Prof. Norm Friesen: Does Technology Actually Teach? A Sceptic's Guide to E-Learning & AI in Education | EPS 021
Every generation gets a new technology that promises to revolutionise education. Film was going to make lectures obsolete. Television was going to bring the world's greatest teachers into every home. Computers were going to personalise learning for every student. The internet was going to democratise knowledge. MOOCs were going to make universities redundant. And now artificial intelligence is going to do all of these things at once, and more.
So why does this cycle keep repeating? Why do educators, policymakers, and technologists keep making the same promises, and why do those promises keep falling short? And, most urgently, what should we do differently this time, before we make the same mistakes all over again with AI?
These are the questions at the heart of this episode of Deep Thinking with Dr. Steven Stolz, in which Dr. Steve sits down with Prof. Norm Friesen of Boise State University, one of the world's leading scholars of e-learning, educational technology, and the history of educational media, and a researcher who has been studying these questions since 1995.
Prof. Friesen is not a simple technophobe or a nostalgic defender of chalk and blackboards. He is a rigorous and historically informed scholar who has spent three decades developing a genuinely sophisticated understanding of why the relationship between technology and education is so consistently and surprisingly resistant to the transformations that each new wave of innovation promises. His books and research, including "The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen" and his extensive work on phenomenology and educational technology, have shaped how scholars around the world think about digital pedagogy, e-learning standards, and the lived experience of teaching and learning in digital environments.
In this rich and timely conversation, Dr. Steve and Prof. Friesen explore:
✓ Why every generation of educational technology promises to revolutionise learning and consistently fails to deliver — and what this remarkably stable pattern reveals about the fundamental nature of teaching and learning that we keep trying to technologise away
✓ What the enduring resilience of the classroom and the textbook actually tells us — why these apparently old-fashioned and technologically unsophisticated forms have survived wave after wave of disruption, and what their survival reveals about what education genuinely requires
✓ The fundamental differences between face-to-face and digital pedagogical relationships — what is lost, changed, or irreversibly altered when the teacher-student relationship moves to a screen, and why better technology cannot simply bridge these differences
✓ Why "digital literacy" is a misleading and ultimately unhelpful concept — how treating digital skills as simply a new form of literacy obscures the deeper questions about what it means to be educated in a digital age, and how we should think about this differently
✓ What phenomenology and the lived experience of education reveal about teaching and learning that data-driven approaches, learning analytics, and algorithmic assessment systems simply cannot capture — and why this matters for how we design and evaluate educational technology
✓ The crucial insights from German pedagogical traditions — Pädagogik and Bildung — that are almost entirely absent from Anglo-American educational technology discourse, what these traditions understand about the relationship between education, culture, and human formation, and why their absence from our technology debates is a serious problem
✓ What media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Friedrich Kittler teach us about how different media shape not just what we learn but how we think, perceive, and relate to knowledge itself — and why educational technology designers need to take media theory seriously
✓ The relationship between technical standardisation in e-learning — including Prof. Friesen's own work developing ISO standards — and pedagogical practice: can we standardise educational technology without standardising and ultimately limiting teaching itself
✓ The history of educational technology from the perspective of someone who has studied it since 1995 — what patterns keep repeating, what lessons we stubbornly refuse to learn, and what genuine progress, if any, has been made
✓ How we should think about artificial intelligence in education differently from every previous wave of technological optimism — what history teaches us, what is genuinely new and different about AI compared to previous technologies, what the specific risks and possibilities are, and what questions educators, policymakers, and technologists must ask before the hype cycle runs its course and leaves another generation disappointed
✓ What a genuinely honest, historically informed, phenomenologically grounded, and pedagogically serious approach to educational technology could look like — and whether the education system has the intellectual and institutional resources to build it
Prof. Norm Friesen is Professor of Education at Boise State University, co-editor of the journal Phenomenology and Practice, and one of the world's leading scholars of e-learning, educational technology, and the phenomenology of education. He has been involved in developing international technical standards for e-learning through the ISO, and his research bridges German and North American educational traditions in ways that are rare and genuinely illuminating.
🔗 Prof. Norm Friesen: experts.boisestate.edu/en/persons/norm-friesen
🌐 Show notes and resources: stevenstolz.com
This is episode seven of the 2026 season of Deep Thinking, titled "Reconsidering Education." Previous episodes in this season:
✓ EPS 015 with Fred W. Stolz OAM on educational leadership and legacy
✓ EPS 016 with Prof. David Labaree of Stanford on why schools were never meant to change
✓ EPS 017 with Prof. Jack Schneider of UMass on the politics of educational evidence
✓ EPS 018 with Prof. Gert Biesta of Edinburgh on what education is actually for
✓ EPS 019 with Prof. Todd McGowan and Prof. Ryan Engley on psychoanalysis and ideology
✓ EPS 020 with Prof. Dor Abrahamson of UC Berkeley on embodied cognition and mathematics education.
Deep Thinking with Dr. Steven Stolz is produced in Adelaide, Australia and releases every second Wednesday on all major platforms. Hosted by Dr. Steven Stolz, educator, philosopher, and academic at the University of Adelaide.
