I'm interested in rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy only insofar as they relate to synthesizing the best of modern technology and learning theory to create history's greatest school -- one that provides a world class college education dirt cheap to the whole world. But it has to be more than just a superb Ivy League education. The curriculum designed to serve the spoiled children of a wealthy elite is a good starting place so far as the humanities go, but a magnificent education today must include technology and all the practical skills that the university has virtually ignored: how to create wealth, what money really is and how to manage it, how to create rapport, how to choose a great mate, how to write and deliver a short compelling speech.

As it turns out, rhetoric, technology and pedagogy are central to such a purpose. It's incredible to me that academia continues to fail so spectacularly when it comes to teaching people what should be its central concern: how to write and think (virtually the same thing, in my view).

I'm convinced that all the elements required to create the first Third Millennium university are at hand. Some of the technology may still be too costly, e.g., the latent semantic analysis supporting automatic grading of freshman essays, but the crucial ingredients, the infrastructure for a robust, vigorous online community of learners and teachers is there as is moodle, texts from Project Gutenberg, lots of free resources like Purdue's OWL.

I believe that the central purpose of the new university should be to teach people how to write. I used to have a colleague with a sign on his door that said, "It's easy to teach people to write so long as you first teach them how to think." Ironically, at most universities where I've taught, the teaching of writing is largely left to graduate students. In what other industry is the most important function left to the least qualified?

Now that I think of it, I have not noticed that many of my colleagues were gifted, facile writers. They wrote very little. Hmmmm. Writers write. I'm forming an instant theory that the reason that universities have failed to fill their most important function is because that the professoriate are incompetent writers. If you can't do it, you can't teach it.

I also think that writing is the essential learning tool. If you cannot write a clear and concise digest of what you've read or heard, you bear a cruel learning handicap. If we could just teach everyone to write well, maybe they would be able to figure things out for themselves.

Best,
md