"Is it the English teacher's responsibility to train students to use technology that enriches the writing curriculum? . . . students are often presumed to know how to use technology. In fact, they often know little more than how to play a video game." -Nancy Traubitz, Jan. 1998
". . . we must recognize that the teaching of writing must also be technological training, an awareness of varying reading and writing processes in a time when the images, sounds, and words of multimedia environments all impact meaning and interpretation, and where these modes of communication are not merely supplemental to traditional hardcopy models of textuality. Today's contemporary writers are involved in information shaping rather than information transfer and will be required to abandon more linear, individualized genres in favor of the multi-dimensional realms fostered by computer technology." -Kristine Blair, March 1997
"In an economy and culture increasingly mediated via Internet browsers,
success in the 'new work paradigm' described by Web-design expert David
Siegel depends less upon the individual writer, or even collaborators,
producing the well-wrought verbal text and more upon the coordination of
a team whose members practice a variety of complementary technical, visual,
verbal, and professional discourses. Among these, verbal literacy is not
replaced or buried so much as layered into a more diverse amalgamation
of literacies." - Craig Stroupe, May 2000
As English teachers, we sense intuitively that what we do will always be relevant. We know that learning and expression in the five modes of reading, writing, speaking, listening and critical thinking are the keys our students will need to unlock knowledge of the world. And yet, I suspect that many of us also are beginning to feel our mastery of the mediums our students will be asked to communicate within during their lives in the beginning of the new millennium is slipping from our collective grasp. Students have long been astute in asking us the essential question: "But will I need this in 'real' life?" In order to capture their attentions and motivate them, we must have a ready answer, and it is becoming increasingly hard to justify the traditional five paragraph essay, the research paper based on card catalogs, hard bound encyclopedias, 3X5 index cards, and typed bibliographies, the structural analysis of literary texts in the canon of "dead white men", and the other assignments handed down to us from now several generations of English and education professors. It is not my intention to deny the important thinking and organizational skills these assignments can teach. Students do need the discipline of organizing their thoughts and representing them in clear written expression. The problem is getting them to commit to an assignment that they perceive as ancient and irrelevant. The problem is that, in part, they are right in thinking so. My main point in this rationale, then, is that it is our responsibility to model the life-long learning we want to instill in our students by first acquainting ourselves with the technological interfaces which already mediate most communication in our society, and then giving students the opportunity to express themselves through these new mediums in the work we assign in our English classes.
It will not be enough, however, to simply give our students access to computers for their writing. What we have them do with the equipment (computers, scanners, digital and video cameras, CD-ROMs and DVDs, cabling to the Internet, and other hardware) is equally important. The software we choose (see my Multimedia/Hypertext Software Review page) will set the parameters for what lessons we can design for our students, as will the configuration of equipment in our schools (do we have one computer in each classroom with internet access, a lab dedicated to our department, a school or system wide network?), the access we have to the equipment (is there one video camera in the school library, can we keep the scanner for a day, a week, or indefinitely?), and the age and condition of the equipment we do have (does the operating system of our machines support the applications we need to use? is there a CD-ROM in each machine or on a network server?). Once we have chosen the appropriate software and established the parameters in which we can work, we will need to think about our objectives, not only in terms of what our students will learn about the messages they receive and send, but about the mediums in which that communication takes place.
