Hope for Humanity

When I first enrolled in the class, I was expecting new techniques of pedagogy, some digital components of coursework and a project-based structure--but I never expected a non-structured, seemingly non-focused curriculum, the daily panic-attack of a surprise homework load and the inability to plan ahead due to the non-presence of any syllabus at all. "I should drop it," I remember thinking, "I can't handle this in my last semester of school--and my first semester married--and my first semester working--and the semester when I'm in a hardcore capstone class." I stayed, because I've seen the potential for creativity in learning fluidly, with group members, in projects, and in a new medium--and I've seen the results without such encouragement... 

I made this myself. All rights out the window. 
Also, I just noticed this zombie could be in the middle of the Thriller dance. 

My mom just wrote a post for her parenting blog reflecting on her experience with pedagogy in home school with my little brother. She was amazed at the change she's seen as he's been allowed and encouraged to direct his own learning and become invested in that process: "In the past year, our Zombie child morphed into a more self-directed teenager with greater confidence in his own talent and abilities—a transformation nearly as incredible as that in the movie [Warm Bodies]!" She claims that several aspects of public schooling are "Zombie Makers," including low sleep, high stress, inefficient, focused-on-the-squeaky-wheel/overburdened teachers and, especially, a one-size-fits-all curriculum. You can read more of her essay on education-created zombie teens here. 

Albert Einstein quothe: "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its
ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it's stupid."

Humanism in the English Renaissance was intensely concerned with returning to classic education techniques, which, if followed together, would enable humanity like never before in history (except of course ancient Greece, haha), and create the perfect "Renaissance Man," able to speak, write, reason and make clever conversation. Erasmus of Rotterdam said famously, "It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is," but the next happiness, of course, was extending the mental and logical facilities of man to make him, as Hamlet says in Shakespeare's play, a "piece of work:"
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals...

Hamlet ends his speech, as usual, vacillating between opinions, "—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" but the vantage point of humanism is already established. The potentiality of man, enabled through education and speech/writing training, was almost limitless. In Erasmus's treatise on rhetorical strategies entitled de Copia, he comes up with 100+ variations on just one, boring sentence: "Your letter pleased me greatly."  To see some, click here.

What does this have to do with zombies? The emphasis of humanism was on the potential of human creativity, and through its course, our class has taken a necessary pulse in that vein of thought in order to arrive where we are now: not passified, individually grade-grubbing zombies, but an enlightened (if still amateur) team of Renaissance men and women (Sprezzatura), seeking out (Brave New Worlds) sources and ideas from previous centuries (ad fontes) and repackaging, refreshing and revitalizing (Humanism) them through our new media (Typographia), relying on our faith in God (Ploughboys and Bibles) and in each other (Humanism again!) as we go.


I found myself praying for unity and a sense of purpose, along with the strength to just carry on. 

It was partially a primary text and partially an assignment that answered my prayer, I feel, and changed my experience of the course--a video introduction of Michel Montaigne's Of Cannibals. In re-vamping the situation but retaining the original themes of the piece, I found new inspiration in the Renaissance artist and writer's take on previous centuries. It was exhilarating to find that with a webcam, , dark eye shadow, creativity and a little ketchup, I could do it, too--I could excite and inspire and amuse with the rest of youtube (the modern printing press, making public and simple what had previously been elite and closed to amateurs). The results of the class's video debuts launched us into a whole new aspect of pedagogy: getting the information to the masses in formats they were comfortable with (as in Plough Boys and Bibles) and working fluidly, in teams and as a class, as we did so (just like courtiers).


Though at the beginning of the semester I was ignorant about Erasmus or humanism's claims, I did recognize the stagnant signs of zombi-fied learning in myself. I don't think such drastic measures as we took are necessary to avoid the zombie'd student--and indeed, at the beginning, I found myself slipping into a stupified, anxious sphere from the inability to plan homework assignments ahead of time--but when I started really getting to know my teammates and trusting their creativity, I felt a change in the spirit of learning that enabled real scholarship ...in the form of puppet shows. Go figure, huh?

Strengths and Weaknesses, FINAL Presentations

CLAIM ONE OF THESE ISSUES, APPLY IT TO A FEW THEMES, BLOG ON IT.

