From Bauerlein:
We hear lots of talk about the rise of “nonlinear thinking” in the Digital Age and “interactive writing” in Web 2.0, but I take “effectively communicate orally and in writing” as a straightforward, linear practice, one that serves best in most scientific settings. And business, too, according to my brother the actuary, who told me a while back: “Anyone who can write is a major asset in business.”
Um, I think I hang out with a pretty 21st century crowd, but I can’t remember “lots of talk” about “nonlinear thinking” or “interactive writing”.
Ironically, this is a place where Bauerlein could easily demonstrate that he is not constructing a straw man by doing his readers the courtesy of linking to the “lots of talk” he supposedly hears. That would allow us to evaluate his argument, and allow Bauerlein to frame his discussion of this issue as part of a larger dialogue.
That’s the sort of stuff we’d like students to know. That the lack of links to cited viewpoints here is a good indication the author is just making stuff up, and arguing with people that are at best marginal figures in the 21st century skills movement, and at worst completely fictional creations. In other words, we would like our students to know how to do things like use the connections the network provides to evaluate the trustworthiness of information on the network (and, in turn, use connections to demonstrate their own trustworthiness and good faith, as well as carry the discussion forward).
Here’s a guy talking about these sorts of issues. And another. And another. And another.
Etc. I could list a hundred others.
This is what I’m hearing “lots of talk” about.
But hey, what employer would want people who understand these things, right?
In the article you link to, Bauerlein writes:
I’d like to call attention to Bauerlein’s own difficulties7mdash; note the vague pronoun references in the first line of the second paragraph; . . . have a hard time with it and it’s blocking the progress of research.
Apparently Bauerlein has similar difficulties.
I have no idea why he has such a huge bug up his but about all things digital, but I’m extremely underwhelmed. He’s basically re-hashing arguments from c. 1992. He sticks in buzz words like “Web 2.0,” and clearly has absolutely no idea, at all, what they mean.
Just making things up? I cite several voices on nonlinearity in Dumbest Generation and in other writings: Daniel Pink on right-brain-ness, for instance. The book has an 18-page bibliography.
Nice idiom in the first comment, too.
I’d suggest you link to these things you’re disagreeing with once in a while. I understand it gets pedantic to do it every time, but whenever I stop by your blog, all I see are straw men, and a bunch of prose that looks like you took a 1991 Bill Bennett speech on the dangers of relativism and did global search and replace of relativism for “Web 2.0″.
Part of the glory of the Web is I shouldn’t have to go down and buy a copy of your book to evaluate something on your blog. And yes, in the idiom of the Web, if you don’t link occasionally to the people you are refuting, you are about as trustworthy as an academic book without a bibliography.
So there’s a good example, right there, of a 21st century skill our students need to master — how to annotate work in a network literate way. Do you disagree with that?