As hinted at in my last entry, I am very slow to adapt. It took a few months after getting into college to actually get a facebook account and it took my sister wittering on about the funny things being said on Twitter for a few months to actually convince me that Twitter wasn't completely worthless.* In fact the only way in which I'm truly progressive is in what I listen to and what I watch.** As I discovered when I was studying in London, I am actually a forty year old in a twenty-two year old's body (which can be very inconvenient, the forty year old can get quite grumpy about those youngins). Which leads me to my next point...
Last semester I had the opportunity to take a number of upper level history classes. I'm a music major who thought she wanted to be a history major, so getting to take three history classes was a revelation to me. In all three of those classes, at one point or another, each of the professors made the point that while the curriculum and ideas taught by academia can be quite progressive the actual professors are perhaps the least progressive people in the country, especially in their unwillingness to adapt to new things. Which leads me to my next point...
I have mixed feelings about "A Personal Cyberinfrastructure." One part of me, the part that probably convinced me that blogging was and continues to be a good idea and who got me to finally join Twitter, completely agrees with what Gardner Campbell has to say in both the lecture and the article. But the pragmatist, the part of me that knows that there are people in their mid to late 20s who don't know how to work a power point presentation, thinks that his ideas are nice and yes it would be great if we could implement them, but it would never really work. The majority of professors, heck even the majority of middle and high school teachers, would be unwilling to adapt to the new technology. The same professors who rail against Wikipedia as completely untrustworthy and incapable of providing accurate information would be same professors railing against Prof. Campbell's ideas as unnecessary and incompatible with higher education. They're wrong on both points, but they aren't going anywhere and so Prof. Campbell's ideas will, in all likelihood, go unfulfilled until my generation comes into power.*** That is, if people not like me become tenured professors at universities. Because I'm still not sure about this whole website thing. I like my templates.
*Hello! Welcome to my version of footnotes, wherein I make tangential comments that wouldn't make sense in the body of the entry. Tangential comment: This is a true story. I didn't get on the Twitter bandwagon until February of '09 but almost immediately started following Stephen Fry and rash of British comedians no one has heard of. It was a good day.
**Mwhahahahaha. The footnotes are not always mature.
3 comments:
I hold the viewpoint that you used to have about twitter being worthless. One night at dinner with my in-laws to be, we were all joking about what to tweet on Twitter. For example, "I am sneezing now", "I am leaving Wegmans now", "I am smiling now", "I am going to the bathroom now", etc. Since I signed up for Twitter as a course requirement, I have only tweeted when I have posted something new on my blog. So what makes Twitter so popular? Can't a person just send a text message or put the same message on Facebook?
For me the value in Twitter is that I get follow "celebrities" who would never touch Facebook. And when I say "celebrities" I mean obscure British comedians and Stephen Fry. Another advantage that Twitter has over Facebook or texting is that a) it's more streamlined (no Farmville etc) and so if you're trying to impart a message to your followers it's right there and b) you can communicate with people who live halfway around the world. Twitter is like a smaller version of blogging really, so while you can tweet "I'm currently groccery shopping" you can also comment on a New York Times article or a video off of Youtube etc. The possibilities are pretty endless if you just put your mind to it. But it think Twitter's popularity largely has to do with the real celebrities on it saying crazy shit.
I agree that's it's fun to follow celebrities on twitter! Although twitter confuses me sometimes. I have a like/dislike of it.*****
***** your use of footnotes is amusing :D
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