Strengths:

• Different entry-points/levels of engagement 
• college audience member loved ad fontes videos (more analysis, assumes familiarity w/ text)
• middle school audience member liked the more simple puppet shows (introduction)
• audience member with illness likes that it's self-led: can take breaks and come back to it

Weaknesses:

• need to build in redundancy in the videos (in case annotations don't exist)
• need a longer pre and post screen and a "tip" to turn on annotations
• need longer text inclusions to allow for reading
• need a better video intro to Renaissance

Ad fontes: 

• text adaptation into a visual/video format, how to include the primary texts
• refreshing the primary sources with a new format, new story, new context
• touch on evolution from e-book to website to video curriculum
• began with iterative structure: looking back to the themes throughout the rest of it. 

Brave New World:

• evolution from e-book to websites to cereal to video curriculum
• shifting media, novel media (zombies)

Humanism:

• creativity and collaboration, project based learning
• required to work together: you have casualties! 
• picking up for each other
• HUGE PRO--way harder to grade, though
• trusting the students to be able to do this

Plough Boys and Bibles:

• praying for help!!
• religion, how much do we incorporate LDS with the project
• Evolution of the class: toward more access (digital dialogue to blog)
• grades, how much do we depend on a syllabus and grades (ordinance to personal salvation)
• caring about learning instead of getting graded
• but no security about knowing how you're doing AND no competition
• frustration!! 

Typographia:

• Technical methodology: how to annotate videos, including screens before and after the video, how to form a narrative, the map, structure of intro to adventures to quizzes. 
• Consolidating the new mode of presentation into a narrative.

Sprezzatura:

• AHA! getting people talking, social interaction, allows for this fluid class non-structure
• sociality is primary
• agile development (small teams who can quickly change direction)
• conversations don't think it's a problem when we tangent or change direction
• badge system

OK, let's actually look at the PROCESS of our CLASS

Professor overview

1. Lecture-based iterative, six themes, whirlpool structure

2. theme-based--independent, ad fontes, looking for primary texts, review on digital dialogue

frustration of not knowing classmates, not knowing what to do next, not knowing what matters or what to look at, confusion about not having a syllabus.

3. group formation and picking some digital tools (picked wiki)

4. wiki (still focused on making an ebook) independent research combined into categories

5. blog: more creative: cereal idea, video idea (zombies, paradise lost disney intro), video intros (Petrarch), entire video curriculum (dinosaur puppet). 

6. Finally deciding to go entirely to videos, curriculum, working as groups and giving group days

Throughout: became more personal, more collaborative, more pedagogical, shifted to more creative and less rigid, more accessible, less school-regulated. 

Viewer Comments and Presentation Ideas

A 14 year old, homeschooled, computer-savvy male: When I asked him to do it, he said that he usually didn't like "super-annotated" videos on youtube, but when he heard it was in place of class he was all ears. He had to find the Brave New Worlds by searching the youtube account (eRenaissance2) <hard to find>.  He thought it was funny and kinda silly. He said he "failed miserably" at the quiz, so he just clicked through all the answers until he found the right one. He wanted to keep going after the first (cannibals) adventure because he thought it was hilarious, so he went on to the Winthrop/America challenge. He said he guessed right on those quiz questions. He didn't understand Blazing World at all because he'd never even heard of it.
"Everything was laid out pretty well... it was fun... way better than sitting in a classroom..." It sounds like the narrative really helped him understand what was going on.

A 26 year old, BYU grad student, barely ever gets online: "I lost patience with the thing about two minutes in. It was funny, though. It's just not my learning style I guess." I think he would've enjoyed the Ad Fontes videos more than the Brave New World or Typographia ones. It's great that we have different levels of engagement, though!

My mom needed extensive coaching to find the beginning of the video chains, but then she thought they were hilarious. She needed help figuring out how you would use the curriculum in a home school course, too. We assume some level of Renaissance awareness (basics: when/where are we talking about? what are the themes?) that many readers and even educators may not have. The intro video (map video) should probably address those things (my fault!!).

Humanism:
Our project involved evolution and a focus on the creative (instead of dogmatic) learning experience. Each person was encouraged to work on the problem individually, and we got about 100 variations of the Renaissance (i.e. your letter greatly pleased me) in video, text, essay, collaborative essay, intro, tweethis, the Tempest, wiki, blog, etc!!
If we aren't talking about the experience of the project in another group, I think it would be a great point in Humanism (I liked what Jerrick said, though, about the grade experience for Plough Boys, and the evolution of the project like Julie Ann was talking about).

