Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
June 14, 2010
From the Washington Post: Increasingly, though, another view is emerging: that the money schools spend on instructional gizmos isn’t necessarily making things better, just different. Many academics question industry-backed studies linking improved test scores to their products. And some go further. They argue that the most...
June 14, 2010
No thinking person can simply be for or against digital technology. You have to be able to use your critical faculties and evaluate any particular technology in an independent way, trying to balance the plusses (which there will be) against the minuses (which there will also be).In my job as a teacher I use some recent technologies and...
June 11, 2010
James Mulholland, an English professor at the Wheaton College that Ann Curry confuses with mine, writes about the future of the humanities: We could think of humanities centers as the beginning of a “more is more” strategy for our fields in the corporatized university. One constant complaint from humanists is that academic budgets...
June 10, 2010
June 10, 2010
From a brilliant essay by Jed Perl: Writing, before it is anything else, is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts. This is obviously true of forms such as the diary, which are inherently solitary. But even those of us who write for publication can conclude, once we have clarified certain thoughts, that these thoughts are not especially...
June 9, 2010
David Bentley Hart is doing his best to replace some long-told lies with some approximation of the truth. Well, we all know how that kind of thing works out. Mark Twain, from his great address “Advice to Youth”: Think what tedious years of study, thought, practice, experience, went to the equipment of that peerless old master...
June 8, 2010
By Conor Friedorsdorf at his new Ideas blog for the Atlantic. Familiar stuff to regular readers of this blog.
June 8, 2010
I have mentioned elsewhere that the best work of history I have read in a long, long time is Keith Thomas’s The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England. But if it weren’t for Thomas, I would be singing in the streets about Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. I am...
June 8, 2010
Stanley Fish: I wore my high school ring for more than 40 years. It became black and misshapen and I finally took it off. But now I have a new one, courtesy of the organizing committee of my 55th high school reunion, which I attended over the Memorial Day weekend. I wore the ring (and will wear it again) because although I have degrees...
June 7, 2010
I’m still thinking about my future with or without Google, so don’t jump to any conclusions if you see me wearing this. It doesn’t mean a thing. Really.