Cassettes, Identity & More

“So to what extend does articulatory phonetics help our understanding of language proficiency? Hold up, let me google”, might become a lingo of the past if academia decides to follow Professor Tara Brabazon lead and declare a fermenting war against Google, Wikipedia and other archetypes of user-generated scholastic websites.

Professor Brabazon >says:

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“We need to teach our students the interpretive skills first before we teach them technological skills,” said Prof Brabazon, who holds national teaching awards.

“I want students to sit down and read. It’s not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both – not one or the other – not a cheap solution.”

Interesting, yet I wonder to what extend did academia fail to teach students a balanced critical thinking, which would be applicable to both on and off line research. Secondly, I know I have been guilty of citing the internet as a source to write papers. Nevertheless, this was in high school prior to my entrance to the world of e-journals and other digital publication.

Personally, I am more inclined to support James D. Carmine’s open letter and point of view. Surely, we can request the global e-moguls to supervise the revolution. Which they in turn will give them various possibilities exceeding our own current capacity to ‘create’ well skilled students :).

James D. Carmine’s >open letter to Google:

It makes sense that for-profit institutions like Google, Amazon, Barnes and Nobles or even Starbucks, begin to consider applying for university accreditation, and offering degrees of their own. Clearly, well-run for-profits are vastly more economically efficient than any non-profit college or university. The efficiency is a consequence of following the basic economic principle that an informed consumer will always purchase the best value for the least money. I, like most parents, would happily send my children to Google University if I knew they would learn more there than at a higher priced university. (…)

Google could escape the tenure trap by not hiring any faculty at all. Instead of hiring the faculty themselves, institutions like Google could simply purchase a vast library of taped, high quality, lectures given by academic super stars or other top performing teachers who are willing to sell series of their lectures (perhaps even receiving residuals if they really rock!). These professors would operate as free agents in a digital world of Professors Without Borders. (…)

Google University (…) would not only reduce the cost of education to students, the competition between professors to produce the best lectures would create vastly superior lectures, and the competition between for-profit institutions in order to attract students would produce vastly better outcomes for students, and therefore would even help American corporations, like Google itself, who need highly competent employees.