Pursuant to the previous post, I note with interest that a group has declared 24 March 2007 to be “Shutdown Day“:
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate! Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?
Not a bad idea. It reminds me of the concept of a “media fast” advocated by Thomas Cooper, professor of media at Emerson College. Cooper described the purpose and results of a media fast in an article titled “You Are What You Watch,” available on the Emerson College Web site in a PDF file (the article appears on the second-to-last page): link.
Since March 24 is a Saturday, a day when I’m not in the office, I’ll be able to participate. No blog entry that day.
I have to teach class that day, which requires a Power Point presentation. Well, I guess I could lecture using the chalkboard…. but how archaic is that??
ck — [Warning — rant about to begin….]
Well, pedagogically speaking, I’m pretty critical of PowerPoint presentations anyway. From the standpoint of feminist pedagogy, they tend to lead to disembodied teaching — students can ignore the embodied, fallible, flesh-and-blood person who is teaching, and concentrate on the disembodied, seemingly infallible, brightly-colored images projected on the screen — students can also ignore each other since it’s obvious that the teacher thinks the disembodied slides are more important than physical bodies. I also believe PowerPoint presentations lead to disengaged, sloppy learning — rather than attend and/or engage in class, many students will simply wait to look at the PowerPoint slides on the teacher’s Web site.
Did you know that Sun Microsystems banned PowerPoint presentations because the management felt that PowerPoint led to sloppy thinking? Did you know that Donald Rumsfeld relies on PowerPoint to conduct the war in Iraq — instead of issuing carefully thought out orders, he gives the military brass PowerPoint slides — and that some military leaders attribute the fiasco in Iraq in part to that way of conducting business? If you want to be like Donald Rumsfeld (yuck), then by all means use PowerPoint in class.
So I suggest that the best way to educate students into thinking and feeling for themselves, the best way to help them to become active agents in their own lives, is to dump PowerPoint in favor of directly engaged pedagogy. Every day should be Shutdown Day in the academy!
[End of rant.]
My $.0271828 worth.