Final Presentation Ideas

Class Ideas

• Technology and Presentation
• orienting methods
• formal devices that we use to orient people:
• The Tempest
• Ebook/textbook
• Wiki
• Blog
• the map + annotations/links that direct people to different PLACES
• platform/rope/swimmers on a lake
• 6 themes
• 3 texts each
• we have NOT multiplied this into the Norton anthology
• Too much information problem is FIXED
• A jumping off point: you'll remember these 6 themes
• Narration versus no narration when presenting texts.
• how we assess their learning
• how we used the video quiz (branching), google doc quiz
• generation of interest, not a Testing Center type exam
• Six Themes
• Aspects for each theme
• what we would do for the three themes we didn't do:
• Sprezzatura
• fluid conversations: find out how much you know as you talk! 
• learn how to be a Renaissance Man **badging**
• the assessment system
• Bibles and Plough Boys
• spiritual aspect of the class
• faith, failure, how much do we put in?
• orientation and evolution from textbook to ebook to youtube
• oral presentation
• Humanism
• 
  
• Printing
• Maybe issue of different media--what are the problems of making it more open to all (like Thomas' bookshop: manuscripts to printing)
• Brave New Worlds
• Pedagogy:
• Collaborative learning
• mastering new skills, project based learning
• individual learning to group involvement evolution
• Ad Fontes
• Maybe issue of representing primary texts should go here instead...
• Issue of representing primary texts
• what's the role of 
• quotes? narration? summary? putting it into a different format?
• Nate's text video, Sarah's "new take" on sirens, Dia's zombies

Quiz Formats?

Quiz formats:

Group 1: google doc quiz that leads to badging system

Group 2: interactive video quizzes

• characters continue
• each quiz question has two following videos?
• A- YAY, you got it right, here's the next question
• B- NAY, you got it wrong, here's the reason WHY--now click the right answer (go A)
• three questions: 
• and three texts
• 15 videos (or 12)

Quick Prototype of a Text Intro Video

I didn't finish it, but I learned what I need to do to make the process faster. The music (creative commons from freesound.org, I had to register to download anything) helps, but it's still pretty dull.

Script for Cannibals

Scene: cannibal hut/desert island, complete with human body parts on a spit]
[enter Sailors]

Sailor 1: Arrrr, a real cannibal island! Now, I remember reading an essay by some French guy...
Sailor 2 Marner: Michel Montaigne. You didn't read it, you just used Spiff Notes.
Sailor 1 Jonas: Bark Notes, actually, and it's all the same anyway. OK, I'm trying to remember if he gave us any clues about how not to get eaten.
Sailor 2: Just stay cool, man. I read the whole essay, and we just have to remember that just because people are different doesn't make them wrong. Steady, [other sailor is deep breathing] steady as she---
[enter Cannibal]
Cannibal: Boooooo!
[Sailors screech like girls and start shaking]
Cannibal: Haaa, teeny sailor girls screech like stuck pig! Welcome to our island, sailor sandwiches!
Sailor 2 Marner: Look at me, I'm shaking like we're still in that tempest!
Sailor 1 Jonas pirate: Um... I don't think it's sea legs anymore.
Cannibal: No need be frightened!  [switch to normal side] See, we offer you welcome! Rest, help, food! Anyone care for some delicious... Lady Fingers?
Sailor 1 Marner: Sailor 2!!! I mean, Jonas!!!
Sailor 2, nervously, Jonas: Ha! ...I bet they're ...finger-lickin' good! Arg.
Cannibal: HA! No worries, sailor sandwich man, I no eat you, you a comedian!
Sailor 2 Jonas: Well, why not?
Cannibal: Comedian taste funny!
Sailor 2 Jonas: HAA! See, [Marner], they're not so bad! Oh, oh, I got another one: what do you and a HR rep have in common?
Cannibal: What HR rep mean?
Sailor 2: You're both... fed up with people! (snare drum snap)
[Both laugh until Cannibal abruptly stops.] [switch to scary side]
Cannibal: ...all this laughing make me hungry.
Sailor 1: DON'T EAT ME!
Cannibal: Well, we humanists so we like (to eat) humans. I give you TEST. You can answer few question right, we no eat you. You answer wrong... and we helps you find out where you funny bone be.
Sailor 1 and 2: HELP US!

Help the sailors and work toward your own Exploring Brave New Worlds Badge:

option 1: I've already read Michel Montaigne's Of Cannibals. I'm ready for the challenge!
option 2: I need a refresher first! Take me to some texts!

