrfreiheit and lernfreiheit associated with the business of “modules” and all the rest that has so rightly upset so many of our students? What happens to the collective ability to talk intelligently when you replace a zillion teaching assistants and endless hours of talk with very expensive LMS systems, modules, and technicians that enforce what we would have to call “loading dock-teaching, -learning, -talk, and -communities?

Critical stuff like that. Could be fun.

Cheers!

Bruce