Class Goals: Defining issues.

Connection to course goals: Ability to define a variety of issues within one larger "topic" and the variety of positions one can take on those issues.

1. Collect annotations. Copy and distribute them to the class before Friday.
2. Discussion of main points of Roszak and Postman. Be sure to highlight what they focus their discussion on to get to the issues.

• Computer proliferation on college campuses could be present these dangers:
• Dependence on corporate sponsorship
• "downsizing" by replacing profs, instructors, TAs
• decreased interaction between students, instructors
• fostering "technological dependency" (see his narrative of the movement from powerful "hackers" to disempowered drones, pp. 285-end)
• What does he see as the purpose of learning and education? The ideal method for learning/teaching?
• What are his solutions to universities’ tendencies to rely on technology as a quick fix? (pp. 284)

Main points of Postman:

Gather for your discussion

Connections between Roszak and Postman:

• Similarities:
• Technology too often seen a as a godhead/belief system
• Our subservience to technology (our view that it is here and we must accommodate ourselves to it)
• Differences
• Postman’s solution is to "make technology itself an object of inquiry"
• Postman focuses on children more than college-aged students
• Postman is concerned about the class differences technology will exacerbate, rather than alleviate

CSOW: Postman quotes a writer who believes that "modern technologies have rendered schools entirely irrelevant since there is so much more information outside the classroom than inside it." This is why we study critical reading and evaluation, so that we can learn to discriminate between those ideas that are useful and those that are not. As Postman describes with his "little Eva" example, it’s not a lack of information that troubles us, but what to do with all of the information we are constantly taking in. We need to do this not just in writing arguing essays, but throughout our lives as ideas/ solutions are presented to us.

1. Field sources from PHG.

• Interviews, surveys, questionnaires - how could these be used?
• How could the Web be used as a field source?
• An example: One student was comparing the quality of courses at Ivy League schools and state schools. She used the Net to find typical courses at both sets of schools and compare the content of them, then went to chat rooms to interview people about their courses.

1. Introduce CAP.

Assignment: Read your group’s article (it may be on reserve in Morgan Library) and be prepared to summarize it for people who have never read it.