Compute for critical thinking

I really enjoyed Michael Bérubé's visit to Hofstra yesterday to discuss the future of liberal arts. I love his presentation style - I am a recovering English student, I love presentations sprinkled with Searle and rescues of Habermas. But more importantly I always find Dr. Bérubé to be a clear-minded thinker, as clear about the value of separating social facts from brute facts as he is clear about the problems facing grad students when it comes to employment and the adjunctification of our universities.

If there is an intersection between what I've studied and what I do - and I'm not saying there is one - the intersection is precisely where liberal arts instruction becomes practical. We all want to graduate students who can express themselves clearly in writing, for instance. That's a classic liberal arts value and while I don't know how far back it dates I do know that it is found everywhere in higher ed from the Ivies to the community colleges. Students will neither get nor keep jobs if they can't express themselves in writing.

I don't know if you've noticed, but the blogosphere runs on writing.

Why not have more informal as well as formal writing opportunities for our students? If we want them to be able to write a lucid email, blog, or Twitter post, shouldn't they be trying it out in our classes?

Or if you'd rather spork yourself to death than admit you want your students to write a lucid blog, don't you suspect that if they spent more time writing blogs that garnered them feedback, they might develop better habits of clarity, organization, and persuasion that would leak over into their essays?

I suspect it. When I use discussion boards in my classes I am sneakily providing a venue for increased informal writing that nonetheless gets feedback and ultimately a grade. It may well be that students are consistently better at compartmentalizing their writing tasks than we are at assigning them, and that just because they do, over the course of a semester, learn to write a lucid, even persuasive discussion board post, they may well still write texts to one another that consist of "@lib where u@?".

That doesn't bother me. I think of the delightful contrast between very high-culture poetic rhetoric and street swearing that we saw in the TV series "Deadwood", for instance. David Milch, the award-winning screenwriter, purposefully played with that opposition in his dialog, as he felt that people of the 19th century who had any education at all read things like Shakespeare and that their language was indeed a salty combination of iambic pentameter and words that would make a sailor blush. Dr. Bérubé's own rhetoric, I think, is made all the more effective by alternating between extremely targeted summaries of extremely rich texts like Contingencies of Value and Internetisms like "YMMV" (your mileage may vary). When I went to school, admittedly a million years ago in a land far, far away, it was expected that education would enable us to be able to switch registers from formal English to the sort of English we heard around us every day and also spoke. That doesn't mean that Shakespeare doesn't get discussed in the language of Pennsylvania farmers - or high school students. It totally does. To insist that Shakespeare only be discussed in a register befitting Shakespeare is to lose much of the value of studying Shakespeare: his language enriches ours and understanding his stories enriches our understanding of our own. Add your own discipline's core text here.

So let's toy with the idea that having students communicate electronically and informally about their classes is a valuable rhetorical exercise rather than the end of the liberal arts as we know it. Maybe they are spending less time on homework; certainly they are spending more time working at jobs; but if, in the twenty minutes they have to spend on it, they write up a blog post about the topic of your class that they spent some of their work shift thinking about, isn't that a net win for education?

Our instructional designers and technologists can help you come up with any number of exercises that can take advantage of students' omnipresent ability to add their thoughts to the Internet via text. We'd be happy to help you. And if you have an exercise you love, please let your nearest FCS staffer know about it so we can write it up as a case study and share it with other Hofstra faculty!