Thursday, January 31, 2013
Friedman's hope: Ines and Daniel, ModPo people
Thomas Friedman's column on the MOOC phenomenon - a follow-up to an earlier piece he published last spring - expresses great optimism: "LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down,
but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful
about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online
higher education." He mentions ModPo without identifying it clearly, but Ines Cifuentes, a ModPo student, explains further in her comment in response to the Friedman article.
"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 
