I was waiting for Wade, the professor, to respond and break it down..

Obscure lists like this gets one to think outside "their" box.. which IMO is what education basis should be about.. and after going to colleges for over half a decade.. you rarely bump into a professor that gets "it".

"pack93z" wrote:

I definitely agree that most profs don't get "it," though.

I sometimes wonder if the best we can hope for from the big chunk of college faculties is their recognition that they don't and that it matters that they don't.

An awful lot of academics are doubly in denial: They deny that they don't get it. And they deny that getting it matters.

I'm not sure I agree about the relative unimportance of changes since 1950, zombie.

Yes, they tend to be primarily information-centered. And without the enabling that 1750-1950 offered, they wouldn't have had the shoulders of giants required to build upon.

But arguably the real revolution of 1750-1950 was not technology or resources/labor, it was knowledge and knowledge use. (Check out the work of Joel Mokyr sometime, especially his Gifts of Athena.) And arguably the changes of PC/Internet/Netscape/Google/cloud computing have been even more transforming.

Or perhaps the story lies somewhere else entirely. Which is why this term my students are going to look at something very different. I've always focused on technology and some other traditional topics (e.g. myths about the economics of slavery and imperialism). But I'm going well outside my comfort zone this term. -- We'll start with Thomas Friedman's World if Flat...then move backward. Still do the Industrial Revolution, but in large part as a way of connecting the "after" of today to the "before" history of trade and globalization between 1000 and 1750 A.D.

I'm really excited about the class, but I keep telling myself to be careful. I was really excited about the way I had the class set up last fall, too, and I laid an [strike]ostrich[/strike]dinosaur-sized egg.

"Wade" wrote: