Foot:Publish or Perish / Video Games in the Classroom

These articles were both very pro-technology, I am not. If I were having high school students read these articles, then I would tell them to identify the various instances of author bias. It is always important to know the authors motives for writing before reading that author. In the case of the "Publish or Perish" article the article wasn't biased towards Amazon or Mac, but rather biased towards the notion that books becoming more prevalent in electronic form is a good thing. The author went as far to infer that publishers of physical books will eventually become obsolete because of the electronic book craze, "Asked about publishers’ efforts to raise prices, a skeptical literary agent said, “You can try to put on wings and defy gravity, but eventually you will be pulled down”". I like electronic books because it makes books more accessible, this is the only aspect of electronic books I like, poor kids dont get access to electronic books, you don't have the sense of ownership that you get from buying a physical book and carrying it around and keeping it with you, you don't get that new (or old) book smell form electronic books. Lastly, I hate to see computer people profit from the hard work of literary people. The "Video Games in the Classroom" article was such a far stretch, unless you are teaching a class specifically on how to design video game software (which they were in the class in the article). The author completely ignored the most important question pertaining to video games in the classroom "how would a video game help a student become a better reader and writer?", The educational merit I have seen in video games throughout my life is that video games help the player foster some problem solving skills. But to have students come into school and play video games instead of doing academic work is ludicrous. The teacher who started this class made himself sound like an idiot (at least to me) " He talked about all the wasted energy that goes into teaching things that students don’t need so much anymore, thanks to the tools now available to them. Why memorize the 50 states and their capitals? Why, in the age of Google and pocket computers, memorize anything? “Handwriting?” Doyle said. “That’s a 20th-century skill.”" I apprecate this guy thinking of new ways to help teach students, but when the New York Times tries to present his ideas as something that could be implemented in any classroom it is misleading the reader.