Cashman\’s Blog

     I’m going to begin this week by talking about my experience of going without a computer for two days. I actually did this a couple of weeks ago. My family was going out of town for the weekend so I thought it would be a good opportunity since I would have no excuse to use my computer. I didn’t bring my laptop. What I found amusing was that when we visited my in-laws house, they had a computer and I found my eye continuing to stray towards it. I felt drawn to it. Maybe I could just check my email or maybe I could go read the webcomics I enjoy. The temptation to go and play for a few minutes was very strong. I felt disconnected.

It was kind of like when I canceled my cell-phone midway through the semester. I finally just got fed up with Alltel’s crappy signal and their cheap phones that couldn’t hold a charge for more than one day. Anyways, I went without a cell-phone for several days and it was obnoxious. I felt isolated. Going without a computer was the same thing. I kept wondering what I was missing. But I survived and it was kind of nice not to stress over papers for a few days.

The Internet is always moving. New things are appearing and old disappear. It’s the very epitome of the rat race. Leave it for a week and you feel behind. This is something that our readings never really addressed. I enjoyed reading Ball’s argument that a lot of work that claims to be new media scholarship is really just old scholarship put online. They just don’t really utilize the technology. This is something we discussed in class last week. Some of the scholarly websites we looked at could just as easily have been printed on paper.

Breaking a paper into pieces, slapping some hypertext and examples on it, isn’t really that interesting. In fact, I find it kind of annoying. Woot. I get to read a nonlinear scholarly paper. Let’s hope each part can stand on its own or I’m going to be really confused. So what’s the value of putting a scholarly work online? Certainly, the ability to incorporate examples is useful. In the paper I’m writing for this class I’ve been debating whether to include image samples but such images would have to be taken out if I want to get it published in a print journal. An online journal has a little more freedom for color, video and sound examples.

But I think the real issue here is transience. When I think of scholarly work, I think of something solid and relatively unchanging that future scholars build upon, discuss, break apart, and eventually dismiss for the next intellectual paradigm. The work doesn’t change so that when we refer to it, others may see what we see. What is most unique about online material is that it changes. Unless it’s an archive site, a website that isn’t updated regularly eventually fades from view. Someone has to host it and make sure it stays available. I think it is this issue, more than form or style, or even quality that keeps online work from really achieving recognized scholarly status.

I found the rest of our readings on tenure and finding jobs just plain depressing. It feels like there’s a whipmaster standing over scholars threatening to banish them to community colleges unless they constantly push the intellectual envelope and write, write, write. And we can’t just write anything. It looks like there’s a desire to include online publications as valuable contributions to the field but we’re not quite there yet. Well, I think that’s it. Adis.

            A blog to me is a digital space where I can either talk about my thoughts or tell about my day. Neither are very structured. Rarely, do I have a thesis in mind. I don’t like to quote people very much. I don’t assume an academic voice. And I certainly wouldn’t consider it scholarship. However, blogs also feel to me like a journal and thus they encourage reflection. I think that they are a useful tool for teaching and perhaps, as Krause suggests, they serve as a space for brainstorming ideas that one day might contribute to scholarship.

            This is not to underestimate the amount of work and effort that goes into web construction or online content. It’s easy to think, oh let me just whip together something in Dreamweaver, but really web design is a slow process that eats a lot of hours. I remember spending an unearthly amount of time making a Flash website for my wife. She wanted a hobby website where she could discuss some of her interests. We’ve often commented in class how much time our students spend making personal websites and wishing we could harness that creative energy for something more educationally “productive.” Maybe we shouldn’t. After all, if it becomes work, it ceases to be fun right?

            Another fun question to ask when we talk about web content is who really owns all that material? Every website has a copyright thing at the bottom but we all know that’s a big joke. Very few people are willing to spend the 50 bucks it takes to get something genuinely copyrighted with the government. Heck. By the time the paperwork goes through, you’ve probably changed the website at least a dozen times.

