Dear All,

I apologize for sending these questions out so late, but I think that this reading is a whole lot deeper than you would expect based on last week's readings. Compared to the light airy readings we were blessed with last week, this one seemed like a wet sponge in comparison. Not boring, mind you, just very technical.

Anyway, I had a lot of questions from my reading and understanding, but I think that I'll boil it down to just a few of the easier and broader questions in the hope that maybe someone will have some ideas for me instead of the traditional stone-cold silence.

1.) Tiffin and Rajasingham offer up a lot of "original" theories and ideas about traditional learning that seem to be, at least at times, a little crazy or out there. They then go on to justify their wildly different approach by saying that the only way to change things successfully is to throw out all of the old rules completely and start totally fresh on wholly new ideas, and quote Chomsky as one of their supporters. In light of the dismal failures of older technologies to change the face of education, is it reasonable to switch to this new approach, or should we disregard those past examples as anomalies and keep going down the same general path? That is, are the failures of yesterday intrinsic to a bad system currently employed or examples of a bad fit for technology in a good system?

2.) The second chapter was thick and technical, but if you read the couple of sections set off in boxes at the end of the chapter, you can get a pretty good idea of what they're talking about. In those boxes, Tiffin and Rajasingham continually use phrases like "The intermeshing of information is dynamic" and "dynamically adjust bandwidth and switch modalities." These phrases seem to imply that education must grow to be wildly more flexible and ever changing, with the further implication that the current system is too slow and staid to be truly useful in the long term. Is this a reasonable and logical assumption? It seems to imply that the things schools need to teach change every day and can't be solidified into a core set of ideas or even learning goals. What does this assumption say about the value of 4000 years of educational theory?

3.) Final question here. The authors plan calls for educators to junk the actual world entirely in favor of a complete simulation. The implication here is that you can successfully simulate interactions with people and places to such a degree that there is no advantage to physically being there. At that point, isn't there a risk of throwing out the actual physical reality and replacing it with this virtual reality which then becomes the only world people know? Is there any difference between these two worlds, and if there is can we even tell the difference?

Well, this has become much longer than I ever thought it would. I hope that you will plow through this and try to think about at least some of my questions before class.

Finally, believing that the best ideas are the ones that we steal from others, I'm going to encourage everyone to follow Seth's advice and bring some stuff to eat or drink to class today. It really does make life more enjoyable.

See you in about 12 hours.

Tom