Killing Time?
(in response to Prompt 2)
Kendra put it nicely: “as an instructor, the greatest gift to me is being able to teach a student how to use his or her own brain.” And, she implies, that goal needs to be more important to us than using technology to be hip, cutting-edge, publishable, etc.
In these articles, it was nice to see that the opposite was often true: teachers are using technology to more effectively do the things they’ve wished they could do for years. Moxley’s and Mauriello, Pagnucci, and Winner’s articles emphasized using technology in ways that encouraged better teaching (standardization of curriculum) and learning (the latter article mentions “a mature sense of voice, audience, and purpose”). What would (the rather silly) Boyle say to that, I wonder?
Of course, that’s not really a fair question, since these articles are so time-separated. If I went with Boyle to hang out at IBM in 1993, I might also feel frustrated at the seeming need to unnecessarily technologize the classroom. I still feel that way occasionally, when computer-driven ways of doing things seem less useful than the old ways (with teacher evaluations, say). But Moxley makes it clear (convincingly) that Web 2.0 has changed things in vitally important ways. Students no longer need to learn HTML or FTP, and they no longer need to lug around floppies that fail every 3rd try.
In high school, I remember writing a short story about a computer that ate people’s souls or something. I kept it on a floppy that I kept in my coat pocket. When the disk failed, that was it; no more story. But if I had been working in Google Docs, or saving my work in an online repository, or posting subsequent drafts to a blog, I would have never lost it (barring the frightening possibilities of companies collapsing), and I could have even gotten comments as I proceeded. In 1998, that would have been inconceivable, but not these days. Online blogging and second-gen wiki and course-management software makes technology easy enough to use that training is usually student-learnable without almost any direct teacher intervention–and when it’s not, teachers don’t have to be coding experts to explain the problems.
(I’m starting to feel like I’m just preaching without really saying anything. Oh well.) Sure, if the teacher doesn’t see any benefits to the technology–can’t articulate them when asked by a frustrated student, say–I don’t think it’s very helpful. (I’m not sure where I stand on the “force teachers to do it for the sake of standardization” or “let the Luddites do it their own freaking way” continuum.)
But let’s say I want my students to start considering the effect of real audiences on their writing–something that’s pretty hard to do unless, you know, real audiences are reading their writing. It’s worth it to me to take the time to learn how to use Newsvine, a community-driven news site where people can comment on professionally written articles or write their own, to help students experience the embarrassment of writing poorly in public and the excitement of crafting their posts for the needs of actual people. Yeah, I have to spend some time going over this in class (so far about 10 minutes one day and 10 the next day), and I have to answer e-mails from the 3 or 4 students who are having technical difficulties. But it’s well worth it, I think.
(Here’s my Newsvine site. All my “friends” are students in my class; they use my site as homebase from which to find and read their classmates’ posts.)
-Kyle
