Immune To Reality Analysis

There are many ways to define success and there are also many ways people view success in different ways. Individuals can achieve success while venturing down many different paths in life and (conversely) people can also fail in while following a single path to success. Cathy Davidson discusses the positives of the impact that technology has on the classroom in, her writing, “Project Classroom Makeover.” Davidson also discusses how society has been moving towards a standardized way of learning for the past few decades. The knowledge that the public needed to know throughout the past was not as intense as what they need to can comprehend now. While Gilbert’s essay, “Immune to Reality,” deals with how people learn and how success forms within

Consequently, newer technologies and their implementation in people’s lives allow for such an immediate response they give to the user of the technology. In “Project Classroom Makeover,” Davidson discusses how she had her class at Duke try to come up with a new inventive way of using the new technology of the time, an iPod. Davidson discussed this when she stated, “we would be giving out free iPods to every member of the entering first-year class, there were no conditions. We simply asked students to dream up learning applications […] and we invited them to pitch their ideas to the faculty” (49). Giving these students free range on the application of the devices for an educational purpose, it provided them an environment where they can use their individual strengths to solve a problem at hand. On one hand, new technology allows for people to grow because of the immediate responses that they provided to the user. These immediate answers that are given to the user allows for them to succeed because the answers allow them to understand how they are wrong and how they can succeed in the future. Gilbert explains in his essay how when people seem to fail in the world we often accept a “fake explanation [which] can cause us to tuck an event away and move along to the next one” (142). However, with the impact of new technologies, these “fake explanations” are few and far between since computers now give an actual explanation for the failure. With computers and technology advancing at a fast rate, these “false explanations” which could be given are beginning to die out. Therefore, applying newer technologies in educational environments allows for the user to understand where they failed and can grow and learn to succeed in different ways. Newer technologies like the implementation of the iPod in the