Last Class / Research Q / Reflections

Instead of assigning a typical research paper for our final project for ENWR600, Seminar in Writing Studies: Teaching Writing Through Technology, Professor Knight asks us to create a hypothetical research proposal. The assignment forces us to consider how we would pursue our personal research interest in a real-world way. During our final class discussion, in which we all shared the top-line goals of our research proposals, we discussed whether the way in which we posed our question was correct, whether our methodology made sense, and what we hoped the outcome might be if we actually ever got to conduct the research. By sharing our research questions, we can see the topic of composition and technology from multiple points of view and also identify themes for research that surfaced throughout the course.

The James R. Squire Office of Policy Research in the English Language Arts

The James R. Squire Office of Policy Research in the English Language Arts

Response 8 T/Th

Class 8 Response
Betsy Gitelle
7/22/09
ENWR600
Prof. Melinda Knight
Response to Part 3 (chapters 9, 10, 11, and 12)
Herrington, A., Hodgson, K., & Moran, C. (2009). Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

FROM MK:
"One question to consider would be how much has really changed."

At the very end of the book, when the three editors are wrapping up in the final chapter, I really was thinking for a minute that absolutely nothing has changed. The primary force of pure rhetoric, the attempt to communicate clearly to an audience, is still the organizing principle behind all of the teachers’ and students’ compositions, whether “multimodal” or purely “alphabetic.” At the same time, technology obviously has transformed the practice of composition at the highest level (the narrative) and the lowest (the placement of the period). I guess I believe we are ultimately trapped by the facticity of our bodies, and the desperate need we have to connect, using as many means as we can possibly afford. The challenge is to use these multiple channels to clarify and elucidate, not to create more static.

In Chapter 9, Mya Poe and Julianne Radkowski Opperman discuss the impacts of technology on science writing at both the high school and the college level. Science writing, whether in the form of a tri-fold Science Fair project board or a scholarly article, always has been concerned with making and proving a hypothesis. This goal has not changed. What has changed is that technology makes it easier to visualize data, to access research, to engage in process-based, peer review, and to iterate quickly. The compositional, technology-based tools have made better scientists and science writers at Greely High School and at MIT. The basic premise of the inquiry is the same, but the methods have changed, and, based on this article, I would say the resulting work is becoming better as well.

Peter Kittle, in Chapter 10, uses a really creative approach to explain the way he integrated technology and multimodal composition into his teaching: Fast-Forward/Rewind/Play/Pause/Record/Freeze-Frame. He discusses how his students became identified in very personal and psychological ways with the multimodal compositions they made in his class. In each case, the student created an autobiographical, multimedia study on an expository topic – how to play guitar, how to do Yoga, how to go on Spring break on a budget. It doesn’t surprise me that the students wound up loving what they created. They each assumed a powerful role as a composer and figured out how to edit using new tools to connect with others about a topic about which they felt expertise.

Finally, in Chapter 11, Stephen Smith writes “…our greatest strength [is our] greatest weakness – a reliance on print media to make meaning.” In this chapter, three teachers with a combined 48 years of experience in the classroom throw themselves into the process of infusing technology into the composition process as a response to Kathleen Blake Yancey (p. 181). They convey a kind of push-me/pull-you feeling about their need to join in. These teachers can see the advantages of using the technology to help students externalize process, do peer review, assume the dual roles of composer and editor, but ultimately they all know that they are focused on teaching students: what they always have: “Tell them what you’re going to say; say it; then tell them what you’ve said.”

All of the authors see assessment as a tool that is evolving alongside the multimodal ways of composing – a mirror image distorted by the standardized, state-mandated, arbitrary measures, and made clearer by peer-review, self-evaluation, and externalized process.

In the conclusion of the book, the editors agree “with Gunther Kress (1999) that the activity of design needs to move to the center of our pedagogy.” (p.199) Design is a process in which a problem is solved in the most perfect and economical way based on a set of parameters. When I contemplate what has changed in the process of teaching writing, based on my experience of this course, my interactions with the technology, and the readings so far, I see that while the technology pushes us to do more, see more, connect more, it ultimately has to get out of the way so we can figure out what we really want to say.

