Rachelle's Reading List: Friday, October 31st, 2014

Peter Thiel, +1, College Universities, 0 Via The Washington Post: "Lucky creative writing students in a University of Pennsylvania seminar will be able to earn academic credit for wasting time on the Internet next spring. The class, appropriately titled “Wasting Time on the Internet,” will require its students to spend the three-hour weekly sessions dividing their attention between the world of the Internet and the classroom." "The purpose, Goldsmith says, is to have the students write something good at the end of the course, as a result of all that forced distraction. Goldsmith says he hopes the distraction will place his students “into a digital or electronic twilight,” similar to the state of consciousness between dreaming and waking that was so prized by the Surrealists." “We do it, but we’re not really thinking about what we are doing,” Goldsmith says of digital distraction. Forcing students to think about all that “wasted” time might change assumptions about the worth of cycling through endless Reddit posts." Full course description HERE. [Photo via @negin_mirsalehi]