The Organic Professor on the Inorganic Net
First presented at TCON 98 in Hawaii's Annual Online Conference
COMBINING MEATSPACE, CYBERSPACE AND DEEPSPACE: How the Internet Changes the Conventional/Traditional Classroom by Julia Evergreen Keefer, Ph.D.
In order to justify the expense and labor involved in internet education, it must be proven that there are intrinsic educational benefits, that it is not just a market for corporations to tap into to develop intellectual capital. Jacobson et al.have begun empirical documentation (1996) on the use of hypertext to enhance learning but eventually we should conduct experimental scientific studies where we actually measure, through CAT and PET scans and other technology, brain activity in nonlinear, linear and chaotic creative activities. This informal paper is a theoretical discussion of the language and rhetoric of what I have delineated as cyberspace, meatspace and deepspace followed by a description of the web-enhanced multidisciplinary writing classes I have been teaching at New York University from 1996-1998.Technology (i.e. internet access, construction of web sites, e-mail, MUDS, MOOS, not network television) can and should improve higher education, but it is not axiomatic that it do so. If the students get addicted to the same cheap thrills and mindless drivel of advertising, network television and the video arcades that are rampant online, if they digest all information as if it were gospel, or if they get lost in a tangled web of indigestible hypertext, viruses and dysfunctional servers, then the universities will be wasting their money. The information age is fast producing a new elite, based not on color, race, lineage or nationality, but on the ability to understand, manipulate, and control cyberspace. However, there is no reason why we cannot use this technology successfully if we do not let it become the mindless "massage" that television was and still is. A skillful synthesis of cyberspace, meatspace, and deepspace can enhance higher education only if academic freedom is not stultified by administrative regulations, compromised by consumerism, threatened by reactionary colleagues, or molded into assembly-line courseware.
I am defining academic "freedom" as the autonomy and power of the intellectual community of professors, researchers and students to investigate dangerous ideas, express unpopular theories, pursue wild flights of the imagination, take chances, and go off on solitary tangents if need be, in order to acquire, understand and use knowledge creatively. The goals of the organic professor on the inorganic net are to bring some knowledge to the information as the traditional learned professor, to keep the meat alive in cyberspace as the boot camp sergeant, to encourage communication as the group leader/facilitator of the conventional classroom in the round as well as cyberforums and chat rooms, to help students surf the net without drowning as the e-mail tutor, web designer and hypertext scaffolder, and to make sure individual creativity is not neglected in the cluttered, busy bustle of cyberspace as the deepspace therapist. It is important that our minds don't emigrate "out there" so that there is nothing left "in here."
Like any good drug, cyberspace requires antidotes. As a professor, my antidotes are a theatrical classroom that reactivates the biological body through lively debate, performance, acting and physical exercises; library aerobics that combine step aerobics with bookshelf browsing, a book in hand, and the traditions of the past; and face-to-face individual conferences where I help students find their own paths through the endless highways of cyberspace, organize their ideas and train their mindbody in traditional techniques from meatspace, and encourage them to face the unpredictable, often fearful, eruptions of the unconscious as creativity is given expression in deepspace. Combining technology with face to face contact is essential for getting the best education possible. Information can so easily be accessed electronically that teaching should focus more on the organism that does the accesssing: the human brain.
Education means intelligence training and development, not just accumulation of information or acquisition of a specific skill. Intelligence is a creative use of cognitive process, domain and structure. Process is characterised by activating the imagination, gathering insights, goal formation, research, strategizing, tactics, creativity and implementation. Everyone has a different optimal process so that while methodologies should be learned and applied, there is no one formula that is good for all. Cognitive research into the six domains of intelligence, linguistic, visual/spatial, kinesthetic, rhythmic/musical, personal and logical/mathematical, reveal that by favoring left brain functions, the Western university has not only limited cognitive activity but excluded a lot of people, especially those whose domain is kinesthetic or rhythmic/musical. Education has never really addressed the structure of the brain and the impact of neurophysiology on learning until recently with cognitive neuroscience. Diet, exercise, stress and sleep alter the efficiency of synpatic firing.(Howard, 1994) That is why we can't let our bodies disintegrate as our minds soar through cyberspace. Humans have been around for thousands of years. When will we learn to use more than 10% of our brain? Education has been struggling with this dilemma for centuries.
