You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education - The New York Times:
Besides, so the thinking goes, kids today are digital natives. Because they’ve grown up around screens, their brains must be fundamentally different from those of older generations. Teachers need to “meet them where they are” by catering to shorter attention spans and swapping books for multimedia lessons. The more that math and language assignments resemble a video game, the more students will learn.
Every step in this argument is wrong.
This is good news, but not quite as good as I thought it was after reading the first few words
Sober or blotto
This is your motto
Keep muddling through
Ordering the books for my classes … for the last time. (A solitary tear slides down my cheek.) All 19th and 20th century texts, which is somewhat unusual for me, but not altogether unrepresentative of what I do. The one book on the list I’ve never taught before is the Balzac.
- G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (Modern Library: 9780375757914)
- Simone Weil, Waiting for God (Harper: 9780061718960)
- Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (Harper: 9780060670771)
- C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (Scribner: 9780743234924)
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Fortress: 9781506402741)
- Shusaku Endo, Silence (Picador: 9781250082244)
- W. H. Auden, Selected Poems (Vintage: 9780307278081)
- Balzac, Lost Illusions (Modern Library Classics: 9780375757907)
- Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin: 9780141439549)
- Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Oxford: 9780198748847)
- Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Picador 9781250788450)
One of those classes will include music, art, and film. So probably the last two things I’ll teach will be The Brothers Karamazov and Malick’s A Hidden Life.
A Manufacturing Town by L.S. Lowry (National Media Museum/Royal Photographic Society/SSPL/Getty Images), from an essay by Salford’s own Terry Eagleton.
When I look at the choices offered to Americans by their two chief political parties, I always remember a line from Woody Allen’s “My Speech to the Graduates”: “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
I understand that this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I find Alec Goldfarb’s Indian classical music on guitar fascinating. ♫
My chatbot gives me
The gift my unsoul longs for:
Freedom from knowledge.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto:
Regardless of which path we choose, the future of computing will be hyper-personalized. The question is whether that personalization will be in service of keeping us passively glued to screens—wading around in the shallows, stripped of agency—or whether it will enable us to direct more attention to what matters.
In order to build the resonant technological future we want for ourselves, we will have to resist the seductive logic of hyper-scale, and challenge the business and cultural assumptions that hold it in place. We will have to make deliberate decisions that stand in the face of accepted best practices—rethinking the system architectures, design patterns, and business models that have undergirded the tech industry for decades.
See further reflection on these issues by one of the authors of the Manifesto, the brilliant Sam Arbesman.