Off-Topic, But speaking of video: Isn't my avatar hip? God, I wish I was more like Max Headroom in that picture.

On-Topic: It's a few days late, but I wanted to share this idea, as it just hit me: I finally understand what the "Luddite" was talking about in Tuesday's reading.

His argument started out sounding like BS. We should prevent computers and the Internet from reaching their full potential? You are a bad person. But my perspective should be expected, as I have 20-20 hindsight and the fact that I chose to be in this class means that I stand next to computers.

But what was he really saying? He was saying that types of computer work might become ostentatious; they might be an unnecessary expenditure of class resources and time (which is a resource) that do not add to what simple writing can achieve.

I couldn't even relate to such a thing. What would this largely useless medium look like? I think it would look like video.

Everyone knows that when we bring video into the classroom, it's to waste time. Or, in any case, time is wasted despite our efforts. We can talk about visual rhetoric, which is valuable, and get to the themes at work in movies and tv shows, but ultimately we're just making the students commentators on this phenomenon. They don't contribute to video production when they're watching Fahrenheit 9/11, they are just critiquing the argument (and possibly being snowed by an overzealously political professor).

And yet you could argue that video had a good chance of enhancing the classroom. The move towards TV in schools that I was witness to in the 90s, and the still common practice of showing video in class (discussed above) is a part of this. Yet I have never seen a wide-scale (read: students who were not film majors) initiative to have students contribute to video texts. If the Luddite had discussed video instead of computers, I think he would have a much stronger argument.

It's ironic, then, that this would change with the advent of recent computers. On Macs and PCs, students can create mashups, documentaries, or any other type of video document. This is a huge step, and I think it, along with the Luddite article, can remind us of our need to expand the how we use computers and how we get students involved, rather than simply marveling at them.