First of all I want to distinguish between "conventional" and "traditional" education. Conventional is different from traditional because it doesn't necessarily have a past. It connotes the customary, the unexceptional, the conformist, the average. We see a circle with the corners rubbed off, the elite mowed down with consensus and collaboration. Traditional is also conformist, but hierarchical, based on the synonyms "historical," "time-honored," "long-standing," and "legendary." It has roots in religion, whereas conventional is rooted in society and politics. Both are used sloppily. Both have good and bad sides. I am defining traditional as the European-style education where the Professor was God, his voice booming through an amphitheatre as silent students sat in rows and diligently took notes. Traditional education was based on the transference of knowledge that the Professor had taken years to accumulate. The students were supposed to learn this knowledge by memorizing quickly and taking exams at the end of the semester. They learned critical techniques slowly, only after careful reading and understanding. After they had mastered a certain body of knowledge they were then encouraged to develop their own ideas. When I got a Master's equivalent at the Sorbonne in Paris, I was exposed to this type of traditional education in its later stages. We had the Professor God who mumbled through pages of notes in the glorious medieval and Renaissance frescos of the amphitheatre, oblivious of his silent students. However at the end of the semester, if we didn't come up with brilliant interpretations of our own as well as accurate accumulation of knowledge, we failed the final exams. The advantage of this education is that it develops discipline, focus, and eventually good critical skills. Fortunately I was able to do exciting, independent research on my thesis and still meet the high standards prescribed by centuries of traditional teaching, but many people floundered. The negative effects of traditional education occur when half the class fails because there is no attempt to change information to appeal to different cognitive processes. Traditional education can eventually be boring for the professor as well if she never acknowledges learning anything from her students.
Americans molded traditional European education with textbooks, Coles notes and other devices to simplify knowledge and developed a more interpersonal approach where professors were often parental, sometimes even spoon feeding students. Eventually even this type of adaptation was considered elitist, patronizing and undemocratic. What I call conventional education began in the sixties and seventies and is symbolized by the circle, where professors and students are equal. No one in my department conducts traditional lecture hall education. We are taught to place the student at the center of the activity, to make circles where we are just another chair, to give workshops rather than lectures, to encourage peer evaluation, small group presentations, and even student's self-assessment in terms of grades. A noble idea to be politically correct and give equal voice to all, conventional education can also be a bastion of conformity, guided by consumerism and middlebrowism, often governed by popularity contests as teachers struggle to please students to get good evaluations. No one ever passed out evaluation forms at the Sorbonne when I was there. The deleterious effects of a conventional classroom gone bad can be seen either when the teacher loses control in a room infested with drugs and guns or when conformity and consumerism take over to such a degree that a dumbing down occurs to please customers that are always right. Fortunately conventional education is more creative than conformist in my department at NYU because of the wise leadership of my chair, Ruth Danon. While encouraging equality, collaboration and group process, she is always ready to explore new approaches that enhance creativity.
Traditional education is based on Aristotle, the brilliant, anal-retentive classifier who defined and organized everything, the empiricist who said all objects begin with their end and fulfill their potential best by conforming to their nature; Aristotle, the exponent of the Golden Mean, who saw the dramatic catharsis as a way for society to burn out stress and frustration, at least temporarily; who said that everyone should specialize in something and yet ironically took on every discipline from poetry to ethics to law and government to physical science. Although his politics is abhorred by the cultural left and his poetics disdained by the non linear avant-garde, Aristotle's search for order and truth, his relentless categorization and methodical empirical observation and his brilliant development and use of syntax are qualities I want my students to emulate. We are living in a syntactically-challenged age. Aristotle's logic is based on linguistic syntax, a language that organizes life into nouns, verbs and objects to reflect the human struggle for dominion, control and conquest. This isn't the only language but it's a powerful tool for argumentation, empirical observation, critical analysis: the weight-lifting components of cognition. As Americans let go of traditional education and embraced the massage of mindless television, they also lost their ability to write complex, grammatically correct sentences. With this literacy problem came the accompanying rhetorical deficiency; they were no longer able to sustain long chains of reasoning and became vulnerable to the logical fallacies of advertising slogans. In spite of Aristotle's feelings about women and slaves, his thinking, especially that property-owners should rule, is still the basis of meatspace America where we still love most what we own.