Response 7 T/Th

Class 7 Response
Betsy Gitelle
7/21/2009
ENWR600
Prof. Melinda Knight

Response to Part II:
Herrington, A., Hodgson, K., & Moran, C. (2009). Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Each project featured in Part II of the book required both teachers and students to become completely immersed in digital technology to produce high-quality, multimodal compositions. I now see how teachers are instrumental in helping students assimilate and use the technology in breathtaking ways. In the process of making the projects, students became better composers and editors, found their voices, and found a way to take charge of their own assessment. Paradox seems to be part of the process:

• Teachers relinquish control to assume control.
• They had to create a community of trust.
• They had to provide students with sophisticated compositional and editing tools.
• They had to push students to find an original voice, and an authentic viewpoint, and then use technology to get out of the way.
• They had to create stringent rubrics and make standards known in advance.
• They had to trust that the technology would hold up a mirror to the students, forcing them to do their best.

Here are some quotations I like:

• Chapter 5, Paul Allison: “This shift, this turning point from teacher-centered to student-centered self-assessment...” (p. 79).
• Chapter 6, Jeffrey Schwartz: “…they are more in charge, and I am more a passenger on this excursion into words.”
• Chapter 7, Bryan Ripley Crandall:“Although overwhelming to me at times, I’ve grown comfortable with allowing technological digression in my classroom.” (p. 120)
• Chapter 8, Dawn Reed and Troy Hicks: “…a view that embraces multimodal composing is recursive, networked, and collaborative.” (p.136)

Here are a few links related to the readings. I love the idea of controlled chaos, the studiolike quality of each of the environments described here. I love how the students got to know themselves and their peers, and connected to the larger community. And I’d like to be able to say that I can check off each of the cells in the self-assessment matrix (Figure 5.1, pp. 84-85) but I can’t yet.

However, here are at least a few relevant links:

Bread Loaf
Coalition for Essential Schools
Jonathan Kozol
NPR: This I Believe

There’s more to say and I will post again.

Reponse Class 6 T/Th

Class 6 Response
Betsy Gitelle
7/16/2009
ENWR600
Prof. Melinda Knight

Responses to:

Part 1, from Herrington, A., Hodgson, K., & Moran, C. (2009). Teaching the new writing: Technology, change, and assessment in the 21st-century classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Chapters 2, 3, 4 from Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

What I loved about the reading (Herrington et al) for Class 6 was the vivid way all three authors described their engagement with students through the creative and collaborative use of technology in the classroom. We peer into three elementary educators’ processes with students and in each case see a high degree of direct and personal interaction. Marva Solomon describes her very intimate relationship with three students during a summer intensive, when the group meets every day for the hours a day for 13 days in a row. Each day starts with circle time and good old-fashioned read-alouds. Glen Bledsoe goes to some trouble to describe the physical set-up of his classroom and the way students interact with him as he controls the mouse during their collaborative composition classes: “A computer projector or Smartboard is used to project the writing on a screen located where everyone can see it. I recommend that the teacher do the actual keyboarding” (p. 40). Finally, Kevin Hodgson tells us about “Digital Sharing Day” when “sixth graders wait for their second grade audience….I act as traffic controller, moving groups of readers to groups of writers” (p. 58). You can almost feel the sense of community and well-being in each room, and imagine the students elbow-to-elbow.

Wouldn’t these be great teachers even without their inspired use of technology? Aren’t they great at classroom management and quick thinking? And they are all self-aware, self-critical, and creative. I see each teacher as able to harness technology to help glue the community together and produce innovative, interesting work. I don’t think these interactions would have been as successful if it were not for the force of personality of the teachers, and the basic respect and reciprocity that each models in the classroom. The projects are the by-products of dedication, innovation and discipline on the part of the teachers. I also think they are examples of high-tech and high-touch at its best.

So these examples show how the tools and technologies can extend and reinforce good learning behaviors. And, Richardson’s almost breathless enthusiasm about the breadth and power of the tools and how to integrate them into teaching and learning makes great sense. I always wonder how kids, after a weekend at the mall, seeing five movies, playing hours of multiplayer games, texting, IM’ing, and downloading music, are supposed to feel when they get to school on Monday morning only to confront a worksheet with a pencil. It doesn’t make sense. Of course we need to bring the technology into the classroom, as we have to make school part of life, not an isolated sub-culture.

