Archive for Culture
Should laptops be banned from class?
The Post has a piece on the “trend” of banning laptops in college classes.
[Georgetown law prof David] Cole has banned laptops from his classes, compelling students to take notes the way their parents did: on paper. A generation ago, academia embraced the laptop as the most welcome classroom innovation since the ballpoint pen. But during the past decade, it has evolved into a powerful distraction. Wireless Internet connections tempt students away from note-typing to e-mail, blogs, YouTube videos, sports scores, even online gaming — all the diversions of a home computer beamed into the classroom to compete with the professor for the student’s attention.
Cole, who teaches a course on “democracy and coercion” says laptops are “an attractive nuisance.”
My co-teacher and I have debated the merits of a ban for our class at GMU Law, and while I’ve vacillated on my position, I’ve ultimately taken the libertarian approach. Our students are all big boys and girls paying lots of money for a law education at a top school. If they want to surf the internet during class, that’s their choice as long as they don’t bother anyone else. We provide a clear incentive, though. A full 20 percent of their grade is class participation, and we’re serious about it.
Ultimately I think UVA’s Sive Vaidhyanathan nails it on the head: “If students don’t want to pay attention, the laptop is the least of your problems.”
Roger Ebert half gets it, but that’s half enough
Roger Eebert has announced an online subscription service. On his blog, he writes what he calls a “justification” for the move. While he echoes the familiar complaints of old media–he’s not getting paid for his writing, he doesn’t make enough from ads and big ad buys overlook him, etc.–he seems to understand that trying to force people to pay for his content is just not possible.
If I go behind a firewall, however, and a high school student in Mexico is doing some research, there are lots of other excellent critics on the web, and everybody knows it. I’m pretty sure I could get more than 35 subscribers, but a million?
Ebert also laments that micropayments have not proven workable. He waxes romantic about how after learning of the concept from Nicholas Negroponte’s writing, he and Gene Siskel salivated of the amounts they could make if their readers were willing to pay just two cents a page.
Despite all his charming bellyaching, though, he’s making the right move. All the blog and review content that he now makes available for free will remain free. He’s creating a premium service at $5 a year for which you get extra members-only content and other perks.
I think a key component of his premium package will be a member-only discussion forum. A simple thing like a $5 a year fee is enough of a speed bump that it will keep out anyone not serious about serious discussion. Because of the fee, the level of discourse will no doubt be better than other free online movie forums, and that will attract others who will want to pay the fee to get in.
More old media should take this route. The tribes that would form around different publications would be fascinating. Publications could create quality communities and largely avoid the costs of moderation all while getting paid. I’ll be back in a year to announce the Sometime Right Premium Forum.
Gay Marriage Day in DC
Today is the first day in which the District of Columbia is issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. I live and work in the suburbs, but to my knowledge the Anacostia has not opened up and swallowed the city, heterosexual marriages have not been annulled, and nobody has yet tried to marry a box turtle.
This morning NPR brought us the story of one Carol Benevy and her partner who moved from New Jersey (nothing special there given Jersey’s patterns of outmigration) to DC to get married.
Certainly, moving to a new city and starting a new life is tough. Presumably Ms. Benevy and her partner left friends behind in New Jersey. Perhaps they left promising careers, religious groups, favorite restaurants, Scrabble clubs, who knows what else to move to America’s capital of khaki. So when the Washington NPR affiliate put a microphone in her face and asked her about the significance of today, what does she have to allow?
Marriage was so important that we gave up our Congressional representation to move to DC.
That’s right, Carol and her partner gave up the ability to be two of 650,000 people represented by someone who won his seat (I say his because the entire New Jersey congressional delegation is male) by between 3.4 and 98 points (only one of New Jersey’s 13 House seats was decided by fewer than eight points in 2008) to be… two of 600,000 people represented by someone who won her seat by 85 points but cannot vote on the floor of the House of Representatives!
For most of us, married or single, religious or atheist, gay or straight, statist or anarchist, the idea of comparing marriage to voting for Congress is ridiculous on its face, like comparing the need for oxygen with the need for Spike TV. There is no reasonable way that the two are even in the same ballpark of the human experience. One is about deciding to share a life with another person, while your Congressional representative has nil to do with your every day. The marginal marriage partner matters; if at the margin my wife left our marriage, it would cease to be a marriage. The marginal congressional voter doesn’t matter.
Readers are invited to complete this sentence: “______ is so important I would give up my Congressional representation to have it.” Here are three things to get you started: bacon-flavored toothpicks, roll-on caffeine, and Techron.
Sam Anderson has the best ‘trend piece’ I’ve seen about ChatRoulette
The median age seems to hover around 20, and males outnumber females probably twenty to one. Sex is ever-present, whether insinuated or enacted. (My wife sat in front of the webcam for a while, and it was suddenly, disturbingly, a much friendlier world.) People are endlessly soliciting nudity, both in person and via signs (“FLASH TITS FOR HAITI,” etc.). Roughly one out of every ten chatters is a naked masturbating man, and even they will usually hang up on you, one-handedly, before you can click away. The default interaction on ChatRoulette is roughly three seconds long: assessment, micro-interaction, “next.”
He argues that it’s a throwback to the web’s early days. We forget how much of the web’s past was random uncurated stuff. It’s probably also obvious to say that anonymity is central ChatRoulette’s success. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” with a big twist.