In my table (keep scrolling), these cognitive activities, along with the kind of physiological training we get at the health club, make up the best of meatspace, that should be included as much as possible in our well-rounded education of the twenty first century. I always bring Aristotle to the lab along with my materials for web design so I have something to read when the computer crashes. There can be problems when Aristotelian-trained professors venture into cyberspace if they have not developed sufficient cognitive flexibility. Learning to convert a syllabus to html with Dreamweaver or BBEdit and to jazz up linear lectures with Adobe Photoshop are the least of the problems. Professors must embrace a different rhetoric that goes with the language of hypertext; they must learn the symbolic value of images that accompany their words; they must learn to navigate through the nonlinear world of hypertext without being frustrated or threatened; they must understand the difference between Aristotelian logic based on linguistic syntax, and Boolean logic based on algebraic structure; and they must venture outside out their specialty not only to learn about other disciplines but to really understand different paradigms and cognitive processes, domains and structures. They need to move more fluidly from inductive to deductive thinking, almost like an accordion that opens up and narrows down to play music. American research in the latter half of the century has been increasingly reductionist, inductive and specialized as commercial ventures taint the process with vested interest. This happened way before the internet appeared. In American conventional learning-centered education, the teacher is told to say, "what are they going to do?" instead of "what am I going to say?", a technique that fosters excellent problem-solving but may limit the ability to engage in the abstract thinking necessary to use Boolean logic or develop deductive hypotheses. We need to combine traditional European deductive thinking with the best of American conventional inductive research and the new cyberrhetoric to develop the best research strategies for education in the twenty first century.
The computer conducts advanced searches based on intersecting circles of AND, OR, and NOT, from Boolean logic. This requires an ability to visualize abstract concepts and how areas meet, join or complement each other. Those professors who have spent most of their lives in a specific department, writing articles in the same style for the same journal, attending the same conferences where the same leaders rule, may have trouble with the sea of Boolean logic where disciplines meet, join and complement each other like hungry amoeba. Multidisciplinary learning is not an excuse for shattered focus or attention deficit disorder or consistently superficial thinking, but a way to individualize and consolidate interests, to be more original and to deepen understanding with flexible mental gymnastics. In the applications section, I will discuss how I use elementary Boolean logic to structure multi-disciplinary courses such as Humans AND Nature, Lovers AND other Monsters, Heaven OR Hell, Language AND the Body. As the semester progresses, we are constantly limiting pathways by deciding what we are NOT doing. Multi-disciplinary fields can only be understood by incorporating translogical processes such as homospatial/temporal (superimposition) and janusian thinking (a and not-a are both true) which I am including as part of deepspace.
I am defining "deepspace" as those cognitive activities that blend with the unconscious, our sea of dreams and repressed emotions, that contribute most to our creativity. Creativity skills include a cognitive style that is willing and able to break perceptual sets, be comfortable with complexity, hold options open and not push for closure (like hypertext), suspend judgement of good and bad, be comfortable with wider categories and see things differently from others, which often demands courage and an ability to withstand rejection, criticism and loneliness. The biology of creativity probably relates to higher acetylcholine, calpain and C-kinase levels with a high degree of complexity in synaptic connections and a thicker corpus callosum.(Howard, 1994) Creativity is also a function of theta waves, which is why altered states of consciousness might be useful to explore inside and outside the classroom. In my classes I often use hypnosis, meditation, music and/or yoga before a writing exercise. The seething furnace of the unconscious, the amoral, "opposite truths are both true" world of Janusian thinking, the jumbled timespace matrix of homospatial and homotemporal structuring, and the multivalence of "fuzzy" logic are all part of the cognitive activities of deepspace. Homospatial or homotemporal structuring occurs when two or more discrete objects occupy the same space or time. (Rothenberg, 1996) Our brains engage in homospatial patterning naturally when we use metaphor. Our dreams are filled with homospatial and homotemporal structures where the past, present and potential overlap and ignite our unconscious. However, classical physics tells us that no two objects can occupy the same space. (Photo credit: Jim Willis, Daily News photo illustration, February 23, 1998.) In thie above homospatial photo we see Kenneth Starr superimposed over the White House. The image connotes the "Starr-gazing" power Starr has in his witchhunt against President Clinton, but we know that in reality he doesn't fly over the White House. I once wrote a personal essay about artistic growth based on the homospatial image of pointe shoes over words over dead fish in the Citarella shop window. In order to get rid of stage fright or writer's block, artists should work with words and movements as simply as the fish man creates beautiful new patterns of dead fish on ice every morning. He never gets fish fright. Excellent examples of homospatial photos taken by my students Albert Lung and Michael Gatlin can be seen on my home page and in some of the Language and the Body and TimeSpace Structures sites.
