software to think

I work for UoP. It's a for profit educational model. Surely some can find value in that. I know the shareholders of the stock ticker for UoP do.

A student recently sent me a message apologizing for not getting her title page right. I told her not to worry too much about it. She mentioned a word or a name saying she's going to get it. I asked her about that. She said it was formatting software that her academic advisor suggested that she get.

That's the for profit model.

Knowledge shouldn't be displaced into another piece of software. I don't understand how someone thinks that she is learning by buying a product. That's the shame of it. Even the discipline required to think is being displaced into products that are doing the thinking for us.

But how could this happen? How does someone actually believe that she needs to buy a product to learn something in order to learn it herself? Well, the for-profit model does make the academic advisor into a salesperson.