I’m certainly one for having a go at lecturers that are out of touch, but I would like to think I dont do it in such a vitriolic fashion as Philippe above.
Like many areas, academia attracts a certain mindset of people – people who are interested in knowledge for the sake of knowledge, people who are interested in expanding the bounds of existing knowledge, or people who have an intense focus on one area of interest to the exclusion of all else. These people are not necessarily the right people to come to grips with a whole new medium, especially one that is of little interest to their area of research. Another issue is that academics tend to be from a slightly older generation, one that did not have access to the same levels of technology as we do nowadays. As people age, they tend to become more set in their ways, summed up by the classic “When I was your age…” from any member of an older generation.
The end result of this is the basis of what Philippe seems to have a problem with. If you spend all your life focused on one area (especially a technical one), you dont build other libraries of knowledge about the world – for example marketing and using their research and knowledge to *make money*. Of course this doesn’t really matter to many of them – it’s not their goal. Irrespective of this, this category of person is incredibly important as they are the ones that in general push the boundaries of human understanding.
We go to college to obtain some of the understanding that those in specific fields can pass on to us. At the same time we need to respect that many of them are from a generation when games, especially computer games, did not exist. The knowledge you obtain from these people is a seed to be developed in the future in different ways and in accordance with our own unique and limited understandings of how the world works.
In short, if someone can teach you something, try learning it, not dismissing it because it is not exactly what you wanted to hear. All knowledge broadens the mind.
Dave