Odds are you won't want to take the time to read this whole essay—that's why we publish excerpts here at Culture Making!—but it makes one subtle and one smack-upside-the-head point. The smack: "E-learning" doesn't help students learn. At all. Does. Not. Work. Please, educators, stop throwing (our) money at it. The subtlety: Web reading isn't bad, it just isn't the kind of reading schools should be encouraging, which is slow and analog. In the age of technology, as Albert Borgmann has argued, we all have to choose to become analog ascetics. The mark of a quality education will soon become that it teaches students how to unplug, and why that's such a good thing.

re: books, horizons of the possible, internet, reading, technology and change

Andy

:

The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking. The shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in college classrooms can’t bridge them. Screen reading is a mind-set, and we should accept its variance from academic thinking. [Jakob] Nielsen concisely outlines the difference: “I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don’t believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let’s praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering campfire — or its modern-day counterpart, the PowerPoint projector,” he says. “We should accept that the Web is too fast-paced for big-picture learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At the same time, the Web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets — so long as the learner already has the conceptual framework in place to make sense of the facts.”

So let’s restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off.