Hillary Reinsberg, one of my advisees here at Penn and a fabulously snarky blogger and twitterer, is writing pieces now for The Huffington Post. Her first piece is about technology in the classroom. The power-point-aided lecture of today puts her to sleep. "While our parents' generation bemoans those pontificating figureheads of yesteryear, could today's PowerPoint-reliant professors be even worse?" Anyone who has read this blog's more or less constant campaign against the lecture will easily guess that I'm going to side with Hillary, although in my view she doesn't quite find the core of the problem. Giving an old-fashioned "oration" in lieu of PowerPoint slides is not really any better. The problem is that, given what new media enables us to do outside the classroom time and space, we are still using that precious site for set-piece talks (talkings-at) rather than real interaction, which is the mode in which people learn best. But I like Hillary's skeptical verve here and I'm proud to say that students don't fall asleep in my classroom (they can't; they're too edgily ready to talk next).Bruce Finsilver: "My favorite falling-asleep-in-class story from Penn: One morning as I was walking into a lecture, the students exiting the previous class were all ‘shushing’ us. I saw a poor guy sound asleep in the 5th row. Our lecturer walked in and began as usual. After about a half-hour, the sleeper woke up. We all watched as he tried to figure out where he was and what to do about it; should he sit out the rest of the lecture and pretend nothing was amiss, or should he just get up and leave? He finally stood up and marched out to general hysteria from the rest of us."
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