            I like the idea of web publishing. Dr. Schrag has the theory that publishers today aren’t looking for quality writers. Why find a good writer whom you have to market and sell to readers when you can get a famous chump instead? As such, publishers look for people who are already famous and ask them to write a book. Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears can become authors for no other reason than their names alone would make their books best-sellers. As scholars and not rock stars we are sort of at a disadvantage. Couple that with our tendency only to write just for ourselves and we’ve got a pretty limited audience with only a few outlets where we can reach that audience.

            However, internet publishing leaves us with a bad validity aftertaste. There’s a lot of material on the web and 90% of it is certified crap. Bad writing. Bad stories. Bad information. Why is it bad? Under what tool of comparison am I using? I don’t need a rubric from Kairos to know that a website that reads: “The MAtrix is teh bset movie EVER. My webpage is COOL!!!!!! cuM see my image gallrey” probably means that the website is not the most intellectually stimulating thing in the universe. I do think that Kairos’ little methodology for online sources is a nice measuring tool.  

            But I think perhaps the most interesting idea was what happens to intellectual property when we teach a class online. Is the class mine? Could I construct a course with syllabi, readings, assignments, activities and everything and then can the school fire me to farm out my job to some cheap labor overseas? After all, India has twice the doctorates we do. And then what about copyrighted material that I use? I like to use film clips in my classes as illustrations. We watch “12 Angry Men” in its entirety to discuss argument and reasoning. I can’t provide that online for my students can I? What if they copy it! Would I get sued? Perhaps I can hide behind TEACH or fair use. Hmm. And what if my lecture gets recorded? Can the school fire me and just use my recorded lectures? I think I’m getting carried away a bit but these are just a few thoughts that crossed my mind.

Sound. It’s one of those things that we really only pay attention to when it goes wrong. A person’s tone changes. The crickets stop chirping suddenly. In film, the sound artists have the most difficult and thankless job. If they do their job well, no one notices. If they do their job poorly, everyone knows it. It’s a subtle art. This week, we’re looking at readings that ask how we can improve our students’ aural literacy, how aural literacy can help students reflect on their writing and oral performance, and how aural technologies can be used in the classroom.

Paying attention to the sounds of words is an important writing skill. Whenever I write a paper I tend to read out loud. That way I can tell if certain words make a sentence awkward and that the sentences “flow” nicely together. It also helps me ensure that I completely express a thought rather than just clip together pieces of an idea. This is why I prefer writing alone. I can’t write in a computer lab. I’d be too embarrassed. As it is, my kids sometimes come in and ask me who I’m talking to.

But paying attention to sound is also an important oral skill. When teaching public speaking, I spend a good amount of time drawing my student’s attention to how sound (tone, rate, accent, volume, etc…) can affect a performance. A person’s voice can be just as rhetorically powerful rhetorically as the words s/he speaks. It takes a trained ear to pick up those qualities but even an untrained ear listens to and for them.

Certain voices are considered more attractive than others. My grandmother had a nice voice. One could have called it sultry. When she worked as a receptionist for a local radio station, callers would often hit on her. She was well over 50 at the time. This cracked her up to no end. When she told these callers her age, they would tell her that she sounded younger.  For a long time, I had trouble believing this tale because when I came around my grandmother’s cigarette habit had made her voice coarse and weak.

I was intrigued by the voice-over activities listed by Comstock. It’s certainly a creative way to encourage students to understand the power of sound. By focusing on how different voices affect the overall tone and perception of a video piece, students come to realize just how much sound affects their experience with media and relationships with each other. The student who talked about how she hated her accent was most telling. It’s interesting how we often ignore our accent until we are in an area where it stands out. I never considered myself as having much of an accent but I’m sure it’s there. Ever notice how most newscasters speak with a Midwestern accent? I’m not sure what we can make from that.

Pace referenced an interesting program called Dragon. This program allows you to speak to your computer rather than type. It’s a bit frustrating to use because words must be spoken clearly and distinctly. However, it’s designed so that it can adjust to your particular voice over time but if you’ve got a cold you might as well just forget using it. Does using this program help students write or create oral presentations? Pace noticed a few ways in which the program influenced the end product through constraint and by making students reflect on each and every word. I wonder what would happen if this program was used in contexts other than class papers. What would it do to email? How about chat rooms? Would it kill netspeak by making it unnecessary? Would it create another middleman between communicators and open the doorway for potential misunderstandings?