Quiz:
1. Michel Montaigne's writing looks like...
            a. a personal essay
            b. a chapter from a book
            c. a speech to Parliament
            d. both a and b
            e. all of the above

*** 2. Michel Montaigne likes to get his information from...
            a. a famous explorer of the period, Thomas Heriot
            b. the wisest, most experienced explorers on the ocean
            c. Long John Silver, the ship's cook.
            d. a simple, ignorant crew member

3. According to Montaigne, cannibals are savages in the same way...
           a. fire is hot: they will always be that way
           b. a mean dog is ornery: it's been taught to bite back
           c. fruit is wild: it's still in its natural state
           d. heaven is cloudy: it's actually better that way

***4. Montaigne believes cannibals are no more savage than...
           a. Wild apples (since they actually taste better out of the orchard)
           b. Europeans (since they torture their prisoners alive)
           c. Zombies (since they really don't have a choice in what they eat)
          d. Pocahontas (since she ...wasn't around yet)

***5. What are the two chief values of the cannibals?
           a. valor to their enemies and love to their wives
           b. peace and plenty
           c. careful seasoning and perfect barbeque techniques
           d. drinking and dancing

6. Why does M. use so many allusions to older myths and civiliations in history? Name one such nation and do some background research on what the inclusion would have meant to his day. (ad fontes)

7. Humanism

Work in Progress Timeline for Our Project's Completion

HELP!

WHAT DO I DO NEXT?

*things to decide and work on:
**this is entirely draft/work IN progress, just wanted to get some timeline ideas on ...a screen**

1. Decide on avatars: narrative structure, backgrounds/settings, map of hotspots
• Narrative Structure
• INTRO to your narrative **make the viewer care**
• three text/options/missions
• quizzes
• allowing instructors to do their own??
• too complex to have a video quiz/click to respond?
• important to reinforce learning by responding to wrong answers
• Point:
• are we seeing if they listened to the video, 
• OR asking them to learn new things?
• Learning Tree:
• at the end of each "mission" text, have the option to go on to the other missions in the theme OR back to the island (6 themes).
2. Write up scripts
3. Film or create movies; introduce and flesh out themes
4. Connect movies to each other with annotations/links

Repeat steps 2 through 4 for The Tempest

Friday, March 29- video prototypes for the first theme group (1, 2, 5)

• FOR BNW:
• puppets/backgrounds
• scripts for each videos

Monday, April 1- script/storyline for second theme group (3, 4, 6)

Wednesday, April 3- video prototype for the second theme group (3, 4, 6)

Friday, April 5-

Monday, April 8-

Wednesday, April 10-

Friday, April 12-

Monday, April 15-

Brave New World ideas

See https://sites.google.com/site/openrenaissancewiki/ebook/brave-new-worlds/brave-minicurriculum

for our project ideas, possible flow of video chain, characters, background, script... 

Map

Backdrops

I ran into the same problem as Amber on xtranormal--it subtracted points for various aspects of the video, and then it wouldn't let me link to it here.

I also did some searching through creative commons pictures to print out and form a backdrop or background that way, but the best stuff was copywritten. Like Amber was saying, a classroom or assembly hall would be best for humanism, I think. I like having it as an actual backdrop (as in for puppets) but that's mostly because I don't have the technological know-how to put several digital avatars onto a digital background (pdf?).

Humanism in Stick Figures and Renaissance in the Jurassic

I tried to configure a slap-together video montage playlist thing of what our project would end up looking like....

But then I got really excited about finishing this.

I also played around with Xtra normal and realized we can do recordings of our own voices, which is great. We can watch that one in class, too, if we want.

Snaggletooth?

Class Discussion on Monday, March 18, 2013

The Tempest Performance Excerpts Review!
**You can see our videos below**

As we create our mini curriculum (miniculum?)
we're planning on an INTRODUCTION to each theme including:

•      a student-made intro video (including questions to intro the excerpt)
•      an excerpt of the performance
•      answer key or quiz or some interactive medium to include the student.

• Theme 1: Ad fontes
• Hannah found a great clip where "Prospera" cites multiple Greek/Latin texts and mythologies. 
• Theme 2: Brave New World
• Theme 3: What a Piece of Work
• Dia found a clip that considers Caliban learning language and the connection between rhetoric and power, but other clips (considering Ariel and Caliban as alternate versions of humanity, for example) could be included in this theme. 
• Theme 4: Plough boys
• IN this clip, Christian themes--mercy, redemption and even logic must define Prospera's next choices, according to Nate. 
• Theme 5: Typographia--
• Jenna brought up "I'll drown my book" as an example of how destroying books could actually destroy knowledge in that time. 
• Theme 6: Sprezzatura--
• Julie Anne considered clothing in the excerpts she watched and how costuming influences Shakespeare's theme of courtlier pride in the play.   

