How do “today’s students” write, really? « previous post | next post » There was a cute "Things Kids Write" piece in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago (James Courter, "Teaching Taco Bell's Canon", 7/9/2012), with the subhead "Today's students don't read. As a result, they have sometimes hilarious notions of how the written language represents what they hear. " Is it true that college students today are unprepared and unmotivated? That generalization does injustice to the numerous bright exceptions I saw in my 25 years of teaching composition to university freshmen.
But in other cases the characterization is all too accurate. One big problem is that so few students are readers. As an unfortunate result, they have erroneous, and sometimes hilarious, notions of how the written language represents what they hear. There was the expected flurry of "o tempora o mores" comments: Maybe e-readers will bring us a hope of saving literacy. Today kids don't have a clue – and not only for spoken grammar. and MRS. Permalink. Larry Sanger Blog » Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? Is there a new anti-intellectualism? I mean one that is advocated by Internet geeks and some of the digerati. I think so: more and more mavens of the Internet are coming out firmly against academic knowledge in all its forms. This might sound outrageous to say, but it is sadly true.
Let’s review the evidence. 1. The evidence Programmers have been saying for years that it’s unnecessary to get a college degree in order to be a great coder–and this has always been easy to concede. In 2001, along came Wikipedia, which gave everyone equal rights to record knowledge. Around the same time, some people began to criticize books as such, as an outmoded medium, and not merely because they are traditionally paper and not digital. But nascent geek anti-intellectualism really began to come into focus around three years ago with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, when Nicholas Carr asked, “Is Google making us stupid?” In 2010, Edge took up the question, “Is the Internet changing the way you think?” 2. Dwight Macdonald, "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club" Published in The New Yorker, November 29, 1952 FOR $249.50, which is (for all practical purposes) $250, one could buy, in 1952, a hundred pounds of Great Books: four hundred and forty-three works by seventy-six authors, ranging chronologically and in other ways from Homer to Dr.
Mortimer J. Adler, the whole forming a mass amounting to thirty-two thousand pages, mostly double-column, containing twenty-five million words squeezed into fifty-four volumes. The publisher of this behemoth, which cost almost two million dollars to produce, is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is jointly owned by Senator William Benton of Connecticut and the University of Chicago. The books were selected by a board headed by Dr. Robert Hutchins, formerly chancellor of the University of Chicago and now an associate director of the Ford Foundation, and Dr. "This set of books," says Dr. SO much for the selection, which, for all its scholastic whimsicality, is the most successful aspect of the enterprise. Books on Paper Fight Analog Distractions - Alexis Madrigal - Technology.
We're worried. With all of the things in the physical world -- parks and baseball, cars and cats, food and drink, duvet covers and lamps -- how will anyone get any reading done? Can you concentrate on Flaubert when your cute cat is only a few feet away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy when people are swimming in a pool nearby? People who read books on paper are realizing that while they really want to be reading Dostoyevsky, the real world around them is pretty distracting with all of its opportunities for interacting with people, buying things in stores, and drinking coffee. The telephone lurks tantalizingly in reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through yelling loudly across the room to someone who might know the answer. And some of the millions of people who have ever picked up a book only to put it back down again a few minutes have come away with the conclusion: It's hard to sit down and focus on reading.
The BRIGHT Future of Libraries - a Rant. So a friend of mine sent me this link which includes a bunch of articles about the future of libraries. Before I go on the rant I’m about to unleash, I’d like to say by way of full disclosure that I have not read any of them yet. I plan to read through and post my reactions on each one as I have time. For now, though, looking at the titles, a number of these are from angry Internet pundits who are lovers of technology and who possess an unreasoning distaste for libraries, who are predicting the downfall of libraries because the idea of buildings full of books is outmoded and archaic in an era when everything is FREE ONLINE!!! I’ll be honest: I wish these uneducated morons would just stop, shut up, and go away. It’s their opinions that are invalid and archaic, as is their understandings of what libraries are and what they do.