I read an interesting article by Jeff Rice that connected digital aurality to the practice of hiphop music-making. Both focus on the voice, the flow of language, and the mixing of different audio pieces. Certainly this is one way to conceptualize aural rhetoric. Rice makes an interesting reference to a comment by Walter Ong that audio is becoming increasingly important even with a visually focused culture. This reminded me of video phones. Remember those? They could show a live-feed image of the person you are speaking with. Considering most cell-phones come with cameras, I’m sure they could pull off this type of communication. But I really don’t see that happening and I wonder why? Personally, I think it’s because a phone conversation is not meant to duplicate a face-to-face conversation. It’s designed so that we focus on the message. Not the messenger.

I recently read (okay skimmed) through a book on intellectual property that explored some of the legal challenges of ownership in a digital society. The author (McLeod, 2001) opened his book with a story on how he got the trademark for the phrase “Freedom of expression.” So if you ever intend to use this phrase keep in mind that this guy owns it. The legality of our ability to use this phrase without sending McLeod a nickel is almost funny. Is it even possible to own specific words, phrases, and musical notes and keep everyone else from using them? But then again that makes us wonder whether we can really “own” anything.

However, this does not, I think, devalue the notion of plagiarism. I’ve only had to punish a student once for plagiarism. She’d written me a three page paper with huge chunks taken word-for-word from a website that she didn’t bother to even cite in her bibliography. It was easy to tell she had plagiarized because the tone of voice changed, her vocabulary-level jumped, and she was suddenly very poetic. This student’s copy-and-paste laziness is easily identified as plagiarism but what if she just took the basic information and rephrased it using her own words? Is that still plagiarism?

Here is where plagiarism gets a little tricky. Our goal as educators is to encourage learning and critical thought and we do this through intellectual work. Students sometimes (okay often) see intellectual work as a necessary evil required to get a grade and all that matters is the grade. My main concern of plagiarism is that a student will circumvent intellectual effort by using the work of someone else. I sometimes worry that a student whose main concern is just getting a grade will resort to plagiarism to get the desired grade without actually learning. The Internet, which makes a plethora of information widely available, is a prime suspect for supplying plagiaristic students with a steady supply of pre-made intellectual products. However, as Howard points out: students use the Internet and so do I. It doesn’t take a genius or 3rd party software to catch a student pilfering work off the Internet.

I’m feeling a bit cynical today so I’m going to challenge some of the assumptions made in our readings this week. Does the Internet really change things that much? Howard seems to think so because the Internet makes intellectual products more easily available for us to steal, dissect, rearrange, combine, tease, and copy. He recommends being careful over what we label as plagiarism and recognize that it’s actually a hard concept to define. Did the Internet really change that? Plagiarism, as far as I can tell, has always been a vague and complex issue well before people disgusted others with Captain Kirk/Spock slash fiction on the Net.

I’ll admit I’m not as optimistic as Tapscott about the Internet exploding intellectual property law and making us one big happy Levi-styled intellectually utopian family with economic benefits for everyone except those losers who fail to jump the Internet bandwagon. Whew. That was a mouthful. Quite frankly, I think his opening story actually weakened some of his arguments. He mentioned that Goldcorp had geologists that were given millions to find new gold reserves. When they gave mediocre returns, the owner turned to the Internet, gave away his mining data, and put up a contest to see if people could spot the gold on his property. He got a lot of labor for a fraction of the cost and eventually found gold. What happened to those geologists I wonder? I bet they were fired. There would be no sense in keeping them. So the Internet makes it possible to exploit the work of bored intellectuals without having to really pay them? And I don’t have to belong to Elssivier? Yay! Go capitalism.

