Oh my, I feel like I'm back in high school. I've just been handed a speed-writing exercise, and it doesn't matter that Darren and Susie have assured us that they won't be grading us... the former academic over-achiever in me needs to do a good job. Old habits die hard, dammit.
So I've been instructed to write a blog post about my trip to Banff. But you know what? I'm not going to. My trip to Banff wasn't exciting -- a dozy plane ride, a pass through the Calgary airport, and a shuttle to the Banff Centre. Yawn. Though the mountains of course are beautiful.
So I'm going to take charge here - suggesting, incidentally, that I HAVE evolved somewhat since those younger days, when I likely wouldn't have dared to rebel - and write instead about the contagious ADD in this room. Seriously.
I remain completely unconvinced that human beings have evolved enough, in the true sense of the word, to handle the intellectual environment of Web 2.0. Right now I have 7 windows open in my web browser, and I'm looking up at a projected screen also has at least that many windows open.
It's a running joke here in the room, about how all the faculty members suffer from this debilitating condition (marked by an inability to bring closure to one topic area before skipping to another). Joke it may be, but seriously, I personally think this is a problem that we're going to have to address as a culture at some point. What happens to all the children who are growing up in this environment? At least some of us possess memories of an earlier age (and I'm probably the youngest of those people, having been in high school when the web really took off)... and sometimes I use those memories to try to pull myself back from the abyss and focus...
But I suspect that there are neural pathways in our brains that need to be forged at a young age, or else they don't develop. Or something. There's lots of research out there about that kind of stuff in relation to other things. Just a thought from the sometimes neo-luddite in me...
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