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Michelle Glaros, like me a Florida PhD, writes about the dangers of just-in-time thinking in liberal arts education:

The core characteristics of liberal arts education — critical thinking, broad academic interests, and creative, interdisciplinary knowledge — provide students with the intellectual flexibility to successfully negotiate shifting career paths. Training students in the latest software applications at the expense of teaching them critical, creative problem-solving skills ill prepares them for long-term success in the just-in-time labor market.

Flexibility is the key word here (and would make a good concept for 480). Teaching computing is too often very rigid: we teach how to make web sites with Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop Elements, not how to make web sites with whatever is at hand. But we have to get even more abstract than that, I think: we should be teaching how and why to write with computers in general, and cultivating broad interests in many writing practices. Perhaps the analogy to labor is retooling: for computing, that’s a matter of downloading a different free program and modifying one’s behaviors a little. Meta-tooling.

We have to push the machines to make them be flexible. And we have to support open standards and open source: especially in creative software, the field is very small. Flexibility begins with changing one’s relation to the machine, but also demanding that the machine changes as well.

Posted Saturday, August 13th, 2005 at 8:54 am under Nerdliness, Teaching. Follow responses with the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.