Dwelling in Possibilities | Hacker News Reader

Dwelling in Possibilities

chronicle.com

9 pointsdaveambrose3 comments

This is horrible. It's just an overexplanation of the exuberance unleashed by computers and the internet.

The author observes the habits of modern-day college students and assigns a deep meaning to them. Whenever he notices some superficial similarity between two activities (hey, having lots of low-commitment sexual partners is just like moving quickly from one webpage to another!) he points it out. Whenever he can quote some literary figure saying something roughly similar to what he's been writing about, he does. It reads like deliberate Stuff White People Like bait.

The author's literary style may be overzealous but I thought his philosophy was at least credible. He echoes Tolle, Zittrain and others who warn (as Zittrain puts it) "the internet, in many important respects, is a collective hallucination." Consider how many people today will spend most of their waking life sitting stationary, staring directly at a display. Is that a rational, enlightened way to live given the opportunity cost? I don't know but debating the question as this professor is doing doesn't seem to me horrible or baiting.

Well, he does make one good point in that each student should learn to "know thyself".

However, the rest sounds like he's trying to rationalize his perceived inadequacy relative to his students' potential.

Instead of becoming a luddite, he should realize that classrooms have changed: we don't need to be in the same "broadcast domain" to disseminate information anymore, push those lectures into PDFs they can read outside of class; use the face-time in class to pose questions for the group to solve/discuss; take more class time to answer questions students have (or add a digg-style interface to students questions before class so that the questions important to the students get discussed; etc.

Technology bridges gaps that this guy just wants to widen....

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