I also like the idea that the Internet – that media cloud that’s out there and that we’re part of – is an exact reflection of the world we live in, with as many luminaries and resources, and as many nefarious and underworld risks, as the physical world. We need kids to be able to negotiate the good and the bad, the true and the false, online and in real life.

This brings me to the topic of assessment and evaluation. Bledsoe says it isn’t fair to evaluate collaborative work on an individual basis (p. 50) and I would say that it doesn’t make sense to evaluate multimodal compositions using the same rubrics used for strictly alphabetic texts. I like Hodgson’s rubric (table 4.1, p. 67) but I don’t think it goes far enough it describing the aesthetics and functionality of an interactive project. I am not sure that “Book Presentation” (even though the work is modeled on the idea of a children’s book) is the right name for the category.

I suppose we need to develop a culture of critics. I love the example of the students rejecting the evaluation of their web project because they knew its intrinsic value and had the experience of creating something of quality (p. 50).

In some ways the expectations are at once unattainably high and shamefully low that a measured, even-handed practice of assessment would seem to be in order.

I am thinking about how to articulate my concerns about assessment and how to wrangle them into order for my final project. I think about the book and I am struck by how the focus remains on the teachers’ experiences more than the students – even though each author goes to great lengths to try to describe the student experience. I am beginning to think it would be more fruitful to evaluate the teachers than the students. I am also struck by MK’s exhortation: “seize authority.” If we put the authority in the students’ hands, maybe we would benefit as a culture.

A question:
Does a sense of community improve scholastic performance?

And a post-script:
It is way easier to write on time, in real time. Pacing and meeting deadlines (p. 43) is good advice.

Reponse Class 5 T/Th

7/15/2009
Class 5 Response
Betsy Gitelle
ENWR600
Prof. Melinda Knight

Response to Chapter 1, from Herrington, A., Hodgson, K., & Moran, C. (2009). Teaching the new writing: Technology, change, and assessment in the 21st-century classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."
— E.M. Forster, Howards End

The first chapter of Anne Herrington, Kevin Hodgson, And Charles Moran’s Teaching The New Writing: Technology, Change, And Assessment In The 21st-Century Classroom introduces a paradox of technology: while its tools have broadened and made elastic the ways our students write and communicate, they have narrowed and stunted the way writing is assessed in standardized ways. The worst scenario of all is the use of computers to assess students’ written work. Isn’t the point of writing to connect? How sad to feed sheets of student writing into a CPU for formulaic, primitive evaluation. Until our computers are our peers, emotionally, culturally, and intellectually, it seems to me inherently disrespectful to subject students’ writing to this form of automated assessment.

As the editors begin the inquiry into “how this broader conception of writing – and the skills it draws on – aligns, or does not align, with current standardized testing” (p. 3) I find myself asking these preliminary questions:

• How do we define assessment? (I know this is an ongoing exploration for the course.)
• How are different, and newly emerging, forms of writing categorized? Is there a standard scheme?
• Are there different forms of assessment to parallel the different forms of writing?
• Have tools of assessment typically lagged behind new literary forms?
• How has writing been assessed historically?
• How do other countries assess student writing?

I do not yet have answers, but here are some beginning resources.

• George Hillock’s 2002 research into different state assessments of writing.
• Diane Ravitch who has stated that we should have one national curriculum and one set of standard assessments.
• Last, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong might point us in a direction to help separate wheat from chaff.

Finally, I suppose this all comes down to ratios. There are too many students for every teacher, so teachers want to minimize the effort it takes to assess student work. Assessments cannot be made on individual bases because of the sheer logistics and the suspicion of bias, so assessments need to be made on a macro level, and be objective and quantifiable. Perhaps self-evaluation and peer-evaluation are the only tools that will make sense for judging a student’s ability to think critically and compose in the years to come.

Here are some of the sites I looked at while I was thinking about the issues raised in this chapter.

Alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Press/Yancey_final.pdf

Marshall McLuhan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Only Connect: E. M. Forster In An Age of Electronic Communication

Sherry Turkle

Teaching the new writing : technology, change, and assessment in the 21st-century classroom [University of Washington Libraries]

Technology Initiative - National Writing Project

Walter J. Ong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Prize for Most Gorgeous Blog

goes to Franc, IMHO.

