LETTERS: Friday, March 10, 2000

Online notes: Promise and peril Online notes: Promise and perilTo the Editor: I applaud the DP because it is right. Everyone should embrace the productive exchange of information. And the Internet is going to change the way we learn and teach, just as it is going to change so many other things. I honestly doubt that very many faculty feel threatened by that fact -- faculty at Penn are at or near the very top of their fields. As for constituting a threat to the traditional lecture course, the work of our colleagues in the Graduate School of Education on effective means of teaching probably constitutes a greater and healthier challenge to old ways of teaching. So, the DP is right. I am concerned, however, by the editorial's uncritical embrace of online note services. Just because it is there and just because it uses the Internet does not mean that it is good. There is every reason to be suspicious of the value of a for-profit service that is dependent on convincing students that it is an authoritative source of information, especially when there is no quality control. The majority of people at Penn will not fall victim to their presentation, but we should care about every single student. There are other questions we should all ask. Will people in class be less likely to share their ideas if they know that their ideas are going to be broadcast across the globe in a heavily advertised site? Could a malicious class member sandbag her fellow students by feeding them notes that are wrong? How will the future of electronic means of teaching be shaped by the lead taken by commercial sites? And if Penn yields claims on intellectual property to commercial sites, will the fiscal health of the University -- and thus its ability to offer aid and fund new programs -- suffer in the new economy? The DP is right that some things are inevitable, and perhaps this is not a big deal. But teachers at Penn care a lot about learning, and it is not "righteous indignation" to care -- even bombastically -- about how we learn. Potential tools should not be embraced uncritically. Phil Nichols Professor of Legal Studies To the Editor: If we had written the column "Living life sans regrets" (DP, 2/23/00), we would certainly regret it now. It is just one of the "shoulda, woulda, coulda" regrets that Ariel Horn describes. Sorry to disappoint you, Ms. Horn, but little French schoolchildren outside Paris are not having lots of "regretless" sex. If you had read the New York Times article carefully, you would have understood that Suzanne Daley was talking about a specific case -- Trappes, a gritty, industrial suburb of Paris with all sorts of socioeconomic problems -- and not the "the idyllic French countryside." France does have a high rate of teenage pregnancies but it is in fact six times lower than that of the U.S. We believe that it is the government's role to try and find solutions to this kind of problem. The decision to make the morning-after pill available was thoroughly discussed before it was implemented. Ms. Horn sarcastically characterizes the availability of the morning-after pill to be "like a dream come true." In fact, the distribution of the pill will be limited to cases of extreme emergency. This plan will not create a need for the pill. The pill is being distributed because there already is a need for it. Having the morning-after pill does not mean that it is OK to "lack judgment." Horn's conclusions about French life and culture are insulting and untrue, and the facile and dismissive manner in which they are expressed is tantamount to ethnic slurs. Natalie Manevich College '00 CZcile Aguilar, Marina Chaurand, Sylvie Meynier, Nathalie Quayzin Exchange students from France