(This is a response I've drafted for a report to the National Writing Project, for which I've participated in a group of teachers looking for ways to use technology in the classroom "more thoughtfully." Education )
In the first minutes of our team's first meeting, the power went out campus-wide, and we were left in the dark for a couple of hours, leading immediately to the question, "What's our back-up plan if the technology fails?"
Since then, that question has broadened to this one: "What do we teach with technology that couldn't be learned as well without it?" Collaboration, research, editing, and writing for a broad audience have always been possible and desirable in the classroom, and posting a piece of writing to the internet now makes all those experiences much easier to achieve. Still, that's old learning, just speeded up, and techno-phobes could thereby argue that technology is a luxury, not a necessity.
But, in developing our workshops, we all found ourselves addressing the dangers posed by the easy flow of shallow or false information, the rhetorical manipulation of visual elements such as images and layouts, and the digressive nature of text that allows a reader to jump to hyperlinks instead of following any thought to a logical or nuanced conclusion. Of course, these are all opportunities, too, for those who have a critical appreciation of them.
To be discerning citizens, our students must develop the appreciation both for the old-fashioned kind of long-form, developed writing, and for the new kind that develops in bits of verbal and visual text.
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