For a time, courseware was optional. Some faculty kept using paper syllabi; others adopted the online tools. Some used a combination. But as universities invested big bucks in courseware, and as courseware companies made big bucks selling it, the pressure to adopt it increased.
~ Ian Bogost via The Atlantic
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If the syllabus had simply gone away, educators could mourn its loss and move on. Instead, the document persists as the bloated corpse of what it used to be, and also as a ghost haunting the distributed, corporate information systems that have slowly replaced it.
~ Ian Bogost via The Atlantic
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I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.
~ Jenny Odell
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A world dominated by the technologies of industrial society is fundamentally more detrimental than beneficial to human happiness and survival.
~ Kirkpatrick Sale
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A document called “syllabus” persists, and is still distributed to prospective students at the start of each semester—but its function as a course plan has been minimized, if not entirely erased. First and foremost, it must satisfy a drove of bureaucratic needs, describing school policies, accreditation demands, regulatory matters, access to campus resources, health and safety guidelines, and more.
~ Ian Bogost via The Atlantic
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Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.
~ Samuel P. Huntington
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The collapse of Marxist belief systems led to a massive decline of subjective well-being among the people of the former Soviet Empire, a decline that lasted for decades, leaving an ideological vacuum to be filled by rising religiosity and nationalism.
~ Ronald Inglehart
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The post-information age is about acquaintance over time: machines’ understanding individuals with the same degree of subtlety (or more than) we can expect from other human beings, including idiosyncrasies and totally random events, good and bad, in the unfolding narrative of our lives.
~ Nicholas Negroponte
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If a man says a thing often enough, he is very likely to acquire some sort of faith in it sooner or later.
~ Dashiell Hammett
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The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.
~ Edgar H. Schein
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