This is a good place to share things I don’t dare say in class, isn’t it?
Sure.
Part of the process of studying for your master’s degree online is discussions in forums on the school’s site. I’ve already established my reputation as a contrarian there, asking questions where other students just agree on how wonderful the assigned reading was. But I don’t say all I think, because it soon became clear that there’s something like a religious element to the course. We’re being taught the doctrines of the Church of the Enlightenment, Library diocese, and my plan is to mostly keep my head low when we touch on matters of dogma.
Anyway, one of our recent readings was a study whose author questioned whether it’s factually true that we’ve entered into an Information Age, as everybody keeps saying. He analyzes the studies usually appealed to in arguing for this societal change, and finds in them a lot of mushiness and fuzzy categories. Fair enough. He makes some excellent points. But I posed the question, could any real-world evidence actually satisfy his criteria? It seemed to me we could all be assimilated by the Borg, and this guy would still insist there wasn’t enough hard evidence to prove there’d been significant change.
What I didn’t say (though I may say it yet, if pushed), is that some time ago I spoke to a young missionary who’s involved with a project to provide open-source educational materials to Third World people in various cultures. The project faces many challenges, but distribution is not one of them. He said to me, “We’d been in all kinds of cultures – with cattle herders in the veldt, and jungle villages, and we noticed that wherever we went, everybody [that was the word he used, as I recall] has a cell phone, and they access the internet through it.”
My methodology may be sloppy, but that suggests to me that a major change has occurred in the world.
Secularists certainly loves to label themselves. I don’t think any other period was ever so self-referential as ours. No one during the Middle Ages ever thought how glorious it was to leave behind antiquity and relish in the “Middle Ages”. And did anyone in the 18th century every wax poetically about being in the “Age of Enlightenment”? I don’t think so, but the 20th and, now, 21st centuries just love to label itself and every other age leading up to it. In fact, we get so tired of being “Modern” that we had to become the “Post-modern” and now we reside in the “Information Age”, as if no one had “Information” before they had cell phones.
I’m just poking a bit of fun … 😉
The Renaissance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance#Self-awareness) and the Age of Enlightenment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment#Use_of_the_term) were both named during those periods. Intellectuals are naturally self-promoting.
The Enlightenment was intensely self-referential and self-worshiping, judging from my reading.
When I was 37 I went back to school to finish my Bachelor’s Degree. The first year I took night classes at a state university about an hour from my home, filling in all the general eds that hadn’t been required when I studied small business management at a junior college fifteen years earlier. I found the students at the state university very disengaged. They had no interest in grappling with macro or micro economics. They merely wanted to pass the test and get on to the next class. I made myself onerous to them by sitting in the front row and asking questions. If the lecture got boring I started challenging the instructor’s presuppositions. I’ve always felt that if an instructor fails to engage me I will engage him.
After a year of driving up to the state university two nights a week I transferred to a Christian College a hundred miles away, enrolling in their adult degree completion program. Students in the accelerated program had to be over 25 and have two years of college under their belt. What a delightful change. My fellow adult students were interested in grappling with the material to achieve mastery of it rather than merely passing tests. The hundred miles I drove up there every Monday night for two years to spend four hours in class was time well spent.
Information Storage and Retrieval has eclipsed traditional library science since the 1970s and 1980s and it will never be the same. At the request of the seminary administration and faculty, I became a tutor and led a mandatory noncredit proseminar,for six weeks, meeting twice a week, for all incoming seminarians called Research and Study for ten years. After doing a show and tell introduction of select reference sources giving a critical evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses, I took them into the book stacks and showed them and gave them hands on exercises of how to efficiently work through the subject area book shelves and discover by serendipity what they needed to find and know without the computer and/or old card catalog system (while always reminding them to carefully review required and recommended reading lists in their course syllabi). Keeping a research journal, while going through a subject area book shelf, reading the intro. and concluding chapters, and the first and last paragraphs of various chapters of interest in various volumes. I did the same with a select group of theological journals. Their personal research journals, which were always growing, formed the database for their academic research papers, which I instructed them how to do in the proper style and format of citations and bibliography, which also became an extension of their research journals. This requires and encourages critical examination of information sources and critical thinking of composition. Most of the seminarians I worked with responded very well to this method, while there were also those who didn’t want to apply themselves and relied on computers to find and choose their informational sources for them. Thinking outside of the computer is difficult for some individuals, but they pay a price by using computers primarily and limiting their critical skills and thinking. If I were younger and more computer skilled, I would develop my own style of software that would encourage and facilitate this approach for beginning students in their academic studies.
That’s remarkable, Brad. It resonates with the path on which I’m taking my children through ancient literature this year. We’re learning to read analytically with Adler’s book, How to Read a Book.