Weekend Reading: Quiet Thoughts Edition

I’ve been thinking about generational change in institutions recently, in part in response to the links below by Audrey Watters and ProtoScholar. There is often a sense that such change, because it is necessary, is cost-free, or something simply to be welcomed or celebrated for its own sake.

My own view is closer to George Eliot’s, from “On the Antigone and its Moral”:

Until this harmony is perfected, we shall never be able to attain a great right without also doing a wrong. Reformers, martyrs, revolutionists, are never fighting against evil only, they are also placing themselves in opposition to a good–to a valid principle which cannot be infringed without harm.

And while this is perhaps a gloomy thought for a Friday, it’s also one that reminds us of all the victories in reconciling what Eliot would call “the outer life of man” and “his inward needs.” It need not lead us to simply accept the institutions that shape our work.

On to this week’s links:

• I’m not sure this USA Today article on athletes and Twitter gets at the medium exactly: “Twitter was especially designed to be the world’s most promiscuous communication medium,” says Robert Thompson, Professor of Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “Forget the editorial process, forget a second draft, and forget simply a second thought. It just comes out.”
• Cuihua Shen and Peter Monge conduct “a social network analysis of an online open source software community”: the results are suggestive of a “performance–based clustering” phenomenon within the OSS online community in which most collaborations involve accomplished developers, and novice developers tend to partner with less accomplished and less experienced peers.
• James Somers explains “How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code”: What’s especially neat about it is that someone who has never programmed — someone who doesn’t even know what a program is — can learn to write code that solves this problem in less than three hours. I’ve seen it happen. All it takes is a little hunger. You just have to want the answer.
• Audrey Watters offers a skeptical read of the metaphors underpinning the Khan Academy: This narrative of salvation involves the belief that Internet technology (and its concordant scalability) is the answer to education’s woes. It involves the belief that when longstanding classroom practices such as the lecture are captured via video and disseminated via the Web, that these old practices become instantly better. It involves the belief that deep cognition is secondary to — or maybe triggered by — the power of pause and rewind. It involves the belief that better test scores are not just a marker of achievement, but the goal of learning.
• ProtoScholar correctly identifies the problem with senior academics confessing to lives of unusual ease and freedom from care: The harm I see in this article is that it gives a perspective on the academic life that DOESN’T EXIST ANY LONGER. Are there people out there who have had this experience? Some. Not as many as the conservative blogosphere would like to think, but definitely some. But for a new graduate or a newly tenured faculty member, the life he describes doesn’t exist.

In this week’s video, Andrea Dreger reflects on the difficulties of thinking of anatomy as destiny:

For this week’s bonus video, “Darth Vader Goes to DisneyLand.”

Have a great weekend!

Photo by me.