As an academic-type for more or less my entire life, I’ve associated the start of the fall semester as the beginning of the “new year;” I think of that calendar thing that happens in January is mostly a technicality that tends to be an excuse for a party. It’s a bit different of a new year for me since I’m on sabbatical (sort of), but it’s still a new beginning nonetheless. Faculty and administrators are being called to various retreats and meetings; faculty, lecturers, and adjuncts are getting ready to teach; students, returning and new, are getting to attend classes; and staff folks are preparing for the return of the busy school year after the comparative quiet of the summer.
Strike? Murder cover-up? Fired presidents? Budget crises? Failed email systems? Let’s put all that aside for a moment and bask in the glow of starting over yet again.
Toward that end, I thought I’d share this movie this week, version 2.0 Did You Know? from the shifthappens project.
One of the common rituals for this time of year is to note the things our incoming 18 year old students don’t know. I always find these lists both tedious and insulting, and I see this video as a much more interesting and forward-looking perspective. It’s targeted more to a K-12 crowd, but it is obviously applicable to life at the university level, too.
I also find those lists about what the incoming freshman “don’t know” insulting, because there’s a difference for not being alive when an event happened and not knowing about it (or thinking that something has “always” been true).
I do like this version though. It’s a different spin on the idea of how much the world can/does change.
Ah, yes, the start of the *real* year!
Now that I am working in an academic institution, I feel life has returned to normal, and the year is just beginning. Now to go get an academic calendar that starts this month and runs through next August!
I think it is worthwhile to consider what incoming freshmen ‘don’t know,’ or, rather, what world-view they do not share with us oldsters. Case in point: for network access, today’s students get gigabit switches, whereas *I* had to be happy with a 2400 baud modem.
Time management: when I did research, I had to use card catalogs and periodical indices. Today, these things are online, accessible from one’s seat: no more running from floor to floor in the libary (librarIES?). They simply don’t have to figure in the moving-around time.
The kids have it too easy these days. There. I said it, and I meant it.
Excellent choice of video, Steve. It is extremely well designed on top of being exceedingly interesting. Is that the same Scott McCloud who was a visiting prof not long ago credited at the end?
NOTE: I could not comment on this in Internet Explorer and had to use Firefox, so something is fishy with that again.
I have turned on the “must have an approved post first” moderation mode, so that might have something to do with the commenting, Abby.
That’s not it, Steve. I know IE is terrible, but most people still do use it. If they use the latest version, they may not know how to comment on this post and your last post. I did figure out a trick (besides using Firefox); namely, making the text size as small as possible. It seems to be the width of the comment box that makes it too wide to appear except very, very far down on the page (under the last ad) where it is hard to notice.
Well, now that I see this on my son’s ancient computer under Internet Exploder, I see what you’re saying, Abby. I have no problem with the size of the text, though. Anyway, two brief thoughts: first, I suspect that this is really the result of the plug-in I installed that allows folks some time to edit comments. It calls for a wider comment box, which renders in Firefox by running over text in the right column, and which IE (notoriously bad at dealing with CSS) dumps at the bottom of the page. A fix that makes it easy for IE users and that preserves the plug-in is probably beyond my technical abilities, though I might play with it a bit.
Second, I will say it before and I will say it again: no one should use Internet Explorer for anything. Period. And that includes “most people,” though I think the stats on that have changed quite a bit in recent years.
Way cool!
Hi Steve,
The number of people using IE is dropping, but it is still too significant to ignore (around 50%). I realize IE comes from the mega-monopoly Microsoft, and is a loathsome capitalist monster for that reason alone. But I am still going to continue using it for one very important reason: visual comfort. I spend umpteen hours a day online, esp. this time of year when I am creating syllabi for the web, and having that effect my vision is worrisome to me. Dyslexia makes the letters flip and flop in a crazy dance anyway. The difference between any other browser and the new IE in terms of visual comfort is the difference between night and day, or rather the difference between having sun glasses protecting one’s eyes on a sunny day and squinting in pain for forgetting them somewhere or another.
I wish my.emich would support this basic browser of the unwitting masses as well, but apparently it doesn’t.
Abby, it’s really easy to get Mozilla Firefox. Last night, I downloaded the Mac version and now I’m using it. It’s really easy and I recommend getting it if you can!
That was a very interesting video. I liked it better than the usual “This year’s incoming freshman have never lived in a world without AIDS, blah blah blah.”
Well, just over 50% of folks accessing EMUTalk.org don’t use Internet Exploder. I’m not quite sure what you mean by the visual comfort thing, but since I have a Mac, I probably couldn’t use the new IE if I wanted to. And, for what it’s worth, my problem isn’t that Microsquish is a big evil company– which it is. It’s just that IE has traditionally been very poor software.
I realize that a lot of people use it. But a lot of people do all kinds of, um, bad things.
Sometimes it’s good to be bad, my friends! I am all for using Firefox exclusively if someone would simply give me better eyes with which to view it. I went back to Firefox once more to give it another shake and adjust the settings as much as I could, but without it coming any where near IE for visual comfort, the sin qua non for me.