Book "Twitterature" in TFA actually looks pretty cool: Link

Just might have to change the delivery method. When someone can sit through a farking 80 hour video game in a few sittings, you can bet your arse they can concentrate long enough to read a book.

GaryPDX: Maybe they should just stick to teaching Marxism.

I never took the Marxism class. In the morning? Are you farking kidding me?

Paging Guy Montag, Guy Montag, you're wanted at the University.

GaryPDX: Maybe they should just stick to teaching Marxism.



I find tinsel distracting.

GaryPDX: Maybe they should just stick to teaching Marxism.

I actually read the Communist Manifesto in college. I thought it was the most boring book I had ever read... until I tried to read Das Capital. Good lord.

Are books -- at the least the non-technical sort (novels, histories, philosophies) -- as they've been formatted for the past several hundred years really that important to civilization or education?

I'm not really sure that they are.

This guy doesn't give a lot of good evidence. He just seems to think that since books were the last word when he was educated, that things should always stay the same.

Shabash: Book "Twitterature" in TFA actually looks pretty cool: Link

The problem with writing a book like this is that it, owing to the speed of online pidgeon/slang/dialects, it will be obsolete in ten years.

We've already gone through several mutants of internet English. From 1337speak to lolcats, ebonics, textspeak and twitterspeak, which is getting so abbreviated it's practically a code now, like newspeak.

Does anyone even talk like JeffK anymore?

7473r4: People love to have the same stupid argument every 10 years. No, people are not going to stop reading. Yes, people still read. And Yes, young people read too!

If college professors assign books and expect their students to read them for a decent grade, then students will read the books unless said professor is an absolute pushover doormat who hands out A's like a sex ed teacher hands out condoms.

To be fair, he's not questioning whether kids will still read. He's asking whether they'll still be held to read entire, unabridged books.

It's a fair question; I just don't know if it's a necessarily bad thing for kids to move away from the traditional forms of ingesting knowledge.

BizarroHulk: TL:DNR

you mean just like how subby listed the source?

you're clever

/not subby

dumpstertize: And? Didn't seem to make much sense...might get around to reading Das Kapital, see if Marx improved over time...
You weren't saying it was a long read, were you?
Gods, I hope not!

No, CM was short and easy, just boring. Das Capital is what happens when Moby Dick has sex with The Wealth of Nations.

therhinodep: More importantly, will paper textbook publishers still be able to charge ridiculous prices for their products, while giving kickbacks to professors who require students to buy them?

I had a professor who was pissed off at the combo of a) not having a book he really liked for the class and b) that the textbooks cost so damn much, so he decided to write his own.

Got a local place to print it and made damn sure the price was under $40. Might have been $30 if memory serves correctly. The university wanted a kickback, but he and my student adviser (who also handled that sorta thing) talked them down.

Had him again senior year. No book, and all of our notes were just LaTeX pdfs that he wrote or chapters he got permission to copy.

Awesome professor, and department. Another professor was working on the same thing, but she just had a huge collection of pdf chapters of 'class notes' (really, some editing and text away from being a book) she probably wasn't going to publish. Another professor had a hodgepodge of notes (some apparently written in the days of mimeograph, but hell, the science still worked)... we got a 20+ page stack for the next class at the end of each one.

... Come to think of it, out of all the classes I took in my major (9) I only had to buy 5 books. Two were definitive reference texts for my field, one was optional, and two were no-frills-or-accompanying-CD/Website regular textbooks that ran about $50 a pop.

/my professors rocked

I find I have trouble concentrating on these textbooks in accounting. Truthfully, a lot of the ideas could be better organized in point form. The writers seem to get lost in how much they love their own words, so you end up with a whole chapter to explain something that can be distilled, without losing any significant information, into a paragraph. It's really lame. The worst was Accounting Theory. Holy hell what a terrible book.

Xcott: Actually, the biggest problem is not lack of reading, but lack of writing.

Teach a class these days and you'll find kids with laptops taking notes (maybe,) by typing this or that into one of their windows. Far easier than writing it in a notebook with a pen, and by the same token far worse for retention. Then you have kids who just sit there with nothing, not even bothering to bring anything to take notes---as if going to class is like watching a boring movie.

Give them a test and you just get blank answers, or random stabs at drawing numbers from the question and plugging them in to one of the three formulas they remember from somewhere.

Um, if you're a prof, there's ways to force it on the kids. Not like you should, but whatever.

Ban computers or typing notes, if you want, and give tests where if you take stabs in the dark at the answers you - shock - don't pass.

Hell, my hardest classes were open-book or open-one-page-of-notes for that very reason. Sure, you have the whole book - because in the real world (engineering-style), you'd be able to reference things - but you damn well better know how to solve the problem because flipping through the book, panic-style, might not get you very far.

One page of handwritten notes for a test is also a great way to actually learn the material. Or at least it was for me. Organizing the important information I needed to solve any problem, then rewriting it in tiny tiny print and making the relevant graphs/charts... that actually took me a decent amount of time to do. I have all of them saved, too. Like works of art almost, except the edges where I threw in anything I forgot or example problems...