Abstract The rise of online learning over the past few decades has raised fundamental questions about the kinds of “spaces” and “places” this mode of education creates. Do they support meaningful exchanges? Can they advance educational equity, access, and community-building? Are they comparable to in-person classroom experiences? The recent COVID pandemic and the global turn toward virtual learning in response have brought such questions into sharp relief. These were the questions and contextual factors that brought distinguished historian Carroll Pursell and international educational technology authority Toru Iiyoshi together for this policy dialogue. Their conversation takes readers on a wide-ranging discussion about the interplay between education, technology, and society writ large. And they offer insights into the past, present, and likely future of education in an era of accelerating technological change. Carroll Pursell is the Adeline Barry Davee Distinguished Professor of History (Emeritus) at Case Western Reserve University and Distinguished Honorary Professor of History at the Australian National University. He held faculty positions at the University of California at Santa Barbara and served as the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Lehigh University. Pursell is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and former president of both the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) and the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), which also awarded him its Leonardo da Vinci Medal for outstanding contributions to the history of technology. Toru Iiyoshi is professor and director at the Center for the Promotion of Excellence in Higher Education at Kyoto University. Previously, he was a senior scholar and director of the Knowledge Media Laboratory at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He also served as senior strategist in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Iiyoshi is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Technology and Education and past recipient of the Outstanding Practice Award in Instructional Development and the Robert M. Gagne Award for Research in Instructional Design from the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. HEQ Policy Dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references to readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the unfolding Industrial Revolution was seen to be based, in large part, on a rapidly evolving technological base.At the same time, the source of these innovations was thought to be the work of a new social type: the inventor.For a long century this font of change was encouraged by both public policies and cultural celebration.By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the growth of industrial corporations and the increasing power of science to predict and control natural processes had led to the eclipse of the 'lone' inventor and the rise of teams working in industrial research laboratories.The inventor lived on for a time as a semi-comic figure in popular culture but no longer as a popular folk hero.Mark Twain's tale A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court tells the story of a Hartford mechanic who attempted to reproduce American government and technology in sixth-century England; it was a classic effort at modernisation-what some scholars might now call an example of the Enlightenment Project.When he took over the kingdom and titled himself 'Sir Boss', he related:The very first official thing I did, in my administration-and it was on the very first day of it, too-was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backwards. 1

By 1973 two periodicals, Earth Garden and Grass Roots, were addressing an imagined community of Australians who were seeking to establish 'sustainable' lifestyles, in what seemed to many to be an increasingly commodified world, by moving 'back to the land'.These two journals offered their readers encouragement and practical advice on ways to adopt systems of food and energy production, shelter and entertainment that were small scale, locally made and simple to understand and use.The gender implications that went with these systems were seldom articulated but were nonetheless ubiquitous and powerful.The urge to go 'back to the land' was not limited to Australia nor to the decade of the 1970s; rather it was a transnational movement with roots deep into the Romantic movement and resistance to the Industrial Revolution.Industrialisation overwhelmingly drove people off the land and into rapidly growing urban areas, but the ideal of rural virtue continued and by the mid-twentieth century had shaped the back-to-theland movement that flourished in the post-World War Two era.In the United States, Helen and Scott Nearing left New York City in 1932 and took up an abandoned farm in Vermont seeking, as they wrote, 'a simple, satisfying life on the land, to be devoted to mutual aid and harmlessness, with an ample margin of leisure in which to do personally constructive and creative work'.Years later, they described their objectives 1

Rebecca Onion, Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016, $29.95). Pp. 169. isbn978 1 4696 2947 6. - Volume 53 Issue 3

Grâce a l'invention des machines a travailler le bois, le marche de l'ameublement se developpa aux Etats-Unis des 1940, car la production en masse des meubles fut enfin possible

According to Carly A. Kocurek, her scholarly interests are technology, gender, and popular culture, and it is in this matrix that she forms the key question to be answered by this book: “When, and how, did video gaming come to be seen as the exclusive domain of young men?” (xiii). Her methodology in Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade is a mix of descriptive history (for example, chapter 4 traces attempts to regulate video arcades) and cultural analysis (as in chapter 5, where Kocurek details the films TRON [1982] and WarGames [1983]). Other chapters cover the arcades as sites of play, the rise of competitive gaming, the decline of arcades, and “changes in gaming culture” (chap. 7). Kocurek sensibly links the rise and fall of arcades with those of the freestanding video game, a period lasting from Pong (1972) to the crash of the video game industry during the economic troubles of the 1980s and the rise of handheld platforms such as PlayStation. The arcade of her story is essentially a combination of a physical commercial venue, the box-like video-game consoles that filled the arcade, and the players who came to drop their quarters into a slot for the chance to play. The games themselves were a combination of the computer program (including the game itself and the accompanying graphics and sound) and the decorated box in which it was presented. All three components of the arcades comprise the popular culture that is of interest to Kocurek. The game itself, with its programmed play and graphics and container, is the technology, and both the games themselves and the players display the gender attached to the whole enterprise. On this score, she gives no better example than the game Gotcha (1973). The action was directed by a pair of pink rubber controllers that had to be squeezed by the gamer. A flyer for Gotcha shows a young man grabbing a laughing and busty blonde woman from behind. Oddly, Kocurek comments that this “highlights the game’s appeal to both men and women” (xv).

