Not to mention the future: Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind — ChronicleReview.com
So let’s restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off. Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students’ minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can’t do it by themselves, especially if every inch of the campus is on the grid.
Obviously this guy is a complete lightweight, or he’d be holding the line at oral recitation. Pfft.
While I heartily disagree with him (I believe he is confusing the medium with the method, and reactively at that), his essay is worth reading.