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September 13, 2008, 10:04 PM ET
A Debate on Technology
Siva Vaidhyanathan
This week’s Chronicle Review contains three essays on the place and extent of digital tools in young people’s lives and learning. Each one takes a different approach to the issue, and as a complement to them, we will host a mini-forum here at Brainstorm and invite commentators to weigh in. By “we” I mean myself and guest blogger Siva Vaidhyanathan, a contributor to the Review and professor in the media studies department at University of Virginia. (The other essay writer is Thomas Workman, professor of communications studies at University of Houston-Downtown.) Siva’s Wikipedia page is here, and his description at the University of Virginia site includes this:
“Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar, is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). His most recent book is the edited (with Carolyn de la Pena) collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
“Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, MSNBC.COM, Salon.com, openDemocracy.net, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Nation. After five years as a professional journalist, Vaidhyanathan earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia University, New York University, and now is an associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and a fellow at both the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.”
We shall post back and forth on the essays in the Review and on the learning benefits and dangers of digital technology. Our hope is to broaden the discussion with sound information about the latest research, good anecdotes from personal experience in the classroom, and general reflections on the nature and meaning of digital technology at the present time. And, of course, pointed refutations of the posts.
First post will come from Siva tomorrow.
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