It's true, professors with tenure can ignore the changing times.
There's no accountability and no consequences, so tenured professors
can be rigid, inflexible, and anachronistic, and get away with it.
But of course, that is doing the students a disservice. There's a
huge disconnect between academia and the real world, and young people know it.
In a way, the decline of tenure and the expansion of adjunct hires is
good for students. It's bad from a labor perspective, but at least it
keeps fresh blood coming in. Adjuncts have to continually
prove/improve themselves, and can't rest on their laurels. Ever.
Regarding technology, I'm a selective adopter. Just because something
is new does not make it good. But the corollary to this is that just
because something is familiar does not make it good, either. We all
must think critically about technology if we are to be effective
educators, makers, and even consumers. Control the tools, or they
will control you.
The fresco analogy unintentionally makes the opposite point. Art
schools don't teach fresco painting anymore, except as an extremely
specialist subject. Oil painting is a widely adopted technique that
has immediate application across the board. Fresco painting is, for
the most part, a dead art. So, in fact, students should not be
required to learn it.
If you want to piss off students, wasting their time and money, then
by all means, make them learn some specialized, anachronistic subject
that has little or no application in the real world.
Aaron
At 4/23/2014, you wrote:
But you _can_ reject the technology. Not at all times, nor
throughout the whole program. But, just because oil painting exists
does not mean that art students shouldn't learn how to make frescos.
--scott _______________________________________________ FrameWorks
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--------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron F. Ross, artist and educator
http://dr-yo.com
http://digitalartsguild.com
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