Distance Learning Advocacy at the Inception of Ed Tech and U.S. Public Media

Building 3, 3-133

Book talk by Josh Shepperd, University of Colorado BoulderCo-sponsored by MIT Open Learning, MIT Department of History, MIT Comparative Media StudiesPreviously unchronicled, the origins of both online learning and US public media can be located in a counterintuitive yet symbiotic dialectic that emerged between communications regulation, institution building, funding, and early audience research between 1934 and 1941. At first these sectors synthesized into a common public activist project, referred to as the US "media reform movement," to materialize a principle – equal access to education through technology. Beginning in 1935, educational reformers experimented with trial and error strategies designed to address two challenges: 1) stratified privatization of media ownership, and 2) to build a media infrastructure that could sustain itself without advertising funds. Their most persuasive strategy was the unexpected innovation of the first mass communications research methods, developed to provide evidence to regulators that media extension services were effective for educating rural listeners. As momentum for media education built in the 1940s, reformers evolved into different but parallel sectors: 1) correspondence classes through radio instruction, the forerunner to educational technology, and 2) cultural and national uplift programming as educational entertainment, the forerunner to public media.Josh Shepperd is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Josh designs applied policy and public humanities for the Library of Congress, and serves as director of the Radio Preservation Task Force and Sound Submissions Project. He is author of Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press), and is the founding Associate Editor of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (University of California Press).