Ivy League school offers class called 'Wasting Time on the Internet' New University of Pennsylvania class teaches students how to kill time It asks if 'cat videos' can help create 'compelling works of literature' Class organizer 'sick' of reading about how the internet makes us dumb Instructor Kenneth Goldman: 'I think the internet is making us smarter' By Corey Charlton for MailOnline Students once known for their lazy sleep-ins, late night partying and hangovers are now signing up to a university course to learn how to waste time on the internet. The University of Pennsylvania's Department of English will feature a new class next semester - called Wasting Time on the Internet - in which students spend three hours a week doing nothing of value. The class aims to explore the possibility that checking Facebook and 'watching cat videos' could be used as raw material for 'compelling and emotional works of literature'. Poet and artist Kenneth Goldsmith (pictured) will run the class, which aims to channel wasting time on the internet into raw material for creative writing. Here he pictured at his art exhibition last year in which attempted to print the internet Students will consider if it is possible to 'reconstruct our autobiography using only Facebook' and ponder whether their Twitter feed could be used to write a 'great novella'. The course description notes 'distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting' will be mandatory. The Ivy League School's creative writing class will be run by Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet and digital artist. Mr Goldsmith is no stranger to headlines - he hit the news last year for his attempt to print out on paper the entire internet. Mr Goldsmith (pictured) wants to challenge the notion the internet is making us stupider By asking the public to contribute to send in internet pages printed on paper, the art exhibition eventually featured ten tons of papers sent in by hundreds of people. Mr Goldsmith told the Washington Post his new university course was challenging the conventional belief that the internet is making us stupider and hoped it would place students into 'a digital or electronic twilight'. He said: 'I think the internet is making us smarter. I'm so tired of reading, every time you pick up a paper, on how bad the Web is.' Mr Goldsmith is recognized as an unusual thinker, publishing books such as 'Day' - which was the retyping of one day's New York Times edition. His other works are 'Seven American Deaths and Disaster' - which involves transcripts of press reports from days such as 9/11 and the assassination of JFK. However, last year's attempt to print out the internet was his most bold stunt to date - although in his defense, he admitted that to print off the Internet in its entirety was not feasible. However, it was not just a whim of Goldsmith's, he does have some previous work to point to in the same area. 'The advent of digital culture has turned each one of us into an unwitting archivist, hoarding endless MP3s and digital pictures and old emails,' he said.