Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley December 27, 2010 Deadline February 2011 Issue Science at Home: DIY Labs and More Model rockets, a microscope, a telescope, motorized kits and various computers enabled my explorations of science and technology while growing up in the 1970s and 80s. During the 1990s, the popular television shows “Beakman’s World” and “Bill Nye the Science Guy ” built on the tradition of “Mr. Wizard.” These programs showed young people they didn’t have to wait for school science fairs to do something fantastic. The science projects were decidedly low-tech, using items like cardboard tubes and plastic soda bottles. Today’s amateur scientists can assemble a do-it-yourself lab rivaling any television show, a lab more like “C.S.I.” than the simple lab table of Mr. Wizard. And, as with any hobby, there are online communities dedicated to home science labs. Many of the participants in these groups are active in the homeschooling movement. Also, many of the people invol...

While working on the research for my dissertation, I have read page after page on writing pedagogy asserting that the goal of a university writing course should be to teach students that knowledge is socially constructed and that "truth" is relative to culture and community. The problem with this assertion is that students with autism and similar conditions (my scrambled brain, apparently), are not relativists. Various researchers (Wellcome 2008, Frith 2001) have found that individuals with these conditions are more logical, unaffected by emotional inputs or rhetorical framing. I've found quite a bit of research on this aspect of brain trauma and autism and am including these findings in my dissertation. If a group of people are "wired" to think there is a "truth" -- that knowledge is not created but discovered and then applied creatively -- who are educational theorists to consider such people "immature" or "simple-minded" in s...