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changing expectations

I have been thinking about this since we began talking about the Internet and virtual worlds. Let me tell you a story. I had my ballroom dancing final yesterday. I was a little bit nervous because I didn't remember some of the dances we had learned. How could I study? Aha! I realized, I could look at instructional videos on YouTube. So I did. I can't say they really helped much, but it made me reflect on some of our conversation. I wonder how expectations have changed, in many different arenas of life, but particularly in the academic world. The accessibility of knowledge has increased dramatically, and although some professors and topics of study require peer-reviewed scholarly literature, information about rapidly changing and developing current issues and academic studies is widely published on the internet in "gray literature", and opinion blogs. For my public policy class, my professor encouraged students to use this sort of information for studies of current public policy issues. This relates back to one of our first days of class when we discussed when we can believe what we see, read, hear, etc. This is sort of off the point, which is, how have expectations of students and instructors changed? Shouldn't we all be smarter because of all this information literally at our fingertips? Or have we just become lazier, and has the Internet, as we discussed, become a venue for marketing and entertainment?

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on December 7, 2007 8:24 PM.

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