Reviews for Advanced Teaching Methods for the Technology Classroom

The average rating for Advanced Teaching Methods for the Technology Classroom based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-28 00:00:00 David Hester TREAD CAREFULLY into this review: it's possible that the only thing that would be a bigger waste of your time would be to read the book that prompted it. Or maybe watching paint dry. Welp, I fell for it. I got suckered into reading an entire book by the enemy. "Against Technology" is a smear job. It's a Trojan Horse. It's a professional hit by someone who isn't remotely against technology, despite some sophisticated rhetorical flourishes obliquely commenting on the many and varied critiques thereof, collapsing them into a mish-mash of pronouncements by the author on people he clearly considers ideological adversaries (though without admitting it), whom he hardly bothers to quote (or quote in context) at all. I suppose we are just supposed to take Steven E. Jones' word for it. The fact of this book's title emblazoned in off-kilter, edgy typeface across a cover image of a damaged computer keyboard with the subtext "From Luddites to Neo-Luddism" really reeled me in. The subject matter is fascinating. A lot of the research could have been presented in an equally fascinating way, and it was this raw material that kept me reading and wincing through 232 agonizing pages. It turns out that there's a reason that I haven't heard of this book which came out 12 years ago, in 2006, even though I track things like the release of books by major publishing houses with titles like "Against Technology." I haven't heard of it because it's fake-deep, professorial navel-gazing trash and tech-apologism, and all the real ones probably know it. Don't get me wrong: you might like it if you have a penchant for standing downhill from a landslide of pedantic, fussy (bordering on obsessive), middle class, liberal collegiate pap of no fucking consequence whatsoever. I was going to lead off by saying something like, "Steven E. Jones has obviously very little actual interest in his subject and even less of a stake in the matters at hand" but after a moment's rumination I'd rather say: this book is Steven E. Jones' calculated intervention into the discourses surrounding critiques of technology, capitalism, and civilization, and his intervention is calculated to discredit the loose collection of writers, activists, terrorists, and other recalcitrants that he has identified as Neo-Luddites. I have been assured by my reading experience that if the shit went down on a corner near Steven E. Jones, the fussy professor would be found on the shit side of the barricades, trembling with glass of wine in hand. This book may as well have been called NEO-LUDDISM IS NOT THE SAME EXACT THING AS LUDDISM, SO THERE! with the subtitle, "why you shouldn't listen to or support anyone who references some aspect of history (in this case Luddism) if they (those fucking Neo-Luddites) don't represent all of the same exact things (and not one thing besides!) that the inspirational episode in question has indicated!" Or maybe it could have been called PRETTY MUCH FOR TECHNOLOGY. Or better yet: I AM SO SMART: I'M SO GLAD I ACTUALLY GET PAID TO WRITE THIS HOPELESSLY SAFE TRIPE. On that topic, the back cover of this book includes a review by someone named Jay Clayton (author of a real brain buster, I'm sure, called "Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture") which starts off, "This is a wonderfully sane and engaging book..." And yes, in this case, a "wonderfully sane" book is just what it sounds like: excruciatingly boring and not a threat to a single one of the dominating social realities that we face. I can picture Jones' handler at Routledge being all like, "Oh yeah... this is great copy, Jones. GREAT copy." Seriously though, every couple of pages Jones returns to lash his dead horse, usually couching his arguments in typically post-modern language about the constructedness of any and all narratives, about how nothing is quite real except for texts and their interpretations (unless it's the "Neo-Luddite" interpretation...as rendered by Jones), a premise that could, in my view, plausibly be re-stated as "nothing is real but Power." Some of the ironies of this book: Jones insisting that subjective re-interpretation is the very essence of culture but simultaneously, specifically, and seemingly on principle denying the privilege of such to "Neo-Luddites" who only display their folly in finding inspiration in the Luddite uprising; and the fact that no Neo-Luddite or critic of technology (or whatever) that I know of is even remotely unaware of the limitations involved in referencing the Luddite uprisings of 1811-1812 and 1816-1817. None of them is even remotely unaware that the monsters we face require more nuance than simply declaring oneself to be "against technology" and leaving it at that. None of them is unaware of the constructedness of narratives. Even though somewhere near the end of this book, Jones claims to have adduced example after example of how Neo-Luddites have been selective, romanticizing, vague, abstract, and just plain wrong in both their understanding of the original Luddites and in their analyses of current "technology," Jones doesn't actually see fit to do more than throw 4 or 5 semi- or un-substantial quotes by avowed Neo-Luddites into a book that is otherwise a parade of inane references to Romantic and Victorian era literature and other products from the yawn factory. Another irony is that in this meta-study, you could literally write the names of every one of Jones' source materials on a wheel of fortune, give that bitch a spin, and read WHICHEVER work it landed on and NOT the present one, and your efforts would be more richly and deeply rewarded. To hear this clown spew it, you'd think that Jerry Mander, Chellis Glendinning, Edward Abbey, John Zerzan, or Kirkpatrick Sale– Sale being the author of "Rebels Against the Future," one of the best books on Luddite History and Jones' own Exhibit A in the alleged pageant of Neo-Luddite naivete and manipulation– have nothing much of value to say. That's funny because each of them has much more insightful things to say about the topics that this book supposedly addresses. Jones even spells Chellis Glendinning's name wrong ("Glendenning") EVERY SINGLE TIME that it appears in the book. Pretty sloppy mistake for a book that is the