Fair use is another tricky issue. I’m all for fair use especially in terms of educational growth and development but I question whether we need to teach these things in college. I often assume, perhaps naively, that students have a basic understanding of plagiarism and fair use. As such, I don’t really talk about it. “Isn’t that something they were supposed to learn in high school?” I think. I know it’s dangerous to assume students learn anything other than smoking and safe sex in high school but such basic legal questions should be part of our early development education. I know that proper citation, how and why to quote, and inserting original transitions were drilled into me when I learned to write. I wasn’t even in the AP or advanced classes either. One year I was in the remedial writing class but that’s a story and rant about economic class stereotyping that I’ll save for another day.

Ok. I’m done ranting. And you people better comment or I’m coming to class tomorrow with a whiffle bat and a copy of Crime and Punishment.

McLeod, K. (2001). Owning culture: Authorship, ownership, and intellectual property. New York: Peter Lang.

A theme that jumped out to me this week was a concern that technical literacy and computers in classroom would become invisible. They would be expected. An understandable concern. When I first started putting together a resume seven years ago I was told to list all the software that I was familiar with. Nowadays, it’s pretty much a base expectation that a potential employee knows how to use Microsoft Word and other basic computer software especially one that has a college education. I don’t do computers is a phrase of the archaic past. So what exactly do these expectations mean?

In some cases this could mean that there will be no separation between teaching and teaching with technology. Trish Harris writes, “I unhappily see a future in which composition and rhetoric as a discipline will have subsumed computers and writing aas a subdiscipline because the perceived need for separation, and a separate scholarship, will no longer exist” (p. 492). Is that really an unhappy future? Perhaps, it is an unreflective one. I guess our concern here is whether computers and technology in the classroom is really necessary for education or merely just corporate America telling us that we need the latest toys they produce to stay fresh and up-to-date. After all, it’s all about preparing our youngsters for the competitive marketplace.

Another concern is how this integration will reshape coursework. Johnson-Eilola purposes a change in production pedagogy to connection pedagogy. Personally, I don’t see a big difference except that one incorporates a multimedia approach while the other focuses on single-author products. However, both still end in a finished product that can be graded and analyzed for appropriate learned material. The question of authorship is a rather moot difference since, if we take the postmodern approach of Foucoult, we incorporate other authors and their work into our own because we are shaped by the experiences of other media. There is no such thing as a truly original work. The main difference, as I see it, is the face of the end product. As Ted Nellen says, “Writing is incorporating other technologies: hypertext, color, art, graphics, video clips, and sound” (p. 493). We’ve added pretty pictures and music. When does it cease to be writing and turns into a new media like film and television?

Williams suggested an integrated approach pedagogy that sounded a lot like the multimedia classes I took as an undergraduate. The multimedia program emerged just as I was about to graduate. It blended art, computer science, language, and a dozen other fields. However, it suffered from a lack of identity. It wasn’t sure what it was or its goals. The department went through several directors none of which had a clear view for what or how it would teach multimedia. The problem it had is one that I see in the integrated approach. It doesn’t really define itself well. It looks good on paper but I wonder how practical it is. We’re experimenting on our students. Hopefully, they’ll turn out alright.

I started college as an undergraduate in 1995. When my parents asked me what I wanted for college, I asked for a computer. I think this pleased them because a computer was a heck of a lot cheaper than a car. Although I mainly used it for playing video games and avoiding class, that computer carried me through all four and a half years of my undergraduate career. At first I used it only as a word processing tool. I wrote papers on it. By the end, I was using it to register and check my grades, email my professors, IM my girlfriend, and conduct research. It’s just amazing when I think about it how much the technology changed and how my dependence on the technology increased over time.

