Month: December 2008

Atheism, Religion and Atrocities

Robert at MakingMyWay has one of the best responses I’ve read to the accusation that atheism was primarily responsible for much of the state-sponsored mass murder of the 20th century, specifically in Marxist/Communist regimes (thought it should be pointed out that Imperial Japan was hardly a hotbed of secularism and yet managed to murder hundreds of thousands of people).

To some extent, though, I think the question Robert attempts to answer — “Was atheism the cause of 20th century atrocities?” — is precisely the wrong question in much the same way that “Was religion responsible for the Inquisition?” borders on being nonsensical.

For example, some defenders of theism try to blame the Nazi’s on atheism which is just as absurd as laying blame for the Third Reich entirely at the feet of Martin Luther’s anti-semitic rantings. None of the atrocities by secular or religious authorities can be summed up in such sloganeering.

Moreover, it is certainly not outside the realm of possibilty that some future totalitarian regime basing repression wholeheartedly and explictly on some version or other of atheism could arise.

Robert lays out three commonalities that 20th century repressive regimes shared: a) belief in a dogmatic truth; b) hostility to liberty and independent thought; and c) unquestioned obedience from the top (the cult of personality that was such a feature of 20th century despotism). He argues that those commonalities are decisive rather than the nominal religious or secular nature of a regime.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that secularists themselves have frequently failed to look at regimes in this way. In fact, a survey of 20th century secularists finds a surprising number of them in the first half of the 20th century who were more than happy to judge such regimes based precisely on the alleged “true motivation” of the regime. So there were plenty of apologists for the USSR in the United States and Western Europe who did hold up the USSR’s allegedly progressive goals against the reactionary aims of the Fascists in order to explain their support for the former and their condemnation of the latter.

Using the Kindle in Medical Education (And Why the Kindle Sucks)

John Halamka, CIO for Harvard Medical School, has an interesting post about HMS’ support for the Amazon Kindle ebook reading device,

We’ve recently implemented Kindle support for all our 20,000 educational resources at HMS.

Our integration on the Mycourses educational website enables any Word or PDF document to be delivered to the Kindle wirelessly. There is a cost which is clearly explained to the user (10 cents per document to Amazon). Those that don’t want to pay the 10 cents can download documents to their PC and transfer the documents via USB cable. Once the user enters their Kindle account into the MyCourses Kindle setup page (accessible via our resources page or the GoMobile page), any resource which can be sent to the device has a little icon and label “My Kindle” which when clicked sends the resource to the Kindle. It does this by sending the document to the Amazon account via email attachment which then gets converted into Kindles’s specific format and delivered to the device using Sprint’s Whispernet.

HMS is the first Medical School to offer such a green alternative to all of their compatible resources to be downloaded directly to an eBook. At some point it would be nice to bypass the 10 cent fee with some utility that allows us to send to the device, but it’s a reasonable cost when you consider that Sprint is giving Kindle users free internet.

First off, let me say this sort of implementation is extremely impressive. There’s been a of debate online over just how “green” the Kindle is vs. traditional distribution methods, but leaving that aside the convenience of carrying around a Kindle rather than stacks of papers/books is obviously one of the things that is appealing to dedicated ebook devices.

Unfortunately, this sort of application simply underscores the idiocy that is the Kindle user interface. Currently I’ve go about 300 books on an SD card in my Kindle, and you could easily imagine a medical student having hundreds of papers and books loaded on the Kindle.

But Amazon made the boneheaded decision not to have any sort of way to organize large numbers of documents. Instead the Kindle simply lets you scroll through One Big Damn List(TM) of all your books/papers in alphabetical order by title. Of course a medical student might want to, say, organize papers  by the specific classes they’re relevant too. Too bad — all you get is that One Big Damn List.

That horrible design decision alone renders the Kindle almost unusable for anyone who actually wants to carry a substantial number of books/documents around on it. This decision is especially mystifying in that being able to classify and organize books into some sort of category and subcategory system (not to mention being able to see a list sortable by author rather than title) is fairly standard in ebook readers and ebook software.

I’ve had enough with the Kindle and “features” like this and am switching to the new Sony PRS700 which allows you to set up categories and features a touch screen-based annotation system.