CYBERSPACE MEATSPACE DEEPSPACE Boolean logic Aristotelian logos Translogical Based on algebraic structure Based on syntax Based on the unconscious Intersecting circles of AND, OR, NOT, XOR, XNOR, NOR, NAND Inductive and deductive syllogisms Dreams, repressed desires, uncontrollable emotions Truth is binary, 0s and 1s, depending on input and ouput Truth is valid in a deductive syllogism or probable in induction Truth is amoral in the unconscious
or Dionysian bursts of creativity
Right and left brain coordination, still stimulated by visual sense Predominantly left-brain thinking Memory stimulated by all senses, limbic system, forebrain etc. Finding the path where a kaleidoscope of disciplines intersect as visualized in Boolean circles Specializing in and exhausting one discipline at a time Chaos, chance, unpredictable combinations of thought, emotion and memory Carving out a specific path in a fluid matrix of hypertext Defending one point of view with a strong thesis and argument Janusian processes of looking in opposite directions at the same time Invisible but quantifiable presence Visible and empirical presence Invisible, intangible but disturbing presence Nonlinear use of space driven by asynchronous time Unities of separate space and time with a beginning, middle and end Homospatial and homotemporal structuring where two or more discrete objects occupy the same space or time Mind NOT body Mindbody Bodymind Brain gym: train focus and speed, know when to set boundaries and limits to avoid cyber addiction Brain gym: train strength and posture for dialectics; endurance is related to longevity and physical health
Brain gym: Train cognitive flexibility and coordination to see different points of view, to be creative; endurance is related to courage in the face of the abyss Computer crashes False sense of security or error, i.e. "the world is flat," based on empirical observation Psychosis, madness, stress Hypertext, words and graphics with no page numbers... click all over the place...follow by association and interest Complex sentences grow organically into paragraphs which progress to develop argument to a conclusion...close linear reading All senses used to create something that was not there before Keefer courses focused on Boolean paradigm: Humans and Nature, Language and the Body, Time and Space Keefer course focused on classical paradigm: Heaven or Hell Keefer courses focused on tapping into Deepspace: Lovers and other Monsters, Language and the Body
In the February, 1998 edition of The Monthly Review,David F. Noble writes: "... a new era of higher education has dawned. In ten years, we will look upon the wired remains of our once great democratic, higher education system and wonder how we let it happen."(Noble 52) He foresees the demise of this noble system as follows:
Once faculty put their course material online, moreover, the knowledge and course design skill embodied in that material is taken out of their possession, transferred to the machinery, and placed in the hands of the administration. The administration is now in a position tohire less-skilled, and hence cheaper, workers to deliver the technologically pre-packaged course. It allows the administration, which claims ownership of this commodity, to peddle the course elsewhere without the original designer's involvement or even knowledge, much less financial interest. The buyers of this packaged commodity, meanwhile, other academic institutions, are able thereby to contract out, and hence outsource, the work of their employees and thus reduce their reliance upon their own in-house teaching staff. (Noble 47)
My experience with web design has been the most liberating, creative, autonomous thing I've ever done within the confines of the academic community. However, laws should be made to protect web sites. Even though a publishing company buys, packages and distributes a book, the author has the rights to the book and nothing can be done without her permission. This should be so with web design. From 1996 to the present (1998), I have put all my courses online and love every minute of it. It's an ever-changing, 24 hour performance art show with a built-in, unpredictable, global audience. It makes the scheduling, details and housework of teaching more efficient. It provides a terrific continuity between semesters, a collaborative patchwork quilt that allows the subject to grow, expand and change with input and output. Multi-disciplinary teaching becomes easier and more effective; core material can be easily summarized and displayed; and individual paths followed with the click of a finger. The internet also allows us to connect with similar courses all over the world, to supplement libary books with up-to-minute research, and to publish as fast as they can think. It gives us the opportunity to develop right and left brain functions equally as we type with both hands, click images and icons, listen to sounds, receive and think and create simultaneously. We can incorporate Boolean logic with Aristotelian logos, linear reading with a non-linear spatial orientation. To be intellectual on the web our brains must be able to perform the pirouettes and grande allegro of ballet dancing. E-mail combines the speed of the telephone with the potential for another age of great epistolary literature. Students have sent me e-mail that is more well-written, provocative and insightful than their term papers!