I think we can all agree that students need to learn to be more than passive consumers: of knowledge, of products, of messages both political and commercial. When technology is added to the equation, we can also see the need to help students develop a critical technological literacy, a term Cynthia Selfe discusses in Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention:
There are many ways to help students build their critical technological literacy, some of which I will explore in more depth later in this rationale. But first, I would be remiss in omitting another issue which affects our students and can be exacerbated if we are not careful to pay attention to it when we bring technology into the classroom:In language arts and English studies classrooms . . ., teachers need to recognize that they can no longer simply educate students to become technology consumers without also helping them to learn how to think critically about technology and the social issues surrounding its use. When we require students to use computers in completing assignments, without also giving them the opportunity to explore the complex social and cultural issues that surround technology, we may be contributing to the education of citizens who use technology but who do not understand the complex relationships between humans, machines, and the contexts in which they interact. (152)
Another way to address these students' needs, according to Kristine Blair in her paper presented at the 1997 Conference on College Composition and Communication, (drawing from Jane Zeni in 1994) is for teachers to become researchers of their own classrooms, considering several questions: "What does this technology help us do as readers and writers? Does technology enhance or limit the model of writing instruction in this setting? How does technology change the social relations in reading and writing communities? Such questions are also important because students' attitudes toward writing are so often influenced by the way in which writing is taught, i.e., if there is an predominant emphasis on correctness in mechanics or form or on privatized over socialized writing processes." John Eckman, in his 1996 paper at the CCCC's adds that: "Computers in the composition classroom offer an opportunity for the uncovering of networks of power, but we must be aware of 'how we do and do not think about them'." In addition to questions of how technology influences our writing instruction, we also should consider the impact technology will have on our teaching about academic integrity and avoiding plagiarism. Diane Boehm warns us that "Electronic media have, for example, created difficulties with the concept of intellectual property--for several reasons. . . . For most contemporary writers, writing is collaborative. . . . The ease of transmitting documents is a second change. . . . Electronic media are also difficult to 'track' when we wish to trace a source. . . . Furthermore, electronic media have worldwide distribution. Some cultures have no concept of individual intellectual property. . . In addition, electronic media often blur the distinction between public and private writing." Even a hand-written research paper, for example, can be plagiarized from one of the many web sites that sell papers to students. In my experience, students have managed to plagiarize extensively from the internet by cutting and pasting parts of a book review from Amazon.com, for example, or by turning in a "sample" comparison/contrast essay from an online writing lab as their own. We can't prevent students from attempting to take shortcuts to a good grade, but "we must have broader discussions with our students about ethics--in all courses, at all levels. We must talk about what it means to have academic integrity at all levels. We must talk about what it means to have academic integrity when you are a student, and why that is a prerequisite for the ethical integrity their future workplace will demand. . . . We must also structure assignments and feedback in ways that promote and honor scholarly integrity" (Boehm).While students' [from culturally diverse student populations] access has often been limited by issues of race, class, gender, and generation, these same students frequently see their resulting lack of knowledge as an essential inability to learn or write with computers. In attempting to subvert this attitude, my own goal is to construct educational experiences that allow students to view technology as a means to foster collaborative knowledge-making and change the traditional power/knowledge relationships in the writing classrooms that privilege the sole authority of the teacher in critiquing and responding to student work. (Blair)
The question that motivated me to work on this project is, "How can I begin to do these things in my own classroom?" and a corollary, "How can I share what I've done with other secondary English teachers?" My answer in part, was to review the currently available software to see which programs were most likely to give students the opportunity to move away from the role of passive recipients of "drill and grill" instruction or the long accustomed practice of completing essays and research papers by hand and then going to the computer lab to type, spell and grammar check, and print them out for the final graded draft. In doing so, I chose to concentrate on three types of programs that are well covered in English and Composition studies, both theoretical and practical, and which can be used as platforms for students to become authors of their own work with access to real audiences. These programs fall into these three categories: hypertext, multimedia, and web authoring. I have created one sample lesson plan for each type of program, and will provide a theoretical context for each plan in the body of this rationale.
I begin with the oldest technology (which has been
around for approximately a whopping fifteen years!), hypertext.
Huntington Lyman, in "The Problems and Promise of English On-Line:
A Primer for High School Teachers," defines hypertext this way:
