I got exciting news yesterday: I’m becoming a computer science professor! I’m alright. Nobody worry ’bout me. It’s just for three days.
You see, my friend JP is teaching a CS class for pre-college Freshmen this summer and it’s going to start with getting them Reclaim Hosting sites, then teaching them how to control their own domains. Poritz, who codes his own pages like most people write prose, is so far ahead on this he actually needs help explaining this simplified process to ordinary people, so I’m coming in for the first three days to help talk the students through this process. Ironically, I’m hardly the greatest WordPress web designer in the world. [Indeed, THE Jason Jones owes me an e-mail or at least a post on improving one’s WordPress skills so I can redesign this site again as practice.] Nevertheless, over the last few years I’ve become quite good at modeling “Let’s all learn this together” behavior.
This is necessary because this whole concept of “Digital Natives” is complete rubbish. Yeah, I know that’s a rather common sentiment (at least in well-informed circles), but I’d actually go one step further: A lot of old people like me are a lot closer to being digital natives than college students are. After all, I was on a college campus for most of the Nineties. I actually learned (and have now completely forgotten) Gopher in an 80-part e-mail course. By which I mean, this gopher:
Not this one:
Or this one:
So I literally have decades of experience being uncomfortable on the Internet.
I’d argue that this is a good thing. One of the many things I learned writing a book with Poritz was the origins of the fake word “app.” Yes, I already knew it’s short for “application,” but what JP taught me is that the whole point of applications is to perform a particular function for you so that you don’t have to worry about it. By making things more easy, you’re more likely to hand over your cash, your data or perhaps both.
As a stereotypical liberal college professor, the whole “Fake News” thing from last year scared the Hell out of me, and would have done so regardless of the outcome of the election. Since the Internet is so important to everyday life and is already (for good or for evil) taking over the college classroom, I’m committed to helping students understand how to think critically about something that’s inevitably such an important part of their lives. With an epidemic of fake Founding Fathers quotes perverting our politics, the relationship between this project and history professing should be obvious.
Or we can all be gophers and climb back into our holes and wait for Bill Murray to blow up the golf course for us. Pardon me if I prefer to be more pro-active.
