Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
This was a good way for me to kill some time today: Tiltshiftmaker.com, which is a very simple web site for creating “tilt-shift” photos, which is a technique to make real-life images look like photographs of miniatures.
I think it depends a bit on some imagination and a good photo that looks like a model of something to begin with, but it’s fun to play with.
While hanging out and watching a little television the other night, I saw an ad for Kaplan University, part of their “talent” campaign. The ad depicts a professor and college classroom straight out of central casting. The professor wears a sweater vest and a bow tie, he’s bald, in his fifties, and he is African American (that throws a bit of a wrench into the stereotype). He stands at lectern on a small stage in an anciently old lecture hall, a chalk board behind him–the word “talent” is scrawled on it– and a group of college-aged students in front of him. The classic “sage on the stage” scene. He’s giving a speech about how we are wasting talent and time in an educational system “steeped in tradition and old ideas.” Our professor says it’s “time for a new tradition, that talent isn’t just in schools, it’s everywhere.”
And suddenly, we’re transported to the magic of the “online classroom:” a woman laying on the couch and watching a laptop with her cat, a young man watching the professor on an iPhone while waiting for a subway, a mom sitting at a kitchen table watching the professor with a couple kids running about, a male model propped up in bed with coffee and a laptop, a business woman watching the professor on some sort of hand-held device, and a young woman sitting on an apartment roof with her laptop, perhaps the only place where the wifi signal is strong. And I swear I am not making any of this up– watch the ad. Through this montage, the music swells and the professor tells us again and again “it is time for a different kind of university– it’s your time.”
According to this Business Wire/Yahoo snippet about the campaign, “‘The new campaign makes a statement that the U.S. traditional higher education system doesn’t always meet the needs of today’s adult learners, mainly working adults struggling to balance jobs, families and education,’ said Andrew S. Rosen, Chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc. ‘At Kaplan University, we are rewriting the rules of higher education by offering students the opportunity to customize their education to meet their needs, and by providing resources and support to help them succeed.'”
Well, I see the point they are trying to make. But this is so wrong in so many ways.
First there is the fantasy of the kind of instruction being provided (potentially) by these online classes, of the “great minds” teaching to the masses. Long-story short, that’s not what has historically happened. David Noble (who I largely disagree with) made this point a decade ago: correspondence courses promised this sort of experience 120 or so years ago, but ultimately, what ended up happening was the “great minds” wrote up a few lessons and unknown and frequently inexperienced part-timers actually did the teaching. That is a danger at all institutions, but I guarantee you that you will never take a class from a “distinguished professor” at Kaplan simply because about 90% of their faculty are part-timers.
Second, there is the fantasy of the kind of students and the student experience. Basically, the ad depicts two kinds of students: those who are literally laying around and those who are doing something else while “learning.” I think the not so subtle implication here is that you can take classes online while simultaneously working a real job or something, or taking an online class is as easy as laying around on the couch with your cat. The one student the ad does depict that is somewhat realistic in my experience is the woman (perhaps a single mom?) sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop while a couple kids are running around. Lots of my online students have been single women with young kids, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a male model who laid around in bed all day.
And then there is the “back to the future” aspect. Kaplan is accusing traditional institutions as being “behind the times,” so what do they do to depict online learning? Why, they show a bunch of people watching a lecture! Splendid!
I appreciate that they can only do so much in a 30 second spot, but the fact is the point of online learning/teaching is not to replicate the face to face experience. Rather, the point of online learning/teaching is to take advantage of medium that fosters a lot of interaction between students and instructors. Speaking of which: I need to stop my rant here so I can actually go and do some online teaching this morning….
This spoof by the folks at The Onion is so dead-on I kind of do want a Macbook Wheel:
This via boing-boing: “Golf can ‘damage hearing.'” I assume that what they are referring to here is the high-pitched “ping” made by some high-end drivers when the ball is struck. Specifically, the club specifically being complained about here is the King Cobra LD. It seems to me though that maybe the problem was that the golfer who had his hearing damaged was 55.
Oh, and I wish I had a link for this: when I was in Florida, I read an article in the Naples newspaper about how golf was good but not great exercise. Things I recall include that, not surprisingly, walking was more exercise than riding, but more surprisingly, using a push-cart and walking was about the same as carrying your clubs, riding still involved a fair amount of walking, and the actual swinging of the club involved quite a bit more exercise than the researchers expected. So what they said in this article was that golf was indeed a form of “exercise,” but it wasn’t enough exercise in and of itself. In other words, no one is going to get buff just by golfing, but it can fit into an overall workout program. Go figure.
More or less in the order of the subject here:
I’ve been spending my first day of the year kind of doing stuff around the house, running errands, doing laundry, watching Iowa pound the crap out of South Carolina in the Outback Bowl, and working on the materials for my grad class, English 516: Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice. It is a work in progress, though it is much more together than the rather blank schedule page on the site might suggest.
In any event, one of the assignments I have for the class is for students to do a book review of a recently published book that has something to do with the subject matter of the class. My current list of book options is up and running here; anybody out there in the comp/rhet world have any other ideas for possible readings?
The only two qualifications/requirements are it has to be some kind of book that has to do in some way with “computers and writing” (and that obviously could include a lot of different things), and it has to be a book that has come out recently (certainly nothing before 2004).
And it’s not even mine.
The Online Photographer: The Worst Photograph Ever Made, which I found via Kottke.org.