The campus had computer labs. The nicer ones were in the computer science department but the dormitories had a few communal computers that were virtual dinosaurs compared to what we have today. My roommate didn’t have a computer until his senior year. He did have a car though and so I let him type papers on my computer and he gave me rides. Now it’s hard to imagine anyone without one or maybe two computers. In Opening Spaces by Sullivan and Porter, I found myself thinking of this when the authors gave their messy mini-narrative of making their department’s homepage. Basically, it chronicled their move into the digital domain. This move occurred at the same time I started college down here in North Carolina.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my college experience was unique in that the college environment was undergoing a technological change. It was invisible to me because I had no prior experience of college life to compare it. I never really considered Hollywood films a good indication of college life so I was open for whatever experience emerged. But is this story a necessary component of who I am today? Computers to me are often invisible and I expect them to change. Do I need to include my experience in every research article I write because it forms the foundation of my understanding of computers in the classroom? I guess these are questions Sullivan and Porter would like me to ask even if I have no answer for them.

While reading Opening Spaces, I found myself wanting to criticize it. It felt like I was reading a dissertation thesis that was putting together a giant Frankstein-monster type theory. However, I’m going to try and resist the temptation to point out what I consider flaws in the work and focus on some of strengths of the piece. Most of their postmodern/rhetorical/critical/feminist/self-reflective arguments and issues are not new. They are debates that have appeared in most texts for years regarding the rigor, reliability, and characteristics of “good” research.

I will focus on two key discussions of Opening Spaces that interested me as a teacher: first is their notion of geographic mapping and second is their goal(s) for good research. Geographic mapping is a helpful frame with which to reflect on the relationships between people. It’s a good visual reflection that helps us picture some of the complexities of life. Whether that framework accurately portrays relationships or merely the author’s perception of a relationship is unimportant. What is important is that mapping allows us to visualize a scene and our position within it. I’m not sure if it is necessary to reveal to others your mapping process in either a research paper or class.

Chapter 5 in Opening Spaces was the most important to me because it outlined Sullivan and Porters goals for research and how they perceive the researcher to participant relationship. I’m going to apply their concepts for teaching here for a moment and see whether it fits. Why do we teach? I continually return to this question because I’m still searching for an answer and I’m a teleological kind of guy. I think things should have a purpose. Initially, I entered teaching because a) I think I am good at it, b) I like it, and c) I felt called to do this type of work. Notice how me-centered these reasons are. Nowhere do I mention the student.

Sullivan and Porter suggest that the goals for research are political and ethical. They define politics as having to do with relations of power and ethics as postmodern humanism. I do not think these particular goals fit well for teaching but both of these goals focus on how the researcher and the researched impact each other in positive ways. Instead of thinking why I teach perhaps I should consider why I teach for students. How am I helping them? Such an approach appeals to my Christian ethic of serving others and not just myself. How I engage this approach is still something I’m struggling to understand and put into, as Sullivan and Porter call it, praxis.

            It’s very easy sometimes to forget that every student in a classroom is different. They all learn differently. They all come to the class with different expectations, experience, and prior knowledge. Here’s a quick story to illustrate. I like to use pop culture references a lot in my classes. Last year, a student stopped me dead in the middle of lecture with a question I didn’t expect. I was talking about how magazines target specific audiences and I was using Cosmo as a case example. The student asked me, what’s Cosmo? When I said that’s its short for Cosmopolitan she still had a blank, confused look on her face. I then realized that this student was a foreign exchange student and had probably never heard or seen this magazine. Normally, I could expect anyone growing up in the American culture to be familiar with Cosmo, which is found in the checkout lane of every grocery store from here to California. However, not everyone has had that life experience. Since then, I’ve adjusted that lecture to include pictures of the magazine so that my class can see what I’m talking about. The computer and projector have helped me with this since I have no desire to buy a copy of the magazine.

            When it comes to technology in the classroom, every student has different experience regarding it. Gerrard, Taylor, and Pennington all give some good examples on how that experience can shape a student’s learning in a classroom that uses technology. Gerrard approaches it from a feminist perspective making the argument that gender difference has a profound impact on a student’s history with computers as well as how they use them. “Whereas men like to tinker and explore, women want to accomplish something” (p. 194). This kind of indicates that certain activities involving computers are better received by women than by men and vice-versa. That’s worth exploring. Gerrard also argues that men are more likely to have experience with computers since video games tend to provide the initial entry-point into technology and video games are generally geared towards men. No argument there. That’s how I got experience with it. However, I wonder if the increase of social networking sites, forums, and chat programs is changing this divide since such communication programs are often geared towards women.