Mark Bauerlein on the Problems with ‘Online Literacy’

Mark Bauerlein wrote an interesting analysis back in September on whether or not “screen reading” is comparable to more traditional forms of literacy, and ultimately finds the former wanting,

Once again, this is not so much about the content students prefer — Facebook, YouTube, etc. — or whether they use the Web for homework or not. It is about the reading styles they employ. They race across the surface, dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they already want and shunning the rest. They convert history, philosophy, literature, civics, and fine art into information, material to retrieve and pass along.

That’s the drift of screen reading. Yes, it’s a kind of literacy, but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention — in a word, slow reading. Fast scanning doesn’t foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts, and it doesn’t translate into academic reading. If it did, then in a 2006 Chronicle survey of college professors, fully 41 percent wouldn’t have labeled students “not well prepared” in reading (48 percent rated them “somewhat well prepared”). We would not find that the percentage of college graduates who reached “proficiency” literacy in 1992 was 40 percent, while in 2003 only 31 percent scored “proficient.” We would see reading scores inching upward, instead of seeing, for instance, that the percentage of high-school students who reached proficiency dropped from 40 percent to 35 percent from 1992 to 2005.

And we wouldn’t see even the better students struggling with “slow reading” tasks. In an “Introduction to Poetry” class awhile back, when I asked students to memorize 20 lines of verse and recite them to the others at the next meeting, a voice blurted, “Why?” The student wasn’t being impudent or sullen. She just didn’t see any purpose or value in the task. Canny and quick, she judged the plodding process of recording others’ words a primitive exercise. Besides, if you can call up the verse any time with a click, why remember it? Last year when I required students in a literature survey course to obtain obituaries of famous writers without using the Internet, they stared in confusion. Checking a reference book, asking a librarian, and finding a microfiche didn’t occur to them. So many free deliveries through the screen had sapped that initiative.

. . .

Some educators spot the momentum and shrug their shoulders, elevating screen scanning to equal status with slow reading. A notable instance occurred last year, when in an essay in The New York Times, Leah Price, a professor of English at Harvard University, criticized a report from the National Endowment for the Arts — “To Read or Not to Read” (to which I contributed) — precisely for downgrading digital scanning. Her article contained some errors of fact, such as that the 2004 NEA report “Reading at Risk” excluded nonfiction, but correctly singled out the NEA distinction between screen reading and print reading. To Price, it’s a false one: “Bafflingly, the NEA’s time-use charts classify ‘e-mailing’ and ‘surfing Web sites’ as competitors to reading, not subsets of it.” Indeed, she said, to do so smacks of guile: “It takes some gerrymandering to make a generation logging ever more years in school, and ever more hours on the BlackBerry, look like nonreaders.” (In truth, high-school students do no more in-class reading today than they did 20 years ago, according to a 2004 Department of Education report.)

What we are seeing is a strange flattening of the act of reading. It equates handheld screens with Madame Bovary, as if they made the same cognitive demands and inculcated the same habits of attention. It casts peeking at a text message and plowing through Middlemarch as subsets of one general activity. And it treats those quick bursts of words and icons as fully sufficient to sustain the reading culture. The long book may go, [Leah] Price concluded, but reading will carry on just as it did before: “The file, the list, the label, the memo: These are the genres that will keep reading alive.”

I think Bauerlein makes the mistake of blaming technology for what is really a particular fad in electronic learning. That fad essentially argues that we need to engage (i.e. pander to)  students by pandering to the media forms they’re most accustomed to. Marc Prensky seems to be the standard bearer for this approach. As he puts it in Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,

First, our methodology. Today’s teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of what is important, or of good thinking skills. But it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other things. Educators might ask “But how do we teach logic in this fashion?” While it’s not immediately clear, we do need to figure it out.

Second, our content. It seems to me that after the digital “singularity” there are now two kinds of content: “Legacy” content (to borrow the computer term for old systems) and “Future” content.

“Legacy” content includes reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc – all of our “traditional” curriculum. It is of course still important, but it is from a different era. Some of it (such as logical thinking) will continue to be important, but some (perhaps like Euclidean geometry) will become less so, as did Latin and Greek.

“Future” content is to a large extent, not surprisingly, digital and technological. But while it includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc. it also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go with them. This “Future” content is extremely interesting to today’s students. But how many Digital Immigrants are prepared to teach it?

I completely agree with Bauerlein, but the reality is that for a variety of reasons it is Prensky’s view which seems to be prevailing.