Which I just happened to finish a few weeks ago, and loved from beginning to end. I nearly spilled my breakfast coffee this morning reading Schwartz’s article, as I assumed that I was some rare adult fan of Ernest Cline’s weird and wonderful comic dystopia, a world set mostly in a videogame. I enjoyed the book so much that I was moved to post one of my few reviews on audible.com. But I had absolutely no idea that Wil Wheaton, the narrator, was also a character in the book! Hope Cline sells a million more copies of this fun book.
The final essay in the today’s Book Review, by Jeff Howe, is also a winner. Imagine a reading group linked by Twitter, everybody chattering away about Great Expectations, or Blind Assassin, or Ready Player One!
This is the sort of idea that college classes should be exploring. Instead, we (as in HigherEducationWe) are just getting around to the occasional blogs and wikis as the cutting edge of extended classroom discourse. Which leads me back to the Chronicle of Higher Education and its annual “Digital Campus” issue, full of interesting ideas from the frontier outposts of new thinking.