Hypertext software, then, provides a platform for the creation of such documents. According to John Eckman, "the computer environment makes possible a new medium - hypertext - in which many pronouncements of contemporary literary theory can be actualized." The advantages to students in creating text in this environment are multiple, including the ability to make connections between and among their own texts, literary texts under study in the classroom, and outside sources and locations on the Internet. The ability to see the web of those connections on a map brings the value of the graphic organizer into the process of text production. Another advantage is that ". . . hypertext environments make possible a shift in representation from a structure of center and margins to one of contingent centers, 'infinitely decenterable and recenterable'(Landow 1989, 185, qtd. in Bass)." But there are problems inherent in this technology as well. As Eckman warns us, "Hypertext is also more beneficial, or more profitable, for those who have the authority and ability to make the links rather than following them. . . . Delany and Landow add a distinction between 'passive' and 'interactive' hypertext systems: 'a fully interactive system allows users to edit, add or delete blocks of text, and also to modify the links between blocks.' (21)." In order, then, to combat the tendency for students to remain the passive consumers of technology on the computer screen, we must allow them to create their own hypertext documents, because when "hypertext, in practice, is still controlled from above- the 'center' reappears." The Internet is a system of hypertext (HTML, the language used for web page creation, is HyperText Markup Language), but it is a passive system. When we download a web page, we cannot change that page or add our own text, graphics, or links to it unless we own it and can re-publish it on the web ourselves. If students are to have the full advantage of authoring in hypertext, we need to purchase a software package like Storyspace, reviewed on my Hypertext Review page. Dene Grigar describes an intriguing project using Storyspace in "What Is Seen Depends on How Everybody Is Doing Everything: Using Hypertext to Teach Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons," a chapter in the 1998 book The Dialogic Classroom: Teachers Integrating Computer Technology, Pedagogy, and Research. In her college English class, Grigar built a hypertext document, connecting words in Stein's poems thematically to words and phrases in other poems and to definitions and commentary, then had her students both read her hypertext and then add their own connections, ultimately building a large web of internal and external links. Grigar notes that "This kind of exploration invites active participation in the text and even intervention into its meaning--something that proponents of hypertext also maintain is true (Landow 71) [sic]. And because scholars also claim that hypertext shows particular qualities of language, style, spatial relationships, and hierarchy in writing, hypertext provides an alternative method for analyzing Stein's experimental style, one that my students seemed to enjoy" (34). She goes on to say,Hypertext, the language of the World Wide Web, allows individual words, strings of words, or images to serve as links. The target for a hypertext link might be a different section of a document or a different document altogether. Hypertext permits a document to be connected to an infinite number of other documents, thus providing the foundation for the metaphor of the Web. While hypertext is most obviously a convenient navigation aid, it has profound potential benefits for language arts instruction. (58)
The next type of software is the multimedia authoring program. The difference between hypertext and multimedia software is one of degree, not of kind. Multimedia authoring software simply adds the ability to import video, animation, sound, and pictures into what is essentially a hypertext document. Why do English teachers need to be concerned with non print authoring and design? Kristine Blair tells us that ". . . it is important to show students that everyday writing does not resemble the five paragraph theme, but rather that successful communication is a combination of visual and written discourse. . . .Yet subverting the stronghold print literacy has in most English departments today does not necessitate the subversion of the standards of 'good' writing. While . . . similar rhetorical goals of purpose, audience, development of themes, and so forth, are all within the goals of electronic genres, the technologies of literacy that foster those goals have changed, increasing the need and opportunity for more empowering collaborative writing and assessment processes, particularly the inclusion of criteria that better represents the multimedia, multi-literate features of electronic texts." In addition, Craig Stroupe contrasts print texts with multimedia: "The more hybrid approach of a visualized English would describe instead the potential for dialogically constitutive relations between words and images--in a larger sense, between the literacies of verbal and visual cultures--which can function as a singly intended, if double-voiced, rhetoric." With each multimedia element added to the print text, then, comes another layer of possible meaning. An excellent example of how to add meaning through multimedia comes from the literary project of Barrie R.C. Barrell and Roberta F. Hammett, described in their article "Hypermedia as a Medium for Textual Resistance," in which pre service teachers at Newfoundland Memorial University created a web site in response to E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News. According to the authors, "the purpose of our project is . . . to integrate technology into existing English language arts curricula in ways that avoid the perpetuation of social injustice, withstand inequalities, and resist false commercial ideologies . . .What is gained in these web page responses is a greater variety of student expression(s). Visual, sound and/or graphic responses compensate for the inadequacies of written responses. Thus, while students can express written resistance to Proulx's harsh description of Newfoundland landscapes and seascapes, they can now provide visual warrants to give backing to their case for a kinder depiction of land and sea." Barrel and Hammett conclude that "Readers and creators of text use the medium to socially negotiate a sense of self, of others, and of the world. They may make explicit connections between an event described in a text and their own life experience; they may explore the self through a juxtaposition with texts, noticing and concluding personal insights; and they may expose self (to their audience) in the positions they take up in the social context of the classroom and to the wider world (Myers et al.). In hypermedia, the acts of personal literacy are accomplished and conveyed in the intertextuality of the medium and, concretely, in the juxtaposition of various texts on one screen or in linked screens." While this project was created for and published on the Internet, similar goals can be achieved through the use of such programs as HyperStudio, reviewed on my Multimedia Review page.My students were able to participate in this activity specifically because Storyspace offers a system that makes large portions of text easier to read, retrieve, and link and provides a fluid environment in which users can maneuver comfortably. . . . In fact, some of my students mentioned that they had always felt overwhelmed by research, not so much because of the work it entails but because of the problems that arise in organizing material derived from multiple texts. The amount of space (and paper) it would have taken to chart the many associations my students and I discovered in Stein's text would have been too laborious a task to complete in one term without Storyspace. (35)
