Class Notes, 10 November

Schaberg: Now is when we really start to hone in on the questions / issues to focus on for next semester. For books reports: if there is a part of your book you thin would be useful to read as a class, please share.

Jeffrey's Presentation:

App "Two Screens": Presentation app that allows you to open powerpoints and PDFs at the same time

"The Dumbest Generation: Don't Trust Anyone Under 30": premise of book - we're dumber than we've ever been. Young people are more likely to know the American Idol than the Speaker of the House. Deficiencies are across the board in all subjects.

Between 1992 and 2002 literacy rates have decreased in all areas: age, race, gender, education. Judgement based on whether you have read anything literary in the past 12 months - includes basically anything (poems, magazines, song lyrics)

"The abundant material progress has not just disengaged today's use, it has hindered it." We have more readily available knowledge than ever before but we choose not to utilize it. 43% of 18-24 year olds considered themselves readers outside of school in 2002. In 1946, that figure was 92%.

"Harry Potter has not sparked an invigoration of reading." After the last Harry Potter book was published, sales of children's books went down 43 million units.

"The Dumbest Generation will cease being dumb only when it regards adolescence as an inferior realm of petty strivings and adulthood as a realm of civic, historical and cultural awareness that puts them in touch with perennial ideas.." - there is a generation of people trapped in adolescence called Twixters.

Interview with Bauerlein: Digital culture doesn't mean access to knowledge for teens, it means access to each other. 9/10 of the to websites are social networking sites. Our leisure activites: 95% of us watch an hour of tv a day; we don't go to museums, we don't patronize the performing arts. Out of the 31% of adults who said they read, 16% of them did not read literature.

What do we do? Adults should stop kids from watching tv, listening to iPod during homework, tweeting, etc. There is going to be a record of our behavior and we need to take preventative measures so that we're not the ones who abandon learning and education.

Our culture is "aliterate" - we can read, but we don't.

"Reading at Risk" survey can be found on the website for the National Endowment for the Arts - should be read, it's really interesting.

Thoughts from the class:

Statistics from the book may not be accurate because standardized tests are very flawed.

All the school system does is prepare you for standardized tests, not any kind of real learning.

Every generation thinks that the generation after them is dumber - is it pointless to make these claims? Shouldn't we focus on what we do know instead of what we don't?

The book is kind of pandering - a book about people who don't read so that people who do will read it and congratulate themselves.