Alex--

A definite pattern's emerged over the course of the four papers you wrote for this course this semester: you used Bateson to look @ the emergence of the self, queer theory to look @ the emergence of the women's college, the backsmoker diaries to look @ the emergence of the blog, and now, to top it all off, you're looking here @ the biggest question of all: the emergence of education. My favorite line from this essay is the one I've made my subject heading: your claim that "education should be an emergence story."

You argue that position by looking first @ history, and the striking analogy of the entrance of English literature into the curriculum; you look next @ current practices, and turn then to the future. There are still a few hard edges to be gone over in this process, edges you elide.

For instance: right now I'm in the midst of reading (among other things!) Frederick Rudolph's history of The American College & University, which describes the process whereby "the old scholastic curriculum" gave way to "the new scientific leaven" in the mid-18th century. Then, the introduction of mathematics encouraged "the feeling that it was the busines of the mind to discover things hitherto unknown": "Scholasticism was the philosophy of thoughtfulness, of deduction, of 'ought.' A new spirit was arguing for a philosophy of experience, of experiemental evidence, of 'is.'"

I wish I had the opportunity to give you yet another assignment in this class; I'd ask you do something similar by looking @ the curriculum of the computer science department, and think about how it works, what habits of thought it encourages, not only as what you say it is--"just an academic deciipline"--but as a liberal art. What, specifically and practically, should computer sciences courses and professors be doing @ small liberal arts colleges like this one? What would the "right way" and "proper knowledge" look like on the ground?

I have a particular reason for asking this question. Perhaps the most striking claim in your essay is the one embedded in your quote from Laura, that the "higher up on the food chain," the "less it's about the students." This is something else I'm learning from Rudolph's book: that faculty, who were once hired to do "service"--that is, to teach students and act as moral exemplars for them--have since organized into a form of faculty governance that allows them to operate as entrepreneurs. Most now see their primary task not as teaching, but as the making of new knowledge, contributing to their fields of study. So your advice that we can "show them you care" by introducing technological tools into our classroom may not be speaking to where faculty are, or where they want to be/invest their energies. What can technology do about THAT?

Obviously, there's plenty here for us to keep on talking about....I look forward to further conversation, in-person and on-line, as your academic career unfolds--

Anne