Now we just have to get through to the educrats.

Hah.

Teachers do this too — I just got back from a fun cross-border conference with my Canadian counterparts, where inevitably the biggest intellectual insights happen amidst animated talk over food and drink. We still refuse to be reduced to machines.

Of course, Socrates’ critique of writing is usually taught somewhat ironically in book history or print culture classes, for if Plato hadn’t written these conversations down, we would have no idea they ever existed…

Judging by my own sense of (lack of) involvement in purely online classes, I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn out that crucial brain circuits don’t engage unless there’s some f2f interaction.

Oh, and Indyanna? Brilliant! Seconded!

I’m sure back there in about 8000 BCE there were people out west swearing they could work the bugs out of “content-rich signal fire” technologies, burning from hilltop to hilltop over hundreds of miles, carrying the latest nuanced insights in megafauna-stalking tactics to vast and eager cohorts of meat-hunting recruits. (The vendocracy has a deep pre-history). It might have worked, too, but as soon as early adopters everywhere signed on to the plan, the fire “team” announced it wasn’t going to “support” that version anymore, and that everybody had to “migrate” to a new fuel system. Since they didn’t even have webinars yet, the whole effing system crashed and burned, amid much acrimony.

(1) surely it is not lost on us that the enthusiastic proponents of the gramaphone, the projector, the film, etc. are the people who stand to make a lot of money off the adoption of these technologies. If there were no money to be made, I guarantee there would be no techno-utopianism.

(2) it’s disturbing to me that, in the midst of the greatest crises facing the planet–the climate crisis, and the accompanying economic meltdown around the world threatening to collapse entire countries as capitalism destroys the very resources it depends on (including “human resources”, an Orwellian phrase if I ever heard one)– the current crop of techno-utopians push transitioning to a system that demands and wastes a tremendous amount of power. All these electronic devices drawing energy, the dataservers/clouds/whatever that have to run 24/7. Not to mention increasing evidence that these power centers themselves disrupt the environment, have deleterious effects on human health, and seem to affect animal navigation and so on.

In contrast, there has never been a more efficient technology than the book: it uses no power after its initial creation, can be reused almost endlessly (with care), one can hold onto one page while checking back and forth in other parts of the text; there is no “digital eye fatigue” (a new problem confronting techies and their ophthalmologists), etc., etc. The problem seems to be that most of the business people pushing these newer technologies so hard don’t actually read that much, or at least not works that require sustained attention to argument. The latest self-help tome probably can be read on the iPad without losing much – -it really wouldn’t be worth the paper it would otherwise be printed on. People whose exposure to difficult ideas is so limited are not in a position to judge how best to convey them.

I think the key is that the mode of instruction has to suit the content.. That’s the problem when it is top down. Also that online can be good, but then it’s usually not cheap.