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ln this sense, many academics, technologists, industrialists and even some practitioners are now beginning to highlight what they see as the fundamental incompatibility between digital technology and what is referred to as the ‘Henry Ford model ofeducation’ or industrial-era’ schooling (e.g. Whitney et al. 2007). Such critiques hark back to Alvin Toffler’s depictions throughout the 1960s and 1970s of the epistemologically and technologically outmoded ‘industrial-era school`. Here Toffler (1970, p.243) decried schooling as an anachronistic by-product of ‘that relic of mass production, the centralised work place' - pointing to factory-like examples such as schools’ reliance on rigid timetables and scheduling, as well as their emphasis on physical presence and ordering of people
and knowledge. Forty years on from Toffler’s initial observations, many educational technologists continue to decry the ‘cookie curter’ industrial-era school as a profoundly unsuitable setting for the more advanced forms of learning demanded by the knowledge age and post-industrial society (e.g. Miller 2006; Warner 2006; Kelly et al. 2008).