most sheerly academic pile of up-its-own-ass crap I've put myself through the effort of slogging through in years. Don't get me wrong: I love a good academic-style read. Dense research with many footnotes does not deter me, and getting through a book by Silvia Federici, Roger Griffin, or John Zerzan is not necessarily any easy feat. But the foregoing writers are, to my mind, subversive presences on at least some levels. The same cannot be said for the good counter-insurgent professor. I was going to type out several from dozens of possible quotes from this flaming wreck of literary cat feces, but then i was like, "Eh, fuck it." It's not that Steven E. Jones journalistic romp through the collective mind of the Cultural Studies Department break lounge isn't worth the effort to destroy thoroughly and utterly. It's that I have work early tomorrow, and honestly I'm stoked to never think about this book ever again. I'm probably going to use it as kindling for my fireplace unless I wake up with the urge to really extract some citations to skewer this shithead's rampant self-contradiction and unearned haughtiness. One (small) example (among the myriad) is that Jones repeatedly defines Luddites explicitly as a "labor subculture" by way of contrasting them with the current and surely less authentic Neo-Luddite subculture. But when Jones finally quotes a brief statement by an eco-sabotaging Neo-Luddistic outfit which references the machine-smashing of the Luddites as a way for them to attempt to protect their livelihoods and "their culture," Jones lambasts them for even thinking that Luddites were trying to protect a culture (even though they were) and for projecting their own confused, effete, cultural battle onto his pet subject. Give me a fucking break. How much more transparently self-serving and manipulatively inconsistent can you be? Besides the subject being generally interesting to me, I picked up this book because it's October, I love Halloween, and this book has a whole chapter about Frankenstein as the "first Luddite novel," but Jones' treatment of it was enough to make me almost want to gag, and to actually burst out laughing at a few points and take the book into the next room to read to my housemates so they could see how terrible. Suffice to say that the majority of my penciled notes in the margins say things like "lol," "wtf," "what the actual FUCK," "how do Neo-Luddites do that?," "NO," "slow clap," "No they don't," "smh," and on and on, ad nauseum. I'll wind down by saying that the last chapter, "Ned Ludd in the Age of Terror," sees Jones finally unclenching his sphincter after a formidable 200-page effort at appearing the dispassionate post-modern judge of authenticity and at last lets just a little bit loose with the aspersions and insults. Laughably, after submitting his token moral outrage that any liberal commentator could ever find the Unabomber a sympathetic or reasonable figure in any way, on any level, he describes Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future" firstly as a piece of "Libertarianism" (in the contemporary US and not the anarchist sense) and then also as "rambling." LMAO. Quick, someone tell Jones to maybe give the thing a read real quick and understand the impetus behind THE most common pronouncement on the style of argumentation found therein... which is that the essay is eminently rational, measured, and cogent (perhaps even creepily so). The one thing that everyone knows about the Unabomber Manifesto is that it, emphatically, does not ramble. It certainly has a few instances of reprehensible transphobia gleaned from some of Ted's shitty social views. But Libertarian and rambling it is not. This last bit alone would be sufficient for me to stop listening to someone as woefully out of touch with the words flying out of their mouth. This book is chock full of such pronouncements. It's not that he never has a valid point. It's that he fucking kills it on arrival. As Jones casts out oh so many babies with the bath water– the historiography of Kirkpatrick Sale, the expositions on the effects of technology and on the domination of indigenous cultures by Jerry Mander, Glendinning's ideas about a "primal matrix" and her intense and crucial reportage on mass poisonings from chemicals and radiations, and John Zerzan's early labor histories and philosophical ruminations on the origins of social domination and eco-catastrophe– all head in the sand bullshit to Jones. Anyway, I recommend you read "Rebels Against the Future" by Kirkpatrick Sale, or "Who Killed Ned Ludd" by Zerzan, or anything by Glendinning or Mander or any of Jones' other targets before you bother throwing precious moments of your life away on this bitter-ass, kitsch-y side swipe against Jones' mildly more Luddistic co-faculty or whatever. I'd go on, but i wouldn't be surprised to find out that Steven E. Jones' next book is called "A History of Wicker Baskets in the Romantic Era" or some equally Mickey Mouse bullshit. Whether I burn this book or keep it around as an artifact of the asinine, I hereby challenge Stephen E. Jones to a public debate about the nature and meaning of technique, technology, tools, Luddites, civilization, labor upheavals, or what the fuck ever he wants to spar about. I could think and write circles around this fool. Steven, if you're reading this and you don't want to debate, then please consider accepting my challenge to a formal duel. Or give my asshole a tender tongue bath you fucking twit. I hate you. No stars for the shitstain. Sad!

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-11 00:00:00 Rachel Hausmann Some interesting bits, and his literary analyses are stronger than the attempts at cultural history. Jones is less interested in the Luddites than in their legacy. That is, how they've become mythologized and represented in popular culture -- from Romantic poetry to 1960s counterculture to contemporary anti-globalism movements. He makes some interesting points about the Luddites -- that they weren't simply anti-technology but more anti-capitalist-exploitation, and that they used modes of rather complicated symbolic representation (i.e. making up the leader "Ned Ludd," likening themselves to Robin Hood, and so on). And he reads against the grain, taking pieces that are most often interpreted as simply anti-technology (i.e. Frankenstein and William Blake’s poetry), arguing for more nuanced considerations of science, machinery, and technology.