The view from where I stand is this: The classes I took last semester mostly did not treat the issues I am most interested in studying in depth, or if they did, they basically satisfied my interest in their topic and I won't be heading that way again. Yet I was covering a very healthy range of subjects and using a variety of skills and resources to do so: Internet discussions, printed fiction, Java code examples, kids' software, video lectures, journal articles, philosophy, history (on the reading/input end), and debugging, adding to comment threads, writing case studies, developing concept webs, synthesizing a diverse range of theories (on the production/output end).

All of the classes I am taking this semester, by comparison, including my independent study, have something to do with media literacy, a major interest of mine. All of them, so far, are prescribing remarkably similar literature which spans the narrow range from sociology to cognitive science, covering scant more than psychology and theories of literature between those two areas.

Sadly, I am reading a lot of things which are basically textbooks, and it is very, very hard to get anything useful out of them. I take twenty minutes to reaad a page. I can feel the skimming abilities I developed last semester crumbling. I had been learning to look for important ideas which were new or difficult for me. Textbooks make that nearly impossible. Basically, I'm drinking from a firehose of literature reviews: rather than following the development of one theorist's idea through examples, I'm frogmarched through an overview of all of the ideas of a given field, ancient or recent, useful or discredited, important or peripheral. When someone in a field I don't know well is presenting all of this information to me I find it nearly impossible to think about which of the information is new or useful to me; I end up thinking, "Have to underline this, it is an idea this specialty talks about, all of these ideas are interrelated" As in high school, I end up with pages of underlined text, and feel like a goofus. It doesn't help at all that my cognitive science class is online, so there is no spoken lecture to connect to

You know what I'd rather do? Read the original goddamn literature, and find my own way around through literature reviews. Or talk to professors or grad students in the field, find out what ideas they are working on, relate them to my own ideas, ask what ideas inform theirs, and evaluate whether those informing ideas are worth cannibalizing to support my own ideas. I feel like I've learned a lot just from watching Roger's face when I get him to talk to me about various theorists, and watching for when he curls his lip. Ideas come from people, and how they relate to each other hinges and hangs on a social structure. That is where their power and their meaning comes from. The idea of semiotic domains -- domains of social meaning, as Gee defines them at least -- makes a lot of sense to me.

It seems totally ironic to me that these people who are writing about how people learn are completely unable to put their ideas to practice to effectively communicate the interrelations and importance of those ideas to me in a simple goddamn book.

Whoa. The next thought on my mind is "Where are their hyperlinks? Where is the wiki where I can add my own interpretation to help position an article?" As much as I think about the Internet I have generally not felt like it informs my learning style in such a fundamental way. I mean, there was no Net until I was like 14, and I just had my first Net-enhanced class last semester, in grad school, twelve years later. Chalk one up to the neurocog sorts who note that the brain continues to restructure as we grow...

Anyway. The imbalance of what I'm studying this semester is why it was dumb to not affix my independent to Frank in an official way. Were I working with him, it would be a pressure valve. He's a generalist and has a very holistic take on academic development. Should all of my synapses devoted to ideas about social sciences suddenly melt down (I feel it coming in T minus two weeks), I'd have room to take off in some new direction, maybe think about video game design or something. I mean, he says I can still come talk to him, but argh. Bad strategies, Andrews. Smart to think about new literacies with the professor whose focus is new literacies, but dumb to evade the generalist.

The story behind that is that I tend to spook out about people I don't see often who are very important to me. Same with Jacob. Film at 11. Um, 12. Put your media-critic-news-filter hat on.

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Another observation:

Amazon.com is better for finding books than the library is. It usually has what I want. Plus, if you are looking for the social life of a book, there is much richer information on it than there is in your library. TC's library especially. OMG I can't believe how little stuff they have on technology and TV, it's sick.