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Distributed for University Press of New England

Disrupt This!

MOOCs and the Promises of Technology

In this smart and incisive work, Karen J. Head describes her experience teaching a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and the attendant pressure on professors, especially those in the humanities, to embrace new technologies in the STEM era. And yet, as she argues, MOOCs are just the latest example of the near-religious faith that some universities have in the promise of technological advances. As a teacher of rhetoric, Head is well versed at sniffing out the sophistry embedded in the tech jargon increasingly rife in the academy. Disrupt This! is a broader-based critique of the promises of technological “disruption” and the impact of Silicon Valley thinking on an unsuspecting, ill-prepared, and often gullible university community grasping for relevance, while remaining in thrall to the technologists.

208 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2017

Education: Education--General Studies


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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments • Prologue: How Did a Nice Girl Like You Wind Up Here? • The Rhetoric of Punditry • My Educational Journey: A Brief Interlude • Sweet Disruption • Talking Business in Higher Education • Welders, Not Philosophers • Only the Countable Counts • The Superstar Professor • The Harvard Mystique • Missionary Creep • Epilogue: Balancing My Parentheses • Notes • Bibliography • Index

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