OK, the person who told me that the Teaching Naked book was a load of steaming, stinky shit was absolutely right.
The author has no training in pedagogy and can barely string two sentences together without making wild generalizations. It’s all “human beings always this” and “every single person on the planet necessarily that.” The writing is miserable, the argument is based on very weak assumptions. If a student of mine handed this in as an essay, I wouldn’t be impressed. I only read 25 pages so far but I’m signally unimpressed.
Clarissa's Blog 
I went to a presentation by him. At one point he pointed us to some website that will stream comments posted by cellphone from people in the audience. So we all posted comments. Most people posted comments on how wonderfully mind-blowing his experience was. Mine was “I can’t believe that educated people eat this shit up.”
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He didn’t even try to research half of his claims. It’s lazy writing, lazy argument, lazy thinking. His claims about foreign language learning are ridiculous. His story of an educator living in Moscow and working as an adjunct in Chicago is just embarrassing.
What have I gotten myself into?
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There’s always someone trying to make a buck as a motivational speaker with extraordinary insights into things. I remember meeting one of my old Zimbabwe school acquaintances online and had a very short discussion with her about how understanding a complex idea is one thing but communicating it was quite something else. We talked for about two minutes by Facebook exchange. Afterwards she came up with the notion of “communicatve intelligence” and did a TED talk on that.
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This is off topic, but I sent an email to your blog email address that I’d really like you to read.
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If the book is so lousy, why are you forcing yourself to continue reading it?
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I have joined a book club dedicated to reading this book (as part of my service obligations.) It’s ok, I’m sure we will have very lively discussions because you know how I am with creating controversy.
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And on the other end of the spectrum, we have universities building $60 million libraries that don’t carry a single book.
http://gizmodo.com/its-harder-to-persuade-hardcore-literary-academics-that-1629219921
This comment needs to be posted in its entirety:
“In part because of credible empirical research demonstrating advantages in comprehension and retention of paper books.
The biggest question to ask about this facility, of course, is why build it at all? Absolutely all of its functionality could simply be made electronically accessible to students, at a fraction of the $60 million cost. The reason is that this isn’t some grand revolutionary scheme designed by noble minds to provide students with more resources for cheaper. Instead, it’s part of a) the crony capitalism between university higher administration and construction interests and b) the rampant, incredibly expensive expansion in higher administration itself, which has dwarfed faculty growth and salary increases in the higher education section and is the largest part of the insane growth of tuition rates. This library puts money into the pockets of architects and contractors, and houses a ton of new permanent administrators who are not integral to the academic experience, and all it costs them is, you know, the actual physical manifestation of knowledge and the centuries-old tradition on which the academy is based.
But because people can say “this is the future!,” the tech press gobbles it up credulously and doesn’t ask difficult questions, like why build the $60 million building at all when you could do 100% of this remotely.”
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As a hardcore literary academic, I can say that it’s a horrible trend promoted, as the brilliant comment says, by corrupt and stupid administrators. Mobilizing faculty members for a struggle with them is extremely hard. A more timid and authority-pleasing crowd of people could not be found.
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