Educational commentators Noble (1998) & Hara and Kling (1999) suggest that technology may not be the panacea that alleviates the woes and ills of education.
I certainly would not want to crow that technology does hold the promise of 'better', however, what I think is happening and is different from the time that these two authors wrote, is the advent of people repurposing technology in a way that is/was probably different from how the authors of the technology first imagined.
For instance, Hara & Kling (1999) talk about the frustrations that students felt whilst trying to do an online course which included trying to go to the schMOOze University, a virtual place for students from around the world to come and 'chat' (aka type) in English. However by the late 90s there was still no 'Google', there was no Facebook, no Twitter. 'Blogging' was more like a normal static web page; web technologies were very much controlled by centralised administrators and many technologies required a payment of some sort. Compare that to today where it is hard to imagine that there is not a category of software that you cannot get for free (even if it is not as pretty as the commercial equivalents).
Noble's (1998) article is more pessimistic as he sees that the online educational world becoming more corporatised with the 'business' of education being run by business people and not educators. I believe that Noble's (in hindsight shrill) expressed fears of 1998 were well founded. The computing world of 1998 was dominated by Microsoft, Sun Systems, Oracle and so on. As an avid Mac user, I remember this period only too well. One can easily imagine that the hegemony of these companies would dominate in an online educational initiative forcing us to go down the road an educational agenda that was dictated by the bank balances of these businesses rather than a genuine educational concern. In fact, I would go so far as to say that 'we're not out of the woods yet', but at least this immediate threat appears to have diminished considerably.
The tiniest of 'warts' on this otherwise sewn up relationship, came in the shape of open-source software. The biggest of them at the time being the Linux operating system. 'Big' is a relative term because compared to the Windows OS world they barely registered on the map. Now we can in theory buy a computer with no operating system, and then install an operating system (Linux), serve up web pages (Apache), write documents and spreadsheets that can read and be read by the commercial counterparts (OpenOffice), design and implement a database (MySQL) and even offer up a Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle).
At the same time, users are becoming more attune to the way an online world operates. One can sign up for an account in a social network system in which no money needs to be exchanged, and one can customise one's network, if not infinitely, then certainly in many many different ways. Cheap (relatively) broadband access and knowledge of at least the 'cut & paste' paradigm in cross applications and operating system procedures mean that one can now do most of these tasks online. Think Google Docs, or Survey Monkeys (design online surveys), or project management (my favourite is Basecamp, from 37 signals).
And then there are blogs. Blogger or WordPress allows you to sign up for an account - for free. Just type or write away, or cut and paste from your own document into the assigned, or customisable templates available to maintain a professional looking web log.
No doubt there will be future frustrations for the online student (Hara & Kling 1999), and no doubt businesses will have a significant say in how and even what our educational practices should or ought to be (Noble 1998), but I believe that they will not be of the same kind of threats or frustrations as outlined by these respective and, in the online world, old studies.
References
Hara, N. & Kling, R. (1999) Student's frustrations with a web-based distance education course. Accessed on, 8th June, 2009, <http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/710/620>.
Noble, D.F. (1998) Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education. Accessed on, 10th June, 2009, <http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/569/490>.