Diane Auer Jones is a former Bush administration department of education official who is now employed in for-profit education world. In this aggressive post to The Chronicle's blog, Brainstorm, she takes on some regulatory changes by the Obama administration and posits them as mostly about hindering the uses of information technology. The entire piece includes no mention of her employment or of the fact that the new regulations are intended to cope with quality control issues by some major for-profit competitors.

It will not be long before students in brick-and-mortar classrooms will be required to have clickers in their hands so that they can press the button every 15 minutes to prove they are awake and in the room, and so that a computer can record each time they raise their electronic hand to ask or answer a question. Faculty members will need to preserve thousands of e-mails to show that they interacted with a student, even if he or she missed class on a given day. I guess faculty will be required to keep electronic logs of who visited during office hours, too. ...

You are absolutely correct, Mr. President, that the world has changed. So maybe it is time for your Department of Education to realize that the students of tomorrow will not be educated with chalkboards and overheads, no matter how much those of us who are over 40 wish to relish the glory days of our own college past. I challenge anyone who questions the quality of online education to sign up for an online course to see first hand just what it is like. Go ahead. Do it. Come back and tell us how it was. But for those who have never experienced online learning or teaching first hand, perhaps it is time to stop parroting hearsay and start making some evidence-based observations of their own.

Thank you, Mr. President, for recognizing that technology has changed our world. It is now time to allow technology to change higher education.