My students are multiracial, multicultural and multinational and range in age from 20 to 50. Many speak multiple languages and all have interesting life experience ranging from running a tanning salon to a computer company, performing and making films to working for hospitals or corporations. Some are well-read and some never read. Although these classes are not remedial, many still need work on grammar, while others are fluid, accomplished writers. No one has written a full-length college research paper before and only a few have designed a web site. They are going for undergraduate degrees in the humanities, social sciences, health science and business
In the summer of 1996, I designed my first web site Language and the Body in a kind of spontaneous combustion, after having just learned to turn on my laptop computer. I had only surfed the net once and had never seen any other sites. I brought pictures to be scanned, and filled the pages with provocative questions, symbolic images and colors, and interactive projects. I knew about Boolean logic from the library databases and decided to use its principles to structure my intersecting circles. Fortunately the staff at NYU's academic computing facility was very helpful, partly because I knew what I wanted and had a feel for cyber-rhetoric before I had even learned the technology. My students immediately caught on and filled the pages with poetry, photographs, primary source research in the form of interviews, and even a CHAOS site which features Michael Gatlin's brilliant poetry. Their non linear talents exceeded mine. They were very daring with field work, getting interviews from inmates and corrections officers on Rikers Island for research on the Muslim religion as a rehabilitative force, from Gloria Steinem, during a red eye flight, on the difference between American and French feminism, and from a few victims of clitorectomies, they found in housing projects, for an anthropological study. As they engage in these controversial projects, I never force students to publish online. One of my students was a sheriff who worked on high profile criminal cases. While he gave fascinating classroom presentations on the FBI's use of nonverbal communication strategies and his own experience making house arrests, he refused to have anything to do with the internet for security reasons. Obviously his privacy was respected and he still got an A.
The next course I designed was Heaven OR Hell because I wanted to make the classics sexy. This was the theme for a Writing Workshop II class where students rarely read more than one or two books together before they go off on their own research projects. In my class they read Sartre, Camus, Plato, Dante, the Bible, and Blake, only because they kept asking for more. Obviously they did not thoroughly analyse each of these writers, but they developed more intellectual curiosity, attained greater skill at abstract thinking, and produced longer, better written final papers on their own research than in the exclusively meatspace classroom. The pressure of online publication inspired them to work harder. The OR widens the scope of core material to include both heaven and hell but most students researched the hell of specific nursing homes, hospitals, homeless shelters, advertising agencies, corporations, etc. with only wistful proposals of how to turn the hell into a heaven. The significant enhancement in this course was the amount of complex, intellectual material read.
The Lovers AND other Monsters course was actually a Writing Workshop I level where students generally do very short papers and little or no research. I devised this course in part as a way to help students get in touch with the tumultuous seas of deepspace, to develop creativity so that they would be turned on by writing before they were subjected to the rigors of academic styles. In addition to a substantial reading list of books like Perfume, The Natural History of Love, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, they wrote a ten page research paper on a related subject of their choice and designed mini web sites, featuring creative writing, graphics and primary source research from their webfolios. I was aided by a hard-working, accomplished student, Michael Harkins, who owns his own computer company. In this course, the students developed an obsession with writing poetry because I said that every time they submitted a poem, I would put Excellent on it and say nothing. Every week my desk was filled with poetry. One of my students, Hope DeVenuto, who had never written a poem before in her life, won a poetry competition.
In the course Humans AND Nature, I wanted to experiment more with the multidisciplinary nature of Boolean logic. This is a Writing Workshop II class where students have never written a term paper before. After identifying the basic problems inherent in the interaction between humans and the environment by reading various philosophical books, socio-economic articles as well as nature poetry, I broke the class into three sub-groups so that the humanities majors could analyse the effect of the environment on communication between humans through a close textual analysis in literature, media studies, philosophy and/or history; the business and economic majors could focus on the debate between environmental preservation activists and economic developers through field work as well as secondary sources; and the health science majors could investigate how the environment contributes to disease through field work, empirical observation and review of medical literature. Within these sub-groups there was further division so that the afternoon health science section focused on physical and mental PAIN caused by the environment while the morning section organized a debate between traditional and homeopathic remedies for specific diseases. We discussed the different styles, strategies and paradigms of each major. After group presentations, students then began working on individual research projects limited to a specific place and time. The purpose of this course was to explore different research strategies. At first the students were overwhelmed and had headaches from the amount of abstract thinking that was required, but then they were invigorated by the promise of a cyberperformance where their webfolios would be displayed on the large screen, accompanied by oral presentations, for friends, family and other members of the division.
