Maybe I hate the word; maybe I don’t. I don’t know yet. I know it doesn’t exist (no results in Google) so it’s all mine; I made it up.
Maybe it’s no different from Lobstermato. In Woody Allen’s essay, “Conversations with Helmholtz,” a man interviewing Helmholtz (a psychoanalyst) says that
I explained to Dr. Helmholtz that I could not order the Lobstermato (a tomato stuffed with lobster) in a certain restaurant. He agreed it was a particularly asinine word and wished he could scratch the face of the man who conceived it.
Blogs are written in real time. When I find techtimonial asinine enough I’ll delete the post.
Meanwhile, here’s part of a techtimonial from a former tech enthusiast – a political science professor at Queen’s University.
[My classroom] technologies were slowly teaching me how to un-teach, and they were teaching my students how to un-learn.
Aside from their distractive potential in the classroom, my students had become passive and expectant of pre-formulaic lectures.
Devices had become a barrier between teacher and student — rather than the revolutionary learning tools that everyone was claiming them to be.
Perhaps what irked me the most is that I’m now convinced that many university administrators have promoted the use of teaching technologies not because it enhances the quality of university education, but because of its potential to service vast numbers of paying students with fewer and fewer expensive faculty members.
*******************************
When presented with a visual display during lectures, students become passive. Most simply sit and wait for the next slide, taking their cues as to what is important from the slides and images presented. When I first banned laptops, panic set in. Students claimed that I spoke too fast and that they couldn’t write fast enough. When asked what they were writing down, to my horror the response was ‘everything’.
… Not only has a dependence upon technical devices caused students to disengage, professors are equally at fault for losing their skills to inspire, engage and mentor.
Often, their lectures conform to pre-formulated presentations that are nothing short of a series of bullets.
Many once skilled lecturers have slowly lost their ability to speak with personality, passion and throw ideas around in impromptu ways that leave heads buzzing with ideas for hours afterwards.
It’s what UD calls the morgue classroom.
August 4th, 2012 at 4:47PM
“Many once skilled lecturers have slowly lost their ability to speak with personality, passion and throw ideas around in impromptu ways that leave heads buzzing with ideas for hours afterwards.”
Really? There are people who did a superb, excellent, wonderful job with voice, lectern, and maybe an overhead projector but who turned into drones when they switched to PowerPoint?
I certainly don’t think P/P encourages great communications, but neither does it prevent it. I’m willing to believe that it may make someone worse, at the margin, than he would have been in a more traditional speaking environment, but does it really change excellence into muck?