            I loved Taylor’s statement that “the sunny, liberal, will-to-overcome-difference is pleasant but not realistic” (p. 219). My first roommate in college was incredibly racist. I thought college might change that perspective but he still held it even after being pounded with four years of liberal arts values. Taylor makes the argument that certain differences are non-negotiable. He is skeptical of the Internet’s ability to hide traditional means of physical difference such as age, race, and sex. In fact, he questions the desire to eliminate difference as being a valuable goal. I’d have to agree. It’s pretty much impossible. Even Sherry Turkle, the godmother of Identity theory on the Internet, suggested that the Internet gives us more room to play but eventually our true identity seeps through. We can only pretend for so long before our dialogue betrays our real values, beliefs, and physical differences.

            Pennington’s piece on second language learning adds culture into our discussion. When I worked with Bellsouth, I watched as they began to move their entire technical support group overseas. I listened to frustrated customers try to talk with agents from the Philippians and India. While these outsourced technicians understood computers and generally could speak English quite well, they still had trouble helping people. I learned that you can have a great grasp on the Queen’s tongue but that doesn’t mean you can talk to somebody from southern Alabama. The dialect and culture are completely foreign. The ability of networked technologies to bring together groups of different cultures and languages offers a learning experience never before seen. I think that this is one of the main differences of communication technologies today as opposed to older models. Mass communication tends to hide difference. Ever notice how all news broadcasters seems to have a midwestern accent? Networked technologies offers more freedom for individual voice. As such, I think it provides an excellent opportunity for studying identity expression and reinforcement. How we can draw our students into such a discussion is a question that none of our authors really answered.

Well, that was the smoothest I’ve ever seen an distance class move. No major problems. No random stranger wandering into the room. I’d have to say that I prefer f2f. I’ve mentioned this bias before. These are feelings keep in mind and not theoretical questions. Perhaps its because of what I’m used to but after I’ve had an online discussion, I never feel like anything was accomplished. It’s like a diversion, not necessarily building anything. I see the positives of being able to have class wherever I want and while I multi-task on other things but I found the conversation jarring and chaotic. I’m almost anal about organization and I’m still trying to remember the issues that were spoken. A chat also feels to me more like an area of play. That’s how I’ve always used them. I feel less serious about them and am more likely to say something silly. I kind of liked our reflections at the end. Using DE tools to teach certain concepts would be a lot of fun and I think help the students learn through experience. These are just a few of my thoughts. I might add more later.

-Shaun

Not long ago, I had a conversation with a young lady who was taking an online course through one of those totally online colleges like Phoenix Online. She told me that she was quite pleased with the coursework and that she had learned a lot from it. She also told me that she was paying about what it would cost to go to a local university and take the class in person. It seems that those extra “savings” of online courses are not passed on to the “customers.”

Whenever someone mentioned online classes to me, my knee-jerk response was to say that it’s like getting your degree from a cracker-jack box. You buy it, you don’t earn it as Depew would say. I think I’m biased here because I went through a traditional college setting and if I had to suffer through 8:00 am classes to get my degree then darn it so should everyone else. But seriously, there seems to be a lot of issues surrounding distant learning and I’m going to touch on a couple that interested me.

I can certainly understand the fear that distant learning will devalue the educator. After all, if 1000 students can take a course online with just one instructor when face-to face-education would require two dozen instructors, what would an administrator choose? Hmm. I wonder. And if we can outsource the instructor job overseas for half the cost of an instructor here well then all the better. Yes, online courses have the potential to eliminate educational jobs. As Peterson says, “If we (instructors) do not enter this debate, however, we may find online writing courses are no longer capped at manageable number students, writing assignments are no longer inquiry based, and that the pay that online teachers receive to teach a course is substandard and exploitative” (p. 377).