Let me point out a few things. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Against TED. George Bluth sells the Cornballer, Arrested Development When did TED lose its edge? When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart? Started as a one-off conference nearly 30 years ago, the TED (“Technology, Entertainment and Design”) phenomenon has grown to two large annual events and many smaller regional TEDx events, focusing mostly but not exclusively on technology. TED has posted more than 1,100 videos of the talks online. By my count, 89 of them have achieved more than one million views. What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. It’s tempting to dismiss the “Web 3.0!”
The underlying idea behind TED sounds great: Get smart people to articulate good ideas in a way that is concise and entertaining. Instead, my critique has to do with TED’s epistemic style — that is, what counts as knowledge and how that knowledge is disseminated. Fey & Braunig Drug Salesman, circa 1900, DeGolyer Library. How TED Makes Ideas Smaller - Megan Garber - Technology.
In 1874, the inventor Lewis Miller and the Methodist bishop John Heyl Vincent founded a camp for Sunday school teachers near Chautauqua, New York. Two years later, Vincent reinstated the camp, training a collection of teachers in an outdoor summer school. Soon, what had started as an ad-hoc instructional course had become a movement: Secular versions of the outdoor schools, colloquially known as "Chautauquas," began springing up throughout the country, giving rise to an educational circuit featuring lectures and other performances by the intellectuals of the day.
William Jennings Bryan, a frequent presenter at the Chautauquas, called the circuit a "potent human factor in molding the mind of the nation. " Teddy Roosevelt deemed it "the most American thing in America. " The more things change, I guess. One matter on which there seems to be no disagreement: TED, today, can make you a star. But the ideas spread through TED, of course, aren't just ideas; they're branded ideas. The cult of TED. 20 June 2012Last updated at 20:20 ET By Jon Kelly BBC News Magazine Once a select forum of the great and good, the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference now has millions of avid online fans. How did an elite ideas-sharing gathering go mainstream? Falling animals, misbehaving toddlers and footage of Justin Bieber may populate the bulk of any YouTube most-viewed list. But amid the viral clips and pop music promos is a series of videos that seems to go against all received wisdom about what online audiences like to consume.
Their tone is sunnily optimistic, go-getting, Californian, with titles like Information Is Food, Crowdsource Your Health and Inventing Is the Easy Part. They feature luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, JK Rowling and Bono delivering 18-minute lectures about big ideas - technology, culture, the environment, science, social trends.
Bill Gates unleashed mosquitoes on a TED audience in 2009 The talks have a habit of catching on. "It has a cultish feel to it. I Point To TED Talks and I Point to Kim Kardashian. That Is All. The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan. TED Books. Kindle, Nook, iBooks, $2.99 Reviewed by Carl Zimmer Tonight, I want to talk to you about a national crisis. A global crisis. A crisis of such tremendous proportions that you may not even be aware that it is engulfing you and your loved ones and your neighbors in flames.
What is this crisis? Wait, I meant Facebook. Right. These videos are so addictive that they are cracking the very foundation of human civilization. Therefore we must take immediate steps to ban TED talks. The phenomenon of TED is a mixed bag. There are many good things about these talks. A number of the science talks on TED are excellent. These talks are excellent for two reasons. And in crafting their presentations, these speakers are not selling out. Unfortunately, some TED talks about science don't live up to Huxley's example. Yet that's exactly what Zimbardo is trying to do with guys.
Prejudices and Antipathies. Knowlton.
The Death of the Lecture. Recently, I had a conversation around the lunch table with several of my colleagues. The discussion turned to the requirement to take pedagogical courses, now part of the criteria for getting an academic job at my university. Were these courses useful or just necessary? Do they teach something relevant for improving one’s teaching? As good scientists, we stopped discussing the courses and focused thereon on the definition of “teaching” or, more specifically, on what “good teaching” should stand for. Of the many things we discussed during that lunch, the idea of the outdated lecture stayed with me, I decided to dedicate this post to a critique of this method of teaching.
Lectures are a very common (I could safely generalize and say even the most common) method of teaching at the university level. This does not mean that there are no labs, seminars, discussion sessions, group projects etc. But is the transfer of information mediated by a teacher the same thing as learning?