In the Fall of 1977 I gave a paper at a conference organized by the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. The title of the paper, published in 1980, was “The American Ideal of a Democratic Technology.” Reading it over now, some thirty-seven years later, I am excited all over again by the debate over the nature and role of technology which was so prominent a part of the 1970s, but actually had its roots in the 19th century. But I am also profoundly dismayed by the ways in which America has squandered the insight and the momentum of that debate. Today there are issues with large components of technology and science on the political agenda; fracking and coal seam gas extraction, the spread of crops of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the vacuuming up of masses of private electronic data by the National Security Agency (NSA) for example. By and large, however, they are not understood to be part of the same political issue of social inequality. And of course there is still the obfuscating, and therefore dangerous, insistence on using the terms “science” and “technology” strategically when discussing these topics, and still the Sacred Cows such as space exploration and the dream of unlimited energy through fusion which seem to float above any consideration of opportunity costs where real social needs are concerned.

Journal Article Matthew Wisnioski. Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America. Get access Matthew Wisnioski. Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America. (Engineering Studies series.) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2012. Pp. xvii, 286. $35.00. Carroll Pursell Carroll Pursell Australian National University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 119, Issue 2, April 2014, Pages 555–556, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.2.555 Published: 01 April 2014

During the nineteenth century American entrepreneurs, engineers and inventors combined to transform the European pleasure garden into an increasingly industrialized Fun Factory, filled with mechanical 'rides' which drew upon modern life to entertain the masses of working class thrill seekers delivered from urban centres by equally modern forms of transportation. Play was created by combining the capacity of amusement parks to produce fun with the (often young) homosocial crowd's desire, as consumers, to partake of the intimacy and commodified risk on offer. Underpinning both the production and consumption of play were the many mechanical rides provided, some modified from much older European forms, such as the carousel and Ferris wheel, and others, like the bumper cars, modified versions of emerging and exciting technologies drawn from everyday life. The result was what some observers called an 'industrial saturnalia'.

Between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries the evolution of playgrounds in the United States was shaped by both ideology and technology. Advocates agreed that playgrounds should control and instruct children, but disagreed on the way to accomplish those goals: the extreme positions marked by a commitment to the principles of ‘Efficiency’ or the ideal of recreation. The technology of playgrounds, both the sites and the equipment, changed only slowly, but both steel and wooden devices of traditional design and newer forms of sculptural modernism became central to a developing discourse over dangers to users. Ironically, playgrounds had initially been touted as safe alternatives to play on city streets. After World War II they too were overtaken by the larger risk-aversion that came to mark American culture. This article has been peer-reviewed

Technologies as Cultural Practice and Production Carroll W. Pursell (bio) Some thirty years ago I was reading an anthology of American tall tales, and it struck me that the folk heroes who were celebrated could be categorized in various ways: by sex, by race, by century, by their occupations and the scenes of their incredible feats.1 Three in particular shared a striking convergence. In the story of Old Stormalong, the whaling captain with the oversized sailing ship is becalmed in the mid-Atlantic when he sees what he thinks is a possible rain cloud on the horizon. It turns out to be not a cloud, but the smoke from an early steamship bearing down on him. As it passes he swears to beat it into the harbor of Boston, and, when a wind does rise, he lays on a prodigious amount of sail. Eventually his ship does indeed win the race for port, but when it arrives, the masts and rigging are a tangle and the captain himself is slumped dead over the wheel. In a second story, perhaps more familiar, Mike Fink is celebrated as the best of the river men who poled keelboats up the Mississippi and its tributaries. Mike was renowned for his ability to shoot and fight, but as the story has it, he finally lost his biggest fight—against Robert Fulton, when Fulton's steamboats drove the river men off the waters. With his livelihood destroyed, Mike migrated to the Rocky Mountains where he hunted and trapped until, being driven mad by having to live in an alien environment, he killed his best friend in what may or may not have been an accident. And finally there was John Henry, the most celebrated of them all. In his [End Page 715] familiar story, he pitted his skill as a steel-driving man against a new steamdrill the railroad wanted to introduce. He beat the new machine, but his great heart broke under the effort and he died with his hammer in his hands.2 It occurred to me at the time that if these were indeed authentic folktales (and this could not be safely assumed), they might represent a deep tide of artisanal unease that ran against the flood of national self-congratulation over the technological "progress" of the nineteenth century that was deskilling a large number of workers, with social and political as well as personal costs that could hardly be calculated. I never followed up on that hunch, but sometime later I found the tools with which I might have done so. It has been more than two decades since the collection of essays titled The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, first appeared, and the scholarly landscape she explored has changed.3 But the book then, as now, seemed full of methodological insights and exciting case studies describing a kind of history that, while not entirely novel, promised new works and understandings. I, for one, wanted to read the landscapes and artifacts of the history of technology the way Mary Ryan read nineteenth-century American parades. "The parade," she wrote, "presents historians with a kind of cultural performance from which anthropologists have extracted rich meaning," and I imagined that tools and machines might present similar opportunities. Technology is, after all, in some important sense performative.4 Cultural history has been around long enough now that one does not need to explain it in detail, but I want to emphasize three of its aspects that still promise to expand and enrich the way we do the history of technology. First, as Hunt explains, "the deciphering of meaning … rather than the inference of causal laws of explanation, is taken to be the central task of cultural history."5 One can ask many questions of a tool or machine: Where did it come from (the traditional search for an inventor or designer)? How does it work? What does it do?6 But one can also ask what does it mean—to the designer, the builder, the consumer, the casual observer, and so forth? It is in this sense that one can read parades—or dragsters or the Apollo project. Second, again as Hunt...

Engineering was the largest of the new, modern professions unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, and during the hundred years between 1850 and 1950 many of those practitioners, especially in the areas of mining and civil works, were true cosmopolitans. The rage for exploration and exploitation during these years of High Imperialism created the context for and dictated the mobility of these transnational lives. The profession itself, and the men who followed it, sought out, embraced and were shaped by that experience.