What's up, July to October '22
A shift in plans to make room for this fall's seminar and some topics and ideas that loom and beckon. Plans for posts.
Read time: about 4 minutes (short!). This week: Topics ahead and fitting in matters that relate to a seminar I’m leading this fall. Next week: Baking bread before and after Microsoft Windows takes over the show. An exploration of “deskilling.”
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In late August, the semester starts, and I’m subtly aligning the the order of the posts with the progress of the seminar . So you’ll see residues of classroom discussion and topics in the Thursday morning missives. This is a bit of a change from what I was thinking when I started the newsletter in January, since I believed I’d switch to a daily posting schedule on the Substack for the fall semester. Instead, I’m sticking with the regular weekly plan.
It’s a matter of allowing students in the seminar to keep the boundaries of the class in place, since a newsletter post going out daily to scores of strangers on the Internet changes the social and pedagogical dynamics of the seminar. The students will get daily missives, of course, but through a private channel. I know some students from the past might miss the “daily missives,” as the emails were known, but they’ll also understand that a seminar classroom has a special kind of sanctity. It’s only fair that this fall’s students enjoy the same sense of place that they did.
Besides, a post every weekday is probably too rigorous a schedule for many subscribers. (And maybe for me to crank ’em out with some solid substance!)
Some topics to expect
Deskilling the bakery. What happens to people when bread is automated? We all know what tends to happen to the bread. I might include my favorite (and easy!) bread recipe, too, though I tweak it incessantly.
Scaling the mountain of words. The first year I taught my course on our complex relationship with technology, I decided that having students read a Heidegger essay was just too much to ask. The second year, I figured I’d throw the students into the sea of Heideggerian words. They work out how to swim in them. Students found the essay challenging, as I expected, and it ended up being an important assignment, both for “content’s” sake and for the sake of building students’ scholarly confidence.
Thoughtful adoption, thoughtful rejection. We make some decisions based on advertisements, which of course have a single aim and a single endpoint in mind: a sale. What if we considered technology products more thoughtfully and comprehensively, according to their fit with our purposes? Some people look at products as tools and consider them in light of their society and culture. Are there lessons to learn from them?
The benefit of the unread (plus pulp fiction for librarians). Umberto Eco didn’t read all the books in his library, did he? Take a tour and decide yourself. The canon is a limitation, not a path to a merit badge. Plus, some very humorous fake book covers, especially targeted at librarians among us.
The incremental writer just looks lazy. Lots of writing is slow, and sometimes it’s good. Because slow. How I’ve structured work in my seminar to slow things down and make writing better.
What happens when you see old students. I reflect on seeing students from the classrooms of my past.
My PanAm Nostalgia. I got on a flight to Denver with my bride in June. The experience, unsurprisingly, was poor. I’ve since become nostalgic for the way flying was, and I’m not alone. At least flying is fast, if you’ve got a destination that’s more than a seven-hour car trip.
We’ll try a guest contributor, too! And I’m really looking forward to that. Actually, there might be two of them, one living in the Antipodes!
Got a comment?
Tags: deskilling, travel, nostalgia, history, writing, community, reading, librarians
Loving the upcoming topics! Looking forward to reading about it.
Looks like an interesting course!