In light of my recent  post on the Penn English class on “Wasting Time on the Internet,” Northwestern student Lucas Matney’s complaint that “Northwestern fails to offer 21st century academic experience” is timely:

From my personal experience thus far, very few of my professors have used technology in the classroom in a way that offers a radically changed educational experience. Administrators and individual professors need to ponder what a 21st century education really means if they desire the University to maintain relevance as an institution.

As I recently pointed out, Clay Shirky and Jesse Fox have recently made good arguments why the underlying assumptions here— that technology should disrupt the classroom, that the disruption will be good, and that good education should take place in an environment that is more like the world, not different from it— are wrong.