I find the pairing of these articles a bit weird. It’s tempting to say that they are common to each other in that they provide dissenting or alternative viewpoints to the persistent drumbeat of “rah rah technology is cool” articles, but I don’t think that’s quite fair to these two articles individually. Aschauer, particularly, is more redemptive of technology in that she seeks to revise the category by making it more experiential–thinking about technology as something that seamlessly integrates with our experiences in order to revise women’s relationship to it as something they possess mastery of. I’m a fan of this strategy, since it capitalizes on mastery a group already possesses and doesn’t task them with playing “catch up” as the only road to equality (as she says, that viewpoint is inherently deterministic). I like her attempt at reconciliation with Haraway. I, too, hold Haraway’s notion of the cyborg dear to me (although that’s not really what a cyborg would do, I guess), but I agree that it must come from theory and practice of everyday life, and not broad abstractions.

It’s tempting to dismiss Chapman and his admitted Ludditism, but I paused after on line in the last paragraph: “We may be able to avoid the Siren call of the Web as we avoided the false promises of televised classes in the 1960s and computer tutorials in the 1970s” (emphasis added). I know this is thinking way past what Chapman is arguing against in this article, but t made me think of, in the immediate, MOOCs. Education delivered over the TV seems like a monumentally bad idea driven by the same efficiency and monetary concerns as the recent push for widespread MOOCs and general downsizing of educators going on right now. In that context, it’s easier to see how Chapman, who I assume is an older faculty member (probably white, yes?) would see web technology as another mass broadcast system being collectively promoted as the Next Big Thing in education without any firm grasp on why and no clear vision for how. While I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong, what remains more crucially unclear if that’s a bad or good thing, either in 1999, or now.