-----Original Message-----
From: Chad Zimmerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Monday, October 05, 1998 11:25 AM
Subject: Re: WC:>: FYI-Private sector group submits Internet name plan
>Having been a main university webmaster and now work for a department in
the
>university doing web work I know what is going on here.
>
>www.nmsu.edu is a well designed site, given that the design and content
>placement is "controlled" by university communications.
>
>I did some of the web pages for the www server, what really "burns" me
>though is that we as the student employes do not get any regonigion of any
>kind. Only webmaster does and everyone knows who he is.
>
>I now work for a different department and I am putting up research
>information now for several research projects at http://www.nmsu.edu/~stdi/
>.
>
>Again here is the short fall, this university does a lot of research. Yet
>using the web for this research involves many tag backs .. it took me 4
>months to get a simple C program installed so that researchers can do some
>online conputational work. The program is a simple one, but the server /
>web policies make it hard if not damn impossible to use the web as a
>research medium.
>
>Chad
>
>Oh that's OK, I'll rant for you <g>
>
>I've noticed this consistently in my years on the Web, how teachers
>specifically and educational institutions often don't seem to "get" the
Web.
>Which is ironic, because academics were the original power users who
>drove the evolution of the Internet and later the Web in the first place.
>But the fact remains that in 1998, many academic sites are noteworthy
>for their stodgy, ill-organized content and appearance.
>
>(BTW, I know that some list members are academics; please don't take
>offence at my comments here. They are general observations, not
>specific criticisms. I know that some academics do indeed make
>exceptionally good use of the net in their jobs; just not enough of them.)
>
>Part of the problem, I suspect, is that universities tend to be run by
>committee, as are government bureacracies. This generates large
>amounts of inertia. Decisions are reached in an atmosphere of courtly
>gentility, slowly and with elaborate pretence at "consensus-building", or
>whatever the buzz-phrase-de-jour happens to be. (Although in reality,
>universities are hotbeds of positively Balkan rivalries, sniping and
>backstabbing, but that's another topic.) In any case, there is a rather
>paradoxical conservatism at the heart of many post-secondary
>institutions, at least as the management level. This seems to be reflected
>in the lame Web presence of so many of them.
>
>Another issue, nicely explored in a US Congressional study for which I've
>unfortunately lost the URL, is the nature of the pedagogic profession
>itself. Teachers and professors are by definition people who are the
>authorities in their daily working lives. If the teacher-student
>relationship
>is working "right" then the teacher holds all the cards, dispensing pearls
>of
>knowledge from on high to the grateful unwashed. This indeed is the
>framework upon which their ability to discipline and control their students
>is often built. The teacher knows the curriculum thoroughly, and the
>student doesn't. So the student had best defer to the teacher.
>
>The Internet -- with its potential for instant access to vast stores of
>information and opinion -- threatens this classroom hegemony. When a
>teacher knows that his students can listen to a lecture/lesson, go home,
>and within minutes find 20 dissenting (and perhaps equally authoritative)
>views on a topic, then that teacher's authority is diminished. His
>curriculum becomes suspect, his omniscience questioned. Or so the
>teachers perceive it, many of them. There is, in the words of the study I
>mentioned above, "fear and resentment of the unknown".
>
>Anecdotally, I see this syndrome at work in two people close to me, my
>sister and my ex. Both are public-school teachers, and both (by all
>second-hand accounts I hear) are very good ones. And yet they are the
>only two members of my family circle who are not on the Internet.
>
>When I question this, their reasons are vague: "Oh, it's a fad... my
>students just use it for games and chat and so on... it's filled with
>pornography... it's... it's..." Not terribly persuasive :) Ultimately, I
>suspect it's all just too much for them; that they have a general sense of
>Something Big going on, something that their students understand but
>they don't, and they don't like it. And perhaps they feel that by getting
>on the net themselves they're somehow "selling out". I dunno.
>
>Anyway, I have a miserable cold and am running out of mental steam. Will
>leave this here. Again, no offence intended to any list members from
>acdemia.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>-----------
>Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
> E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Town of Almonte site: http://www.almonte.com/
> Business site: http://www.federalweb.com
>
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