The Professor's Big Stage Summary

Thomas L. Friedman, an American journalist and columnist for The New York Times, seeks to demonstrate the benefits of a blended educational model in “The Professor’s Big Stage”. His article focuses on open online education and its rising popularity; after attending a conference convened by MIT and Harvard, Friedman shares his thought on the topic of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course), online course databases containing open and unlimited access to both traditional and interactive course components. He argues that a blend of online lectures and in-class activities with a proficient professor is the ideal education model. Friedman utilizes storytelling to draw in his audience, and further makes use of examples to argue and support the idea of

He begins his article by describing his meeting with a Harvard professor who has a massive student base that enjoys his lectures. This technique slowly draws in the audience, while steadily introducing the supportive components to the argument. He seamlessly combines an example corresponding to the argument with a story to endorse his argument without the reader fully realizing it. Furthermore, storytelling has been known to be a more vivid method of delivering information, Friedman, in doing so, created an image for the audience that not only drew in their attention, but also made the article and its arguments more memorable. Storytelling has the ability to plant ideas and thoughts into the audience’s brain; Friedman chose storytelling for that reason, so that the audiences’ thoughts would be synchronized with the

His consistent use of adverbs and first person pronouns reduces the validity of his argument; his language appears flowery and lacks an academic form that would be found in an argumentative piece of literature. With too many unnecessary descriptions, the author’s remarks become lost. For example, Friedman comments on Michael Sandel’s shoes in his article; the colours of the shoes are of little importance to the overall purpose of the example, and detract from the point Friedman is attempting to make: open lectures are becoming extremely