How could the themes BE the structure of the project?
FORMAT IDEAS

• Sprezzatura:
• a conversation, even an argument to invite your audience to interact with the the material.
1. Possible angles of perspective, ie. Jerrick v Julie Anne, OR duke vs plough boy etc.
2. Interactions:
1. Rap battles? Comments on who was the best argument?
2. OR just interaction with US? 
3. hash tagging allows us to find their responses later...
• Ad fontes:
• Treasure Hunt
• Book Club or Interview 
• Aristotle talking to Jerrick? Or would it be Aristotle talking to the "DUKE" 
• Consider using puppets, drawings, avatars, some unifying element or character to connect the history--fictional characters--overblown personas--even zombies. 
• headshot of each theme: what would it look like? 
• text loses personality 
• Tiered Content Model
• Skeleton of Sprezzatura dialogue, 
• short intros of ideas would lead you, if you wanted to keep looking at it, to more deep analysis of that theme (or another text)
• how would this connect to an etext? or another curriculum? 
• Leveling: Tempest would draw you into the six themes, other primary texts would be the next level. 
• Are we focusing too much on the Tempest? 
• Maybe within Tempest we look at **the Renaissance**
• OR including, as part of Sprezzatura, an argument that the Tempest doesn't really personify the theme like THE BIBLE or like FAERIE QUEENE... 

To do NEXT...

• Decide on Avatars, 
• Should each theme have 2 or 3 characters to define them? 
• How should be represent it? 
• Animation? 
• SHOULD BE EASY! 
• This should be fun! 
• Post your avatar on the blog, speaking about the theme with that character's voice

Man and HIS Magic in the Tempest

In the Renaissance, humanists championed the power and intricacies of mankind. In the Tempest, Shakespeare explores what makes a human, what makes education worthwhile and why language and learning is so powerful.

This extract from BBC's The Tempest shows the characters Prospero (sorcerer and Miranda's father, now ruler of the island), Miranda (Prospero's daughter, shipwrecked with him as a baby), Ariel (air/water spirit, good, native of the island) and Caliban (earth/fire spirit, evil, child of a sea witch, Sycorax who was left on the island by sailors and whose evil rule was later overturned by Prospero). Watch the clip with these ideas in mind:

Level One (Adventurer):
How do Prospero and Miranda deal with Caliban? 
What does he say "his only profit" of learning to speak is (at 5:57)?
Do you see any other good things about learning about other people or other languages?

Level Two (Explorer): answer the previous questions, plus...
How is Prospero able to control Caliban? 
How do knowledge and language indicate power and station? 
Thus, how does learning make a man?

Level Three (Courier?): answer the previous questions, plus...
Was Prospero right to enslave Caliban, and how does the answer depend on different interpretations of the actors' lines?
Just from these short minutes, what might be some contrasting views of mankind, learning, colonialism and slavery in the Renaissance?

START AT 4:01

START AT 4:01

Sprezzatura + Brave New World Idea and The Tempest

This is an idea for Sprezzatura, actually ---> I don't know if you've already found something, but I thought this clip might work. It really deals with Miranda's, erm, artlessness. She's definitely NOT a courtier. 

This clip where Caliban plays the traitor and pledges allegiance to Stephano brings up issues in Brave New World about colonization and the state of nature in these wild natives. The drunken monster has been wooed by firewater, and thus is an important commentary on the colonization going on in the Renaissance. 

Connecting Old and New: Humanism

Old Themes, New Genres

My Handsome Grandpa

So this is my awesome grandpa back in the ...70's? He was a country grass rock star. No one could play the gee-tar like grandpa--or the mandolin, or the banjo, or whatever else had strings and would sit still long enough for him to play it.

Now grandpa's getting on in years, but he hasn't lost a lick of spunk. Last year he finished building his own motor home so he could take long weekends down to Las Vegas, and he just barely got a bicycle for Christmas so he can take long bike rides down to the drug store.

What has my grandpa got to do with our class? Well...

my own picture of my own grandpa

We have some cool old themes, some fun new genres and plenty of creative kids to work on a fusion between the two.

This is my brainstorm for how we can bring them together. Think of it as turning the hearts of the children to the Renaissance, if you will--we've got to find cool connections to today to catch people's interest (just like Jerrick was saying here--though adaptations can lose the specifics of the piece, it incites interest, which may be worth it!). 

