To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It’s All About Me – New York Times
I got here via Sarolta’s blog. It’s an article about the increasing number of emails students send to their college teachers, and the growing lack of deference (or even good sense) these messages reveal. As I scanned the article, I wasn’t particularly interested, as I rarely get emails from my students, and I would be glad to get more (tho the article pointed out a possible, unpleasant aspect to that state of affairs I hadn’t envisaged). But it was this paragraph that caught my attention:

Christopher J. Dede, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied technology in education, said these e-mail messages showed how students no longer deferred to their professors, perhaps because they realized that professors’ expertise could rapidly become outdated. “The deference was probably driven more by the notion that professors were infallible sources of deep knowledge,” Professor Dede said, and that notion has weakened.

. Naughty, naughty Internet! Naughty digital age!