Collin Vs. Blog

Will notes that Microsoft has set up an RSS feed for topics of interest to educators. I admit it, I'm curious and, as of a few minutes ago, subscribed.

The first entry I looked at connects to a white paper at the MS site: Learning in a Connected World. Even downloaded it. But let me make one thing clear to the person from Microsoft who comes here as a result of the obligatory corporate egosurf. When the page told me that the paper explores, and I quote:

A solution architecture to help educators map a technology infrastructure to the challenges faced by institutions today.

I can't tell you how close I came to unsubscribing right there. Laugh all you like at the tortured prose of academic writers, poststructural theorists, etc., but this is abominable stuff. An architecture, and a solution architecture no less, to help me map an infrastructure to challenges? OMG.

At least, the page doesn't use "leverage" as a verb--oh wait, that's in the subtitle.

I know that it's basically an extended advertisement for MS products, and I know that every network generates its own jargon which is more or less opaque, but still. Look at it this way: if academic prose is so bad as to function almost like a second language, why in the world would we want to learn a third language in order to be advertisted at? Hire a couple more Discursive Efficacy Engineers, would you?

(I'm available on a consultant basis)