Paradigm Lost

Sound Bite

Technology has taken over higher education, and we not only allow but also encourage this. From Google to ChatGPT, technology threatens to sweep students into dependency and weakness in thinking and communicating. Vicki J. Sapp's book Paradigm Lost: Learning and Literacy in the Digital Divide helps educators, students, parents and the public to see the dangers and recognize possible remedies, in the effort to keep education human centered and strengthen it as the preserver of individual and cultural literacy—and freedom.Prof. Sapp provides a chronicle and critique of educators’ and students' efforts to “cross the Digital Divide” from print to digital paradigms. She especially reaches out to the mentors, the gatekeepers of education, to ask hard questions and find positive pathways in our capitulation to technology.

About the Book

Vicki Sapp's first motivation to write "Paradigm Lost: Learning and Literacy in the Digital Divide" comes from her perception that like herself, her colleagues were struggling, confused and overwhelmed by the changes in education attributable to the tech takeover. Here, she analyzes the challenges and promises that digital technology presents, aiding yet obstructing real learning. Along the way, drawing from both print and digital contexts, she gives concrete examples of ways to wake students up to the value of critical reading and writing.Technology enhances our ability to work with information inside and beyond the classroom, but at the same time, technology can block us from developing certain subtle yet profound and essential human capacities. This book examines techniques teachers and professors are using to to meet the needs of the new academic culture where the medium is now the principal message. As Prof. Sapp observes,The mass access, saturation and speed available through technology can reach, engage and inform more students than ever previously imagined—but at the potential cost of not only sacrificing intellectual rigor but also redefining education as instrument of capitalist indoctrination, antithetical to the humanist devotion to skepticism and critical analysis.Part of the book’s title reflects Milton’s famous epic of Satan’s war against God and mankind. While print literacy might not have been a “paradise,” it is a paradigm that we have lost as new digital applications, literacies and values are required by ever-changing technology.Prof. Sapp draws heavily from her own authority of experience “crossing the divide”; she brings in scholarship, literature review, literary analysis, her students’ perspectives and even fiction to cover the layers and argument angles of this major paradigm shift.Those who cannot forgive the author for the chapter attacking Ted Talks might yet elsewhere in the book find appeal to their experience, ideas and concerns about the new digital literacy and culture. Her chapter “Tea with a Demon” delves (to use Chat’s #1 word) into AI’s and ChatGPT’s assault on education as we have previously practiced it; instructors’ epic battle against the demon-bot’s conquest of their classrooms is surely worthy of, if not quite a Milton, at least a chronicler and champion.Sapp notes, "I am especially attracted to Heidegger’s most careful definition of what “technology” actually is, fundamentally. Not the latest invention by Apple or the latest online Cengage lab--not a TED talk, YouTube or TikTok, or Google or ChatGPT or whatever is the latest commodity fad. 'Technology is a means to an end…[and] a human activity. These two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilize them is a human activity.' For Heidegger, technology is a means for humans to draw from what he calls the 'standing-reserve' of “world” and to shape, 'unlock, transform, store and distribute' the standing-reserve of phenomena.