Analytical Paper 2 Paragraph 3 Revision

Connection can be a problem-solving and creative tool. In Cathy Davidson’s “Project Classroom Makeover,” she recounts her experiences as Duke University’s head of new curriculum. She claims that the advent of the Internet and electronic media has changed the way its users learn. Kids “learned by googling” and were “socializing online.” (Davidson 49) Now, “knowledge making and play came bundled in a new way for… kids who, in their informal learning, were blurring that boundary.” (Davidson 49) As a professor and administrator, she realized that, while kids were learning differently and had all these new tools at their disposal, “their schools hadn’t changed much.” (Davidson 49) Davidson made the connection between the vast technological applications of the Internet and the basic approaches to education in order to create an iPod experiment, which gave iPods to college freshman to aid in their studies. This is anecdote serves as an example of horizontal connection, or a connection between two contemporary concepts or disparate fields. Integration of this sort first poses basic questions about society, provides new mechanisms to solve those problems, and finally finds innovative and sustainable solutions. For Davidson, this process started with the question, “How can we better educate?” She believed that the Internet and new technology was the key and sought ways to combine them with learning. Her connections culminated in the creation of the iPod experiment. How can the Internet enhance learning? At the time, the iPod “did not have a single known educational app.” (Davidson 48) By the time they were done, “[students] came up with far more learning apps than anyone-even at Apple-had dreamed possible.” (Davidson 52) From downloading audio archives and recording lectures to collective learning and social networking, these kids started a new classroom culture where computers, tablets, and phones are commonplace and even welcomed in the school halls. Lethem also employs horizontal connection, albeit for a different purpose, to prove the existence of emergent systems. By connecting historical sources from centuries ago with biological studies conducted in the last decade, he highlights how complex, self-organizing systems arise without a pacemaker or centralized authority. Horizontal connection can thus shape society by revealing truths about how the world we live in works and by creating ingenious solutions to the problems we face in today’s world.