Re: what uis n?eoludism?
To be fair, I at least wasn't telling anybody not to explore things. Saying you should pick a thing that gets you out of your head for a while isn't the same thing as saying never explore things. There's a lot to be said for exploring things. But there's also a lot to be said for not exploring things until you have some sort of solid grounding, so you're not pulled this way and that way by each new thing you come across. Allow me to illustrate with a sort of neo-Luddite example.
There are a lot of people who insist that modern devices are screwing up students. They're distracting, studies have shown you "learn more" from print books rather than a device, you remember more if you write stuff down, and so on. So you'll read these stories, Professor Crankypuss bans laptops, phones, and tablets from his classes! Now I know, and everybody here does too, that you can learn in other ways, e.g. hearing an audio book. So right there, I question their basic idea that books, by which I mean physical printed books, and handwriting and so on are the only real way to learn.
So let's move on to the technology itself. Again, I've used phones to read books, indeed for a while that's literally all I was doing with one. So again, we know from experience that you can turn off Twitter and email notifications and all manner of other distractions, and use your phone to read Plato or whatever. So to my mind, what makes more sense than banning technology is to have classes on teaching students how to use technology responsibly.
Books and writing and all are great things, and I'm not one of these futurist idiots on the other side of things claiming all of that stuff is going to disappear and it will be the greatest thing in the whole history of forever! But let's be honest, the technology isn't going away either. And we know, from different segments of the population, blind folks like us for instance, that you can learn equally well from other forms of technology, unless you'd like to argue that I haven't learned well in which case, I'll happily punch you in the face, because I'm smart like that.
Now obviously, we can still debate the roll of technology. An obvious reply would be that the majority of sighted people learn through sight, though you could argue that this is changing with the popularity of audio books, and therefore all of the studies that show that books and writing your own notes by hand and such are the best way to learn are the most broadly applicable. That's fine, and a great debate to have. But my point is, looking at some practical experiences and the realities of the situation can help to bring a different perspective, as opposed to something that's just anti-new technology. And it's not just things from different people's heads either, we've got some real stuff to chew on here, not just some what if thoughts we both had at three in the morning one night when we were drunk.
So fine. Explore away. But if it's just stuff that's driving you around in circles and getting you nowhere, it's time to try something else, I say. Otherwise, I'm just going to assume you enjoy going nowhere inside of your own head and get bored. Because honestly, that kind of stuff gets pretty boring after a while. It's like all those songs about weed. Yes, we got it, you love pot and you think it's super amazing. Shut the hell up, nobody else cares. See also: NYC and/or California, you just had a baby, and so on. I wrote up a list somewhere, of songs we don't need to hear anymore. I should find it and post it.
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