I’ve said before that we– those of us who love computers and new communication technologies and who adapted them early and often– have often been very wrong in our initial assumptions. In the late 1990s we thought that multitasking was a technologically enhanced way to work and learn and play. As it turns out, brains don’t work or play or learn that way at all.

Or, rather, brains can work and learn and play that way, but only by severely limiting the quality of work or play or learning. It’s probably fine to have the radio on the background as you write, but you can’t email with one hand while answering questions in an online classroom with the other; both email…

I don’t mind memorials, of course, and there were a lot of heroes killed on September 11, 2001. I admire firefighters who, as the cliché goes, ran to the disaster when everyone else was running away. Those passengers on Flight 93, probably taught al Qaeda an important lesson. You can’t quite trust crazy Americans to sit quietly and accept their fates. A few might charge the cockpit. Yesterday, though, was like a marathon of the big lie.

A big lie is a lie repeated so often that people forget that it is a lie. One of the worst, which I heard on National Public Radio, is the notion that we “were at war, but didn’t know it until those…

I know I am being a party-poop, but I find this so-called Mindset List endlessly irritating. First, there’s the weirdly inflated claim by its authors– it’s the public relations team speaking here, no doubt– that the list is “a globally reported and utilized guide to the intelligent if unprepared adolescent consciousness.”  In truth, the list says almost nothing interesting– especially this year– or revelatory, unless you see it as a reflection of a very insulated academic culture forever afraid that outside those ivory walls the worlds has left them behind.

It’s a sentimental nudge to the quaint idea of the professor lost in his or her books. Who can afford that anymore? A few items on the…

Twenty years ago, when I began teaching writing, I tried to  teach critical thinking by presenting two opposing arguments and letting students work their way through each of them. I quickly learned that with certain arguments this led nowhere fast. Reason meet faith; debate over.

Many of my students are profoundly ant-intellectual. It’s not youthful sloth or ignorance or posturing, although there’s plenty of those things, youthful or otherwise, it’s a specific set of ideas they have been taught. It isn’t every religion, and it isn’t all Christian sects, but too many are raised to mistrust reason.

The problem, in a nutshell, is the Christian fundamentalist rejection of all substantive debate as such. This rejection, often termed the belief in the literal…

I work online, and I think online writing classes work at least as well as face to face teaching. I love technology and gadgets too, even though they are too often tainted by consumerism. I am not certain of the source, but someone left this Douglas Adams quote as a comment on my site recently:

First we thought the PC was a calculator.  Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII – and we thought it was a typewriter.  Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television.  With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.

I went on short trip last weekend to Meramec Caverns– my GPS is the greatest thing since sliced bread on these trips–and I was struck, once again, by the image of people waving their cell phones around in the air, trying to get what we euphemistically call “service.”

I understand the impulse. The motel and the campground that surrounds the…

I have to agree with the letter writer who complained that the Chronicle of Higher Education ought to cover recent events in Arizona more thoroughly (“Controversial Arizona Law Deserves Scholars’ Attention“). A new law, HB 2281, represents the cutting edge in the long-expressed desire of the right-wing to eliminate ethic studies, as a part of their larger drive to end diversity programs in education. It’s another example of the irrationality of white supremacy, its profound fear that if it does not fully assimilate the other, its own unique identity will disappear.

In Arizona, the formula is very simple: either the people who are ethnically Mexican– most are not recent immigrants, of course–drop their own language and culture and adopt…