Response Paper - Class 4 - T/Th

Class 4 Reflections
Betsy Gitelle
July 9, 2009

ENWR600
Prof. Melinda Knight

I am sitting n the porch writing in my notebook [but now I am sitting at my desk translating on the computer] after reading the Ohmann article – a printout of a PDF. I spent the entire morning trying to access it online, to no avail. Somehow my inability to gain entry into the JSTOR database activated my whole OCD response and I was unable to focus on anything else until I finally received the article by email from a classmate [thank you, Michelle] in the early afternoon. Then, I had to copy and post the PDF onto the NING, another few minutes of fiddling, and then I had to print it so I could read it, because even now, 26 years later (1983 being my first year of immersion into technology), I CANNOT read on the screen. Maybe I should get the Kindle, and be transformed.

Anyway, I have a number of thoughts. The first is that I love the course and the readings. Another is that I cannot get over how prolific my classmates are. If only I could respond in real-time as they do! If only I could think of as many provocative questions and answers. And so, the course makes me aware of some of my own limitations: how slowly I process and write, how I need to ruminate, how I cannot rush. These limitations are in conflict with the exigencies of the class, because of course in an online course being timely is critical. If you are late, you become mercilessly out of phase, and your posts become irrelevant before you even post. (See this, which I linked to via Putting 2.0 and Two Together: What Web 2.0 Can Teach Composition About Collaborative Learning by Chris Gerben, a couple of clicks through YouTube).

On to the Readings: I find Selfe’s voice to be nattering and strident. It took her 24 pages to tell us to pay attention to the effects of technology on the minds of our students. Ohmann, on the other hand, is a love. He is charming, self-deprecating, and ultimately says what I believe: that the technology is merely another manifestation of our humanity, and it will not change anything—truly; our social groups and organizations will persist. Actually, as I write this [at the computer] I wonder: what about the Iranian election and Twitter? What about microeconomies in India communicating crop information via cell phone? Maybe our social structures will collapse and reorganize as a result of technology after all.]

In my notebook, this marginalia, in response to the foregoing thought that nothing ever changes: A sad paradox. We have created the technological tools, but our very primitive social order is impervious to their potential transformative power.

I like Ohmann’s sardonic view of “technology crises.” He seems to be speaking directly to Selfe, virtually mocking her.

Both articles, though thought-provoking, are anachronistic. Imagine Ohmann today, observing everyone walking around with his own thought-cloud, a network of IM’s, text messages, MP# files, PDF’s, and jpgs. I agree with Sean: Ohmann was wrong about the saturation of computer technology into culture.

I am also thinking about Ohmann’s comments about mass-media. Years ago at Citibank the management predicted the emergence of micro-marketing over mass-marketing. What are the implications of this filtering and fragmentation on our own individual literacies?

Finally, in response to both articles and my classmates, I am torn about the idea that writing teachers are the ones who have to be in charge of technological literacy. Let’s go back to the NCTE’s position paper on writing in the 21st Century. All technologies, including scissors and tape and Web 2.0, should be available to all of us as we compose – but we all must also find a way to be quiet and think.

And, all of the communication tools for the course are starting to overwhelm me. I can’t stop clicking. Where do I go? Here, there, or there? This response paper should probably be deconstructed into different paragraphs for my personal discussion board, the NING, the class blog, etc. The interactive designer in me wants to tame it all into one coherent, manageable interface. And, I am late on:
my blog introduction of me
my goals for the course
But, I am inspired to do some research. I want to investigate how technology has affected hip-hop culture, rapping, and poetry. I want to find out if the snap response we have to have and have-not is true. Who is to say which social group has the most currency today? I think it is changing.

Time for class.

I am a follower of my own blog.

This is an amateurish mistake.

I can't seem to deselect myself.

Response Paper - Class 3 - T/Th

My responses are in italics.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Class 3 Discussion Questions (Dawn & Kristen) + one new question about collaboration

In addition to mine and Kristen’s other questions, I'd like us to consider how a text is collaboratively authored.

• Does anyone see a difference between jointly authoring a single document and supplementing a document through comments and discussion and updates?