My present teaching strategy, although it is ever-changing, is to start in the traditional mode behind a desk in front of the classroom, reinforced by the blackboard, the linear rows of chairs pointing forward, and the huge table upon which students deposit three assignments every week: traditional linear expository writing on assigned readings, creative nonlinear webfolio projects, and the progress report on their solo and/or group research. My goals are to instill discipline and focus the class so they get less distracted in cyberspace. I begin every class (for the first four weeks) with in-class writing brain gym exercises to develop cognitive strength, endurance, coordination, focus, flexibility, speed and posture.
Strength Endurance Coordination Focus Flexibility Speed Posture The ability to identify, analyse, excamine and lift a thought and defend its meaning against the resistance of argumentation. This skill is best developed through Aristotelian rhetoric. Mental endurance is required to sustain intellectual activity against boredom, lethargy, frustration, hyperactivity, overstimulation. Coordination is the organization of parts into an efficient, working whole, which involves changes in speed, dynamics, resistance, spatial patterning and points of view. Focus is the ability to concentrate on one idea to the exclusion of others. A dancer focuses on a spot on the wall when executing pirouettes, a useful cognitive application when surfing.
Flexibility is the ability to see all sides of an issue, exceeding the limits of dogma, fear, and prejudice. Because of the vast amount of information we must get through, it is important to develop speed. Aerobic training can help increase our ability to read, write and think quickly. Posture refers to the body's alignment in relation to gravity, space and motion. Mental posture establishes voice or presence.
While they are working out in the brain gym, I read and mark all the papers, and when we are finished, I give an old-fashioned lecture. Then we have a debate or performance, break into small groups for discussion, or go to the library for browsing aerobics, or the computer lab for internet research and web design. I hold individual conferences in my office after every class and communicate with students by e-mail. I believe in individual attention and encourage students to create some silence and solitude around themselves so they can hear their own voice in the media frenzy. By the middle of the semester, the classroom is a circle and I move from group to group, listening to discussions and presentations. Then each student takes over the classroom to give an oral presentation of their research. At the cyberperformance at the end of the semester when cyberspace, meatspace and deepspace come together, it is hard to tell who the professor is.
Strong political action is needed to ensure the integrity of the course material of qualified professors, copyrright of individual web sites, free, uncensored experimentation and development of knowledge, and salaries commensurate with hours worked and production achieved so that we don't continue to be the underpaid, overworked intellectual factory workers of the twenty first century. The conventional classroom must be flexible enough to be turned into a meditation room, a gym, a traditional lecture hall, a circular conference room, a computer lab, a library, the global community and back to the individual brain using both synchronous and asynchronous models of learning. Experimental scientific study using CAT, PET, and other technologies to measure brain activity during the cognitive activities outlined in the meatspace, deepspace and cyberspace table should be combined with rigorous empirical documentation of the results of different educational styles and strategies to prove how we can enhance higher education, but subjective, creative methodologies should also be tolerated. Education in the twenty first century is a billion dollar business and in a capitalist economy it is understandable that the corporations will subsidize internet education to a large degree. They are already preparing their takeover with a marketing campaign that stresses "learning centered-education," a concept developed with conventional education in the sixties but now made more enticing with the prospect of capital gain from all the courseware, educational maintenance and technological consulting such "learning" will entail.(The Learning Revolution,1998)
The corporate mentality of the eighties is a threat to academic freedom as are their plans to downsize the university, flatten the hierarchy, and develop models of collaboration and teamwork that turn everyone into corporate clones. However, some corporations are now becoming more open to creativity than the universities. On the other hand, if professors do not take a more active interest in the internet and its rhetoric and design unique web sites that can't be standardized, they will contribute to their own downfall. Educators, business and political leaders must work together to make sure quality education is not compromised too much by greed, ignorance, fear or laziness, or Noble's dire prediction may come true.
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