Cap’n Refsmmat’s Blog of Doom

Science is limited by what scientists are capable of measuring. Our understanding of reality can only reach as far as our best experiments. If you were to ask any physicist, they’d tell you that physics stops at what we can measure: beyond that, we reach metaphysics, the land of unfounded speculation about why physics works. It is literally impossible to ever test a hypothesis in metaphysics because, by definition, no experiment can enter the world of metaphysics.

Someone go tell that to an English professor.
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I think education needs to take a hint from the Internet. Peer-to-peer communication, using protocols like BitTorrent, forms a significant share of all of the traffic on the Internet. No longer is the Internet a simple client-server model — content can be shared from user to user.

How does that relate to education? Well, teaching has been client-server for a long time, with the “client” being your average student and the “server” being your average teacher. It’s a server-push system: the server pushes content to the client and hopes that it accepts and understands it correctly.

That’s kind of dumb.
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If you expect me to solve your computer problem, you will have to tell me more than “I tried to go to the website and it didn’t work.”

I’d rather like to know what exactly happened when you tried to go to the website and what error message, if any, you got. Error messages, after all, do have a point: they tell you what went wrong. That can be helpful.