COLLOQUY Responses
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COLLOQUY Responses
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 I write in support of Edward Miller and his concerns about the negative impact of computers in the learning experience. (Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 16, 1998: Information Technology) We have reached the end of a microphase in human development. And to progress, to evolve any further, we must challenge the newly established technological shibboleths of contemporary traditional education. Previously the imaginative teacher confronted the angry animals of rational thinking: tests, grades, the lecture-drone, the present K-through-12 structure, ad infini-doldrum. The time is overdue to reexamine the learning experience, its classroom connection, personal accountability, social responsibility, creativity, and curiosity. It is time also to balance the rituals of rote information-gathering with imaginative nourishment, meditation and celebration. The computer has come along in human history -- similar in style if not speed to its predecessors -- at a time when the worship of decal learning has all but erased human internal challenges. It will always be true that sacred cows produce superfluous milk. In this instance, the computer may well be the cow who changes milk into mud. An information fetish seems to occupy the minds of most educators these days. Even in this technological age the human being is more than a warehouse of data, linear thought, and logical thought processes. In the not too distant future look for the transmogrification of the human condition into an aberrant mutant with a swivel image monitor-eye, a protective brain cavity cover equipped with (h)airbag, finger-like projections where the ears once were -- long enough to manipulate the neck pads, a nose-mouse and a four inch wide aperture below it for donuts. Seriously, if you have trouble accepting this messenger's concerns, please turn to an excellent book by Elaine De Beauport, The Three Faces of Mind, Developing your mental, emotional and behavioral intelligences. It is a special reference for the interdisciplinary course I presently teach at John Wood Community College: "Life Tools... New Visions."
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