Wow! That’s quite a eulogy. Thanks for sharing.
Reading through your reflections on how Nelson’s objections to CAI and the Computer Priesthood have proven all too prescient (with computers often becoming tools for perpetuating, rather than challenging, the overly-constricted educational structures he deplored — I wonder whether one of Nelson’s mistakes was to imagine computers and all they make possible as a means of presenting information *to* students (however appealingly, and with whatever degree of choice in the path/sequence) rather than imagining them as tools students could use to create themselves.
It seems to me, at least from my disciplinary perspective (the teaching of writing) that one of the best ways to challenge the ongoing (and it certainly feels like increasing) forces of standardization and homogenization is to insist that really good activities and assignments — the ones from which students learn transferrable skills like critical thinking — are ones that evoke unpredictable responses from students (and so must receive feedback, and, if necessary, a grade, from an actual human being — preferably the same one who wrote, and will periodically revise, the assignment). Even in such situations, there’s a certain amount of balancing order (explicit requirements, timelines, directions, etc.) and chaos/unpredictability (what topics will students pick? what potential sources will they find? what will they make of them?), but it’s definitely very different from a curriculum so structured that an algorithm, or at least a human being with only brief training, can provide responses that keep the student “on track.”
