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I was especially impressed with Talbott's analysis of computer-based education in general, and Seymour Papert in particular. Many of us have deep-seated doubts and fears about the trend toward the replacement of teacher-child interactions with computer-based tutorials and games, the preoccupation with computer literacy, and the introduction of small children to control of a fantasy world via Logo and Basic programming. Talbott has articulated the dangers of this trend in a few pithy chapters that should be force-fed to every elementary-school administrator, teacher, and well-meaning PTA hell-bent on computer lab fund-raising.
Talbott is a former presidential scholar and is currently a senior editor for O'Reilly & Associates, the premier hard-core technical publishing house. So he is no Luddite; most of us would class him, in fact, as a "power user." But Talbott occasionally strays onto shaky ground as the issues get closer to home. For example, I found his warnings about the insidious dangers of computer-based word-processing rather laughable. Talbott feels that the ease with which words can be set down with a computer leads willy-nilly to undisciplined, automatic writing:
I sit at my keyboard and produce all letters of the alphabet with the same undifferentiated, inexpressive, purely percussive strokes. Words, phrases, endless streams of thought flow effortlessly from me in all directions, with so little inner participation that I have reached the opposite extreme from the ancient word-self unity. I spew out my words easily, unthinkingly, at no psychic cost to myself, and launch them into a world already drowning in its own babble. And as I produce my own words, so I will likely judge those of others, discounting them as the superficial disjecta membra they too often really are.No doubt Gutenberg, and later the manufacturers of the first typewriters, were similarly taxed with complaints by the scribes of their eras. However, I must admit that the post-modern structure of Talbott's book, when compared to a classic like Weizenbaum's, lends some unwitting support to this particular argument. The traditional painstaking, tightly reasoned development of a thesis over the course of a chapter has been replaced by collections of subsections that are essentially extended thoughts of 500-800 words each, the literary counterpart to TV sound bites. It is almost as though the author wrote his musings on index cards, sorted them by keyword, and divided the whole stack into chapters at arbitrary boundaries of several thousand words. Perhaps this is the style of the future, but I don't feel entirely comfortable with it.
-- Ray Duncan
Adapted from a review published in Dr. Dobb's Journal, December, 1995.
| Forward | |
| Acknowledgments | |
| Chapter 1. | Can Human Ideals Survive the Internet? |
| Part 1. Man, Computers, and Community | |
| Chapter 2. | The Machine in the Ghost |
| Chapter 3. | The Future Does Not Computer |
| Chapter 4. | Settlers in Cyberspace |
| Chapter 5. | On Being Responsible for Earth |
| Chapter 6. | Networks and Communities |
| Chapter 7. | At the Fringe of Freedom |
| Chapter 8. | Things That Run by Themselves |
| Chapter 9. | Do We Really Want a Global Village? |
| Chapter 10. | Thoughts on a Group Support System |
| Chapter 11. | In Summary |
| Part 2. Computers in Education | |
| Chapter 12. | Net-based Learning Communities |
| Chapter 13. | Impressing the Science out of Children |
| Chapter 14. | Children of the Machine |
| Part 3. The Electronic Word | |
| Chapter 15. | Dancing with My Computer |
| Chapter 16. | The Tyranny of the Detached Word |
| Chapter 17. | The Great Information Hunt |
| Chapter 18. | And the Word Became Mechanical |
| Chapter 19. | Listening for the Silence |
| Part 4. Owen Barfield, Computers, and the Evolution of Consciousness | |
| Chapter 20. | Awakening from the Primordial Dream |
| Chapter 21. | Mona Lisa's Smile |
| Chapter 22. | Seeing in Perspective |
| Chapter 23. | Can We Transcend Computation? |
| Chapter 24. | Electronic Mysticism |
| Chapter 25. | What This Book Was About |
| Appendix A. | Owen Barfield: The Evolution of Consciousness |
| Appendix B. | From Virtual to Real |
| Appendix C. | Education Without Computers |
| Bibliography | |
| Index |
So-called Netsurf discussion groups and publications have been created for the sole purpose of identifying and sharing Net "finds." An announcement reached my screen a short while ago, advertising a new forum of this sort and promising experiences comparable to the great world explorations of the past or to the adventures of a fantasy novel.
The dissonance occurs only when one tries to imagine these same adventurers standing in a library, surrounded in three dimensions by records of human achievement far surpsassing what is now Net-accessible. Would there, in these surroundings, be the same, breathless investigation of every room and shelf, the same shouts of glee at finding this collection of art prints or that provocative series of essays or these journalistic reports on current events?
It's hard to imagine such a response. But then, if the excitement is not about actual encounters with expressions of the human spirit, what is it about? One gets the feeling that a lot of it has to do with a futuristic, almost religious view of what the Net is becoming -- and all these interim discoveries are more valued for the progress they indicate than for themselves. Signs for the faithful. Epiphanies.
From The Future Does Not Compute, pages 195-196.
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.
In the Absence of the Sacred
Jerry Mander
Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, California, 1991
ISBN 0-87156-509-9
Disappearing through the Skylight
O. B. Hardison Jr.
Viking Penguin, New York, NY, 1989
ISBN 0-670-82505-0
Computer Power and Human Reason
Joseph Weizenbaum
W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, California, 1976
ISBN 0-7167-0464-1