Can zombies be the stuff
of serious academic study? And could they be shuffling towards a new type of
future for higher education?
In what is being claimed
as the biggest ever experiment in "edutainment", a US television
company is forming a partnership with a top-ranking Californian university to
produce online courses linked to a hit TV show.
This blurring of the
digital boundaries between academic study and the entertainment industry will
see a course being launched next month based on the post-apocalypse drama
series the Walking Dead.
Why, why, why, why, why,
why, why, seriously why?
I’m all for adapting and
trying to find new ways of doing things but this is just ridiculous, how can
you have a course that is based a TV show that’s about zombies?
What makes this worse is
that the institution involved here is the University of California, a high
ranking reputable university with Nobel prize-winning researchers; why would
they do it, what could they possibly get out of it?
All they’re doing is
wasting their time and resources, making themselves look ridiculous, and they’ll,
rightly, be accused of dumbing education down.
If this course proves a
success then others based on other TV shows could be launched in future, god
that’s depressing, hopefully this course will fail spectacularly and everyone
involved will come to the realisation that it was a huge mistake and it will
never be tried ever again.
No comments:
Post a Comment