Note: Starting off with a picture of The Best Dog because this page is entirely too text-heavy, and this actually ties into what I'm saying...maybe?
I've spent the last 10 weeks whining, bitching and complaining (all different forms of expression) about my students' lack of technological knowledge. This, combined with my tendency to be irritated by everything, is not exactly making me a happy camper. So I've decided to do something drastic: I'm making my students really use technology. For their final project, I'm going to make them do something that isn't composed in Microsoft Word. I think I was entirely inspired by Yancey's article--or maybe it was Selfe's. I'm getting the two mixed up right now. But what I do know is that in the past I've only been paying lip service to technology as a teacher, when I should be integrating it more into my actual classes.
Even before I started teaching, I sort of felt the resistance to technology the my students might have--though I still underestimated their skills. Aside from blogs and Vista, technology has this sort of superfluous feeling in my class; we use it, but in most instances an analog alternative exists--and I'd probably go for that if I wasn't so keen on not wasting paper. For the various papers we have in my class--all in Microsoft Word format--I make multi-modality an option; and, to be fair, Word is not exactly the best place for multi-modality. Due to its lack of picture compression, students have to literally wait hours (yes, hours) if they want to upload a picture-laden document to Vista. But, aside from upload bottlenecks that desperately need fixed, I think I'm forcing technology into a place it doesn't belong. If I want students to start getting all multi-modal, I'm going to need to have them compose in a place that supports multi-modality. That's why I'm changing the next paper into a paper-long blog post with mandatory media. That'll learn 'em.
Back when I was first monitoring classes, I sat in on a session with a instructor who didn't use the laptops, projector, etc. in his teaching. When the class was over, he came up to us and proudly said, "You'll notice that I didn't use any of the technology. I feel that stuff just gets in the way." Of course I thought he deserved a good face-punching, but I decided to take the more civilized route by arguing for the type of reading and writing students our doing without our inspiration or intervention. I even used myself as an example of someone who makes a half-living from doing the kind of self-taught writing completely facilitated by the Internet. But, as Selfe says, "We have convinced ourselves that we and the students with whom we work are made of much finer stuff than the machines in our midst, and we are determined to maintain this state of affairs" (414 HOLY CRAP, I'M CITING). And to make things worse, the dude was using content no college freshman would be interested in learning, even if he brought a keg to class. He was completely devoted to making himself as irrelevant as possible.
So I may have to alter the approach to my class' content drastically over break. Right now, I'm a little forgiving of shortcomings in computer literacy; I think the best thing to do in this case is to jump right in and help the stragglers as much as I can. Wish me luck.
2 comments:
ooo... a paper long blog with links and other fun things. What a great idea. It wouldn't have crossed my mind to use their blogs as a place to publish their papers. I was myspace stalking my sister and her friends earlier today and I was really impressed with the new trend of poetry. But not just let's publish a poem, but that within each photo album the poem was the captions of the pictures. So, each picture had a different line of the poem. And, as a viewer you had the option to look at the whole poem with thumbnails, or look at each line of the poem (with bigger images) and click through the poem. It was just really interesting. And, it wasn't an assignment. It was just something that they thought was cool to do. What a great thing to tap into as teachers! Let me know how the blog paper goes!
im a little late in responding to this, but as we all may know i am a terrible blogger. Anyway, i understand what you're saying about "preaching" about technology and then kinda just sticking with what you have--i do the same thing. I like your idea a lot about having media a mandatory in your "blog paper," im not sure i could utilize this yet because i am not so blog-friendly but i like the fact that you are going to implement something new in your curriculm to help address something that you believe strongly in and that makes sense for the "ever-changing" world in which we now live...i am pondering about what i might want to do to increase the use of technology in my classroom but for now i am drawing a blank. that may be because it is that time of the year where my brain sorta shuts down...who knows? but good job bob!
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