John Naughton

Biographical information

John Naughton is a Senior Lecturer in Systems at the Open University and leader of the Faculty of Technology's Going Digital project.
He was one of the team which created You, your computer and the Net , an online, for-credit course which attracts 12,000 registered students a year.
His current research interest is on the application of Open Source methods to the development of online learning materials. This project is exploring the infrastructure needed to support collaborative production of high-quality teaching materials by dispersed communities of academics.
He is also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge where he runs the College's Press Fellowship Programme and co-ordinates Cambridge's contribution to the Internet Political Economy Forum.
He has been a columnist on the Observer since 1987 and currently writes a weekly commentary on Internet issues.
"A Brief History of the Future", his book on the development and significance of the Internet, is published in the UK by Phoenix and in the US by Overlook Press. It was shortlisted for the 2000 Aventis Prize. See www.briefhistory.com for details.

"e-Universities and other Fantasies" Lecture overview

The current obsession with 'e-learning' is academia's equivalent of the dot-com mania which swept through the world's stock markets in 1999-2000, and will in the end turn out to be just as misguided. This is because the obsession is driven by marketing or economic rather than educational imperatives, and is based on fundamental misconceptions about what is involved in making open learning work. There are good reasons for believing that information and communications technologies may one day enable universities to provide quality learning experiences for distant learners. But the view - implicit in much current e-university advocacy - that ICT is some kind of 'magic bullet' which will simultaneously broaden access, improve the quality of teaching and learning while at the same time costing less than conventional systems is little more than wishful thinking masquerading as policy. Online teaching has great potential, but our experience at the Open University of actually doing it on an industrial scale suggests that it is neither easy nor cheap. It requires the deployment of significant skills, management and resources.
This inconvenient truth is not necessarily what contemporary policy-makers wish to hear.