I think the difference has to do with time. Think of a timeline, where zero represents the creation of a work. On the left side of zero is development time (a private zone, even if the work is undertaken in partnership) . On the right side of zero is evaluation time, where the work exists a priori and anyone can look at it or comment upon it (a public zone).

If there is no intention to create a work, then there is no development time. Then you are just in a conversation, as we are here.

An analogy: in film-making, you have pre-production, production, and post – all of these phases, though, have to do with the original “birthing” of the film, or development. This is the process that I see as the same as being in partnership to write a document. Now the film has been released, and so further commenting and discussion that happens after the fact is qualitatively different – it does not affect the creation of the original piece.

There is a difference between creating a new work, either singly or in partnership or as a collaborative group, and annotating finished products.

In our previous class, Kristen pointed out the importance of collaborative online writing at work.

• But what are the social conventions of e-collaboration?

See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-supported_collaboration

Requires protocols

Communication essential to the collaboration, or disruptive of it, is studied in CSC proper. It is somehow hard to find or draw a line between a well-defined process and general human communications.

Reflecting desired organization protocols and business processes and governance norms directly, so that regulated communication (the collaboration) can be told apart from free-form interactions, is important to collaboration research, if only to know where to stop the study of work and start the study of people. The subfield CMC or computer-mediated communicationdeals with human relationships.

Here are my thoughts about these questions, in italics:

• Are there rules to this we can teach and/or that we must follow? These conventions are being developed now, and that is what is exciting about participating in this technological time of change.
• Are we really free to overwrite someone else's work in our wiki? I think the more polite thing to do is to post serial discussions.
• Is there a leader in group composing? Who has the final authority? No one. It’s a group. Perhaps the loudest voice, or the most authoritative, wins.
• Who owns the intellectual property? Depends on the context. Will we have to sign IP agreements before we begin?
• Can a ning be used as a collaborative writing tool? If so, how? I am not sure. I think there is something very different about socializing on the web, or creating a context for group inquiry, and actually writing.

I like the Wikipedia background on Ning, by the way.

Here are our previous discussion questions:

1. New Media Rhetorics in the Attention of the Economy Discussion Questions My answers follow in italics, after the bullets.

• How much is too much? As teachers, teachers in training, and/or professionals -what is your take /reaction to the idea of information glut/information overload. (defined as: –noun Psychology. an excess of incoming information, as might confront a pedestrian on a crowded city street, that forces one to be selective in the information received and retained.) Do you see the onslaught and overabundance of information as being negative or positive to your classrooms and educational institutions?
• In this essay we see several examples of students using FLASH to convey a layered message of their choosing, including PR messages, poetry, music videos, and more. Does the use of animation, audio, and videos overpower, compliment, or enhance the written word? Do projects such as these have a place in typical English classrooms, should they?

I found the New Media Rhetorics piece to be maddening. The author uses a flash movie to discuss “multimodal composition.” In doing so, he circumvents interface design conventions for document processing. You cannot zoom, select, or cut and paste text for your own edification. You have to discover the page-curl in order to advance through the movie. Annotations and references are not hyper-linked. References even to illustrative demos are not linked – they are merely referred to.

In the end, none of the bells and whistles can compensate for efficiency. The noise to signal ratio in this piece was off, and the medium obscured the message.

2. "Where Ideas Are Garbage and All Writing is Free: Doubting and Believing in Freewriting”

Traditionally speaking, to my knowledge, freewriting is something done alone - one writer with one journal or one computer screen. However, it's now, supposedly, easy to 'freewrite' together or on a public forum.

• Elbow writes: "There is something about the [Feel of? Sound of? Smell of? You fill in the blank ______] pen on paper.” ...to which the authors respond: Yeah. You’re right. There is something about it. It’s slow. What is your reaction to this? Do you agree that writing with pen and paper is outdated and 'slow'?
• The authors 'freewrite' about the best resources to make freewriting a collaborative endeavor, mentioning googledocs, livejournal, and blogs. Therefore, it can be surmised that blogs are a form of freewriting. When this happens is freewriting still what we have always known it to be - a way to work through writers block...or does it become more? Can free writing truly be a shared public experience, as well as a private one?