What’s interesting to me is that there is still a strong value for competent instructors and one-on-one education. After I graduated with my masters, I actually applied to Phoenix Online. They have some pretty stiff requirements as far as your education goes and their pay is decent but certainly not comparable to a college professorship. I turned them down because they required me to be available for 20 hours a week in the evening, which was inconvenient for me. However, such a company I think is the non-academic provider mentioned by Anson (p. 57) which is threatening academic institutions. I’m not sure how one can be educational and not academic but hey who am I to get in an argument over semantics. Regardless, I think that the major concerns here are no different than the age old story of administrators wanting more profit versus instructors wanting good salaries. Depew nicely showed that DE is nothing new even if the technology has changed a little.

I can also understand some of the benefits of distance learning as identified by Miller and Hoy especially for adult learners. As a father of three, I can relate to the challenges of balancing work, family, and school. Such constraints make distant learning very attractive. Driving long distances is just a waste of valuable time. Distance learning allows you to work at your own pace and adjust your classwork to fit an already packed schedule. However, like Miller I want a little more research here on how it can benefit students.

Distance learning is good for some courses but I do not feel that it is helpful to get an entire degree online or only experience distance learning. For one thing: there is no real solid evidence that says distance learning is equivalent or better than traditional face to face courses. Anson painted us a fun picture of a technological future but his sample ideal distance learning student came across to me as exceptionally and unrealistically self-motivated. The digital future that promises to do away with print can’t duplicate the feel of the traditional experience. It’s like phone sex is no substitute for the real thing. There’s just something about being in a classroom, talking with fellow students, and interacting with a teacher, that distance learning will have trouble capturing until we get some really good holographic technology.

     Why do we teach? The answer to this question is important when we think of how we should approach technology in the classroom. There seems to be a conflicting ideological purpose in the texts that we are reading. I think that the literacy myth identified by Selfe gives us a hint as to where that conflict lies. Selfe calls the literacy myth, “a widely held belief that literacy and literacy education lead autonomously, automatically, and directly to liberation, personal success, or economic prosperity” (p. 100). The literacy myth is the reason that governments are pushing for stronger technological literacy programs in education but do you see the assumptions driving this myth?
We see a problem. There is an economic divide among our people. We don’t want everybody to have the same level of income or social success but we want them all to have the same opportunity to reach the upper echelon. That’s the American Dream myth. So how can we ensure that opportunity? Education. If we give everybody equal access and equal education then those who are capable will succeed. Education thus serves individual advancement. We teach so that some of our students will have the opportunity to become liberated, personally successful, and economically prosperous.
Of course, the literacy myth and the American dream myth don’t often pan out that well. Selfe makes the argument that “the poorer you are and the less educated you are in this country – both of which conditions are connected with race – the less likely you are to have access to computers and to high paying, high-tech jobs in the American marketplace” (101). She ties the problem of the economic divide to initial wealth, education, and race. I think she’s close. The only people I know who got high paying jobs right out of college were those whose parents were well-placed. It’s not what you know or how much you have, it’s who you know. Of course, there will always be exceptions.
Getting back to the initial purpose for teaching: on one hand we have teaching for individual advancement and on the other we have teaching for the social good. Individual advancement is pragmatic. Social good encourages a critical contributing member of society but this goal is vague and assumes that an educated society will be a good society. However, I do think that education is a valuable part of sustaining and building society. I’m reminded here of the example of Henry Thoreau given by Baron. Thoreau made great philosophical claims about life but in the end he made his living from pencils. We need a balance I think between these two teaching goals. We should not take the philosophical high ground and speak of education as just a social boon but we should also not assume that education is merely to equip our young so that they can better compete in our capitalist society. A combination of the two would be helpful.
So how does this combination inform our approach to technological literacy? I think it begins by teaching students not only how to use technology (pragmatic training) but also to reflect on technology (critical training). After all, technical training by itself is worthless. Students trained in just one word-processing program may have trouble when a new one comes out. However, if they understand the principles of the software then they can adapt and learn any new technologies that come along. This will make them better workers and contributing members of society. These are just some of my thoughts, I could be wrong.