Teachable Bytes

(Reflections during a meeting with representatives of the National Writing Project in Kennesaw, GA, today. Education )

I have this response to variations of the question, "Are you teaching technology, or are you teaching writing?"

I sometimes fear that what we used to teach has become obsolete. Who writes well-reasoned speeches anymore? Who debates with reason? Who but scholars look for scholarly warrant for opinions? Who appreciates writing that conveys nuances? Who even wants writing that doesn't move or have pictures?

Meanwhile, every child and adult today routinely encounters alarming claims, arresting images, instant messages and instant reactions to distant events, images that suggest more than they depict, easy access to information of dubious value, news filtered through various media and all squeezed by commercials to tiny spaces or short bursts. This isn't all on line, either; it's radio, bumper stickers, magazines, billboards, all-pervasive tv, and it's easily possible to encounter all of the above waiting at a stop light. It happens to me daily.

Let's add a scary element, too: that even images broadcast live on tv can be altered digitally, sounds and documents and whole websites easily copied and altered. (A technician admitted a couple years back that Whitney Houston looked too scrawny and unhealthy for her Grammy performance on TV, so she was "enhanced" to look rounder and healthier for the television viewers -- during the live performance!)

When we use technology to teach research or writing, we take advantage of what a veteran teacher today called a "teachable moment" in our history to achieve the goal of literacy - which I define as the ability to respond to whatever one encounters. Today literacy isn't a matter of words alone, but of images, of sounds, of forms and formats, of different cultures' values, of commerce and commercials, of numbers and statistics, and of technological manipulations of all the above.

We want the next generation of adults to be responsible, i.e., able to respond to new information, conflicting claims, emotional appeals, as well as to numbers, data, personal quanderies, and competing values. To respond, to investigate, to recognize context, to judge, to persuade others -- these should be the goals of education.