This site reminded me of the Whole Earth Catalog, or other “home-made” literary magazines of the sixties. There is a reference to Marinetti, so I guess this is the point. I think you need to have a taste for collaborative free-writing; it’s a kind of genre, as exemplified by the lovely, textural herringbone patter underneath the left nav bar.

3. "Putting 2.0 and Two Together: What Web 2.0 Can Teach Composition About Collaborative Learning”

Dawn already mentioned one of things I am curious about...reactions to this: According to the ISTE 'students should be able to use technology to collaborate before they can even compose academic texts'.

Other questions to think about:

• Can students teach teachers to use new technology to support collaborative composition? I love the idea of students being the teachers. I love the idea of the student seizing authority. I am not sure, though, what kinds of literature will be made as a result of collaborative composition. Again, I think of the difference between the novelist and the film-maker. The novelist is of course a solo practitioner.
• What are your thoughts on versioning and coauthoring..is versioning a form of plagiarizing or is it a way to collaborate with people you may not otherwise have the ability to do so with? This is a slippery slope. I hope that all these tools make each of us more rigorous thinkers, less prone to plagiarizing and more apt to write as individuals.
• Everywhere you look these days, 'social communities' and advertising abound. Gerber writes "Though dropping the “friend” moniker, the more professional site LinkedIn refers to a user’s contacts in a network, and myriad commercial sites like Amazon lull users into a sense of security by referring to our 'fellow' customers who may be 'just like us'". How can educators tap into this idea of social communities in classrooms, without causing students to lose a sense of self?

I think that each student must assume a role, and be aware of the space between the authentic person underneath and the mask. The role can be very empowering. No matter what, each of us has to assume a new role of navigator, don’t we? Otherwise, how to we get through all this stuff? THIS IS SPARTA.

• Gerber, as well as Ellerston, both reference media and advertising in their articles. It's no secret that we live in an advertising run era - but what happens when we start bringing advertising principles and methods into classrooms? Are we prepping students to be 'drones' ruled by media and advertising, or are we preparing them for the world in which they and we live?

Another provocative question. Do you remember the Edison Project? Chris Whittle proposed putting closed-circuit TV’s with targeted advertising into classrooms in exchange for technology. There was an overwhelming response against this, as I remember. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Schools

But, advertising principles, as MK pointed out in class,, represent powerful ways to communicate. The best advertisements grab and hold attention. I think educators would be wise to harness these lessons and get students to be savvy deconstructivists themselves. If school were as exciting as going to the mall, maybe we would be in first place global academic rankings.

Please consider these quotes from Gerben’s "Putting 2.0 and Two Together:”and how it correlates to Ellertson’s "New Media Rhetorics in the Attention Economy" assertions below…

According to the The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), as reported in a featured front-page story in the Detroit Free Press, “technology-literate students should be able to “create media-rich presentations for other students on the appropriate and ethical use of digital tools and resources” by the time they graduate from high school. The same article recommends that children aged 4-8, in prekindergarten to second grade, should be able to “in a collaborative work group, use a variety of technologies to produce a digital presentation or product in a curriculum area.”

According to ISTE, students should be able to use technology to collaborate before they can even compose academic texts. (Gerben, 5)

Ellertson contends that those who control human attention have the power to control human behavior and that this translates into the power to control how and where viewers spend their resources—time and money. Therefore we must become interactive rhetoricians where “in addition to text and visual design, multimodal composing will come to mean programming interactive elements into the new media text, funneling information from a wide variety of sources and then presenting it with a series of techniques that construct a message by using media as syntactical elements.” (Ellertson, 15)

• Should educators incorporate digital technologies in order to develop technologically literate students? If so, how?

I don’t think there is a choice right now. But I wonder if the idea of creating technologically literate students is faulty. The students are citizens of the world. Won’t they bring their literacy into the classroom with them?

What role do you see professional development playing in developing technology-literate students?

Which academic department shoulders the responsibility?

All departments should shoulder the cost. I think it is kind of odd that just because the word “literacy” is used that the burden falls to language arts departments. Same below. All subjects are equally affected by the technology revolution, aren’t they?

Who pays for it?

And what happens in our disadvantaged public schools?

I think the issues are the same for all subjects in disadvantaged schools. To make better schools and better students, we must provide access, create high standards, and involve the community.