Gee, maybe I am thinking about teaching too much. Of course, I had at one point planned on writing a book about the history of different writing technologies, so both of these links are still quasi Sabbatical Lite like.
- The Classic Typewriter Page, which I found via boing boing and which is maintained by someone who teaches philosophy at Xavier U. Cool stuff.
- Johndan’s work/space blog had this cool link here to a site on “The History of The Discovery of Cinematography,” but it appears that that site (not Johndan’s, the other one) is now gone. Well, maybe it’ll be back….
- From Canada’s Globe and Mail comes “Researchers question school in high-tech age.” Basically, the folks being interviewed here ask what’s the point of the conventional classroom at all when it could all be done electronically. It’s a bit over-the-top, but I do think this passage is largely true:
“It’s pre-Gutenberg,” says Don Tapscott, futurist, lecturer and author of bestsellers such as “Wikinomics,” laughing as he recalls the assessment he heard from a university president.
“It’s a prof working from handwritten notes. The students are all writing it down and the prof is writing on a blackboard. The assumption of the printing press is not even a fundamental part of the learning paradigm.”
Dentists, doctors and other professionals asleep for 100 years would awake, he says, to a world where they would not recognize their jobs, much less perform them. But in education, a teacher could walk into a classroom after a century and get busy.