First I'll try to synthesize the theme into a little bit more modern summary...

Humanism: This is the stuff of Les Mis's "Can you hear the people sing?" and Aragorn's "A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship... when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day!" Whenever you've been moved by a speech or a movie scene or even song lyrics, humanism was probably at work. As we've reviewed before, humanist principles quietly put into place such glorious stuff as "I have a Dream" and even "I'd like to buy the world a Coke." Whenever rhetoric championed intellect and reason, looked back to earlier masters of logic and debate or found mistakes in the original score (think "digitally remastered for better sound"), humanism reigned. We're talking  1776,William Wilberforce, evangelicals of 1830 and our own presidential debates. 

So how could be get this into a feasible video introduction? Remember our tweethis:

Humanism threw down established orders and doctrines in favor of the fresh, new worlds of individual imagination, claiming, “What a Piece of Work is Man.”

...and my grandpa.  Turns out you can teach an old theme new tricks, as he shows here.

receiving instruction from another granddaughter on how to work his very own cellular de-vice back in 2004

On Cannibals and Zombies: Montaigne in 2800 AD

journal entry 1: 

journal entry 2:

journal entry 3

journal entry 4

journal entry 5:

I would've polished this much more if I'd had time, but I think it does accomplish some things I'd like you to consider while you watch: How has the personal "essay" genre changed through time? What has a "journal" meant through time? How should literature incite our own experiences, whether that's exploring our own world or making a video? What is Other, and how do we deal with it? What role has the unknown or the monster played through British lit/ cultural history? How does our contact with the Other start to dissolve our own cultural concepts or boundaries? Can it strengthen them instead? Why zombies? Why cannibals? How do you get ketchup out of your hair? Who in your life trusts you enough to let you bite their finger?

A "Lack of Non-Verbal Cues" in our Action-Packed, Balanced Breakfasts Society

A "Lack of Non-Verbal Cues" in our Action-Packed, Balanced Breakfasts Society? I'm torn.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69462973@N08/6310785636/
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License

One the one hand, I've seen the deadened-eyes, the twitching fingers seemingly still curved around a mouse or joystick and the mindless drip of drool stringing from chin to floor, all signs of one, horrible monster: the computer zombie. My mother strictly regulated online gaming, video game consoles and all electronic entertainment for years, but my little brothers still did and still do find every opportunity to get their "fix." I've experienced myself the pointless drivel and real-life-sucking falseness of cyberspace: cyber friendship, cyber chatting, cyber sharing, and now the issue before us, cyber creativity and cyber academia. Can we really have any kind of real discussion without human forms and beings and breath and a physical context for the situation?

I'm a literature student, and emerging participant in the academic conversation about literature, so I guess I have already given in to this idea. I conduct almost all of my "conversations" on paper, through decades, in online library indexes and in databases. I don't even have to talk to a librarian anymore (yes, those light-sensitive library moles previously considered the climax of anti-sociality have been one-upped by ME!) to do my research, write my papers and have my "conversation." I've never met one scholar (except a few professors from my own university) that I've cited in a paper. To exaggeratedly quote from one of my husband's letters to me on my mission "Everywhere you go, you talk to people. You teach people, contact people; you always have your companion to talk to and even argue with. I live in a faceless, heartless pit of words and symbols, working out my meaningless Masters degree in a world of strangers." (Don't worry, it wasn't really that bad... although we did get engaged less than a month after I stepped off the plane!)

His letter continues, "BUT at least I still have in-class discussion."

Or do we? College classes are quick to follow college students' tendencies, and college students are on the web, talking in forums and instant messaging boxes and on walls and through pictures and in comments but anything but in person. Colleges are moving the conversation to the web.

So how do you even know you aren't reading a robot's words right now? :^P

However, the chapter I read in the e-book on online forums did have something important to say on the opposite hand: "Studies of individual personality and internet behavior have revealed that introverted students tend to be more able to communicate with others in an online environment than face-to-face." The author makes a pathos-sprinkled point that as an introvert herself, she has taken advantage of the unbound social hierarchy in an online environment which allows for more democratic and even portrayal of ideas.

So see, I don't know. Is it worth the ease of accessibility, the democratization of debate, the interest of the students and the convenience of onlin-id-iness to lose the person-to-person interaction, the lilt of voices, the actual people participating in the conversation?

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
 Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Can't we have the hard-as-rock, health-paranoid grit of Grape-Nuts with the fluffy pink marshmallows of Lucky Charms?

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