I often think both students and teachers alike fall into a trap of ‘it is a potential educational argument/topic, therefore we must pursue it’ when much of the time this is not the case. I think the best part of arguments, especially educational ones is what comes out of them, not when two people walk away from each other both thinking that their individual opinions are better than the person they were just verbally bashing. In todays lecture we covered many topics such as the reliability and validity of different sources, perspectives and opinions being granted access into online sources, the art of bullshitting and noisy eaters. I’d like to focus on the idea of the massive expansion of literacies and form vs content.

could he be any louder with that sandwich?

I think people would agree that the transition from high school to tertiary education (university in particular) makes students feel as if they need to be super opinionated, join all these random groups, sign yellow pieces of paper and dispute other opinions because they feel theirs is right. In high school it was more a feel of ‘lets get this over and done with’ and ‘students hang tight’ kinda feel. Uni is very different, and that almost ignorant attitude, or the surfy kid who just wants to get good marks and move on to the next thing has totally gone out the window. Adrian talked much about understanding and the loss of power one has when third parties are allowed to do our work for us, or when we hire them out, we become a slave to these external sources. Honestly, who cares? I don’t care if I use the visual box feature on WordPress as a pose to the text HTML feature, as long as it works that is all I care about. However, it is not as if I do not understand the perspective of having a greater understanding or more well rounded knowledge is advantageous. I totally agree with this. When the computer guy used to come over to the house, and I’m sure other teenagers experienced this, that they are the ones talking to the ‘third party’ not the parents as they do not understand this talk about gigabytes and wireless traffic etc. Perfectly valid, but really with the advances in technology there is really nothing stopping me from…well anything?

I don’t get where this argument starts and begins. I am not a slave to anybody, and then someone really self righteous person comes along and says ‘you are a slave to our economic system, the uni’s, your parents’ etc. See, its just arguments for arguments sake. We really don’t need to concern ourselves with such things. If everyone understood everything then there would be a lot of job loss wouldn’t there to start with. As humans we are here to educate ourselves but there is no reason you have to know certain things or do certain tasks. Free will is a thing yes, and laws and restrictions apply but this is just blowing the original lecture topic out of proportion. No one cares about enslavement to third parties because that is a paranoid approach. Those lucky enough to be at university are capable of educating themselves about more than one topic. Fuss for no reason really, but makes for great blogging 🙂

Flash