And finally, there is web authoring software such as Netscape Composer and Dreamweaver (reviewed on my Web Authoring Review page). Basically, almost anything that can be done with multimedia or hypertext software can be published on the Internet. Students don't need specialized software to create web pages, though. Composer is part of the Netscape web browsers which can currently be downloaded onto any personal computer with internet access. The main advantage of web publishing is that when students perceive that their efforts can and will be viewed by a real worldwide audience, their motivation and effort are peaked. Of course, there are also multiple social, ethical, and legal issues which come into play when we give students access to the internet and when we put our students' work "out there" for the world to see. Huntington Lyman explores some of the "very real dangers" of the Internet in his Jan. 1998 English Journal article (mentioned above in my hypertext section): the ease of access to inappropriate and inaccurate materials, such as pornography, the above mentioned "easy research" sites, and anonymous "chat sessions" populated by pedophiles on the prowl. Then there are the distractions of e-mail, computer games, and other on-line diversions in an increasingly commercial web environment. While good teaching practices, "nanny" software like CyberPatrol which limits students' access to inappropriate sites, and diligent policing of students while on-line can head off some of these problems, there remains the legal issue of what happens when a student publishes inappropriate material on the school's web server. For an informative discussion of this issue, see Mark Williams' July 1998 article "Your School Web Page and Free Speech," in techLearning.com's Educator's Outlook archives. I like to think of student web surfing and publishing as a "virtual field trip," drawing on the metaphor (provided to me by Dr. Michelle Sidler, Assistant Professor at Auburn University) of the Internet as a global neighborhood, where we travel paths to locations like the library, government buildings, private residences, retail stores, churches, and recreation areas. But in this neighborhood you will also find the red light district, crack houses, and street corners where speakers deliver questionable and even insidious information. Just like we teach our children to stick to the well lit and "safe" parts of our own towns and neighborhoods, and until they are old enough to make these judgments by themselves, we will accompany them as chaperones, we can also provide the expectations and an environment where our students can learn to do the same on-line, through well designed lessons and careful monitoring of their on-line activities. There will be instances when they will not follow our lead, but we hope they can be learning experiences and not disasters. Just as some teachers choose not to take their students on field trips because of the very real dangers of leaving the safe environment of the classroom, some will not want to risk venturing into cyberspace, but a rich learning opportunity will be missed by their students.
A final word about assessment:
If we are to adapt our ideas about literacy and the text to the electronic medium, we must also adapt our assessment practices so that we can judge our students' work fairly. Just as we know intuitively that reading, writing, speaking, listening, and critical thinking will never go out of style, we can also be sure that we will recognize "good" writing when we see it, whether it is in a linear, print-based format, a multi-linked hypertext, a multimedia presentation, or a web document. We may have to borrow and incorporate some ideas from our colleagues in the art department to be able to judge visual design aspects of our students' work, but I see that as yet another opportunity ripe for cross discipline cooperation within our schools. Students can't help but benefit when we cross the boundaries of English studies to work with our colleagues in other departments to integrate projects across the curriculum. While we are busy collaborating with our colleagues, let us not forget to value the collaboration of our students, many of whom will be glad to share their computer expertise with us and with other students. "For David Bleich (1988), the emphasis on individual assessment encourages competition over cooperation in that 'the sharing or negotiation of knowledge among students must finally be subordinated to the student's performance as an individual' (Bleich 4)" (Blair). When we encourage students to collaborate, we need to find ways to reward their cooperative learning efforts. I lean more each school term toward portfolio assessment, not only because of the emphasis it places on process, but also because it allows student-generated formative assessment and reflective judgment of their own work. I have found that with few exceptions, students value their work more and are more willing to accept responsibility for their own learning when we require them to participate in the assessment process. Competition with other students becomes a non-issue when emphasis is placed on progress and improvement within a portfolio assessment scheme. And what better product to place in a portfolio than a multimedia or hypertext document which may even be published on the web? (For a closer look at the portfolio assessment and web publishing, see David Schelle's article "Webfolios: Writng Projects that Enhance and Improve Student Writing," in techLearning.com's Educator's Outlook archives from March 1997.). . . among the cited benefits to [computer] users are a democratizing potential to focus on collaboration and community and, consequently, an equally democratizing potential to distribute power, authority, and knowledge. [but] . . . computers can become tools of empowerment only as teachers are trained to employ more dialogic pedagogy and assessment practices within electronic settings. . . . Lanham believes that electronic literacy has the potential to foster a more public definition of the writing process, encouraging a dynamic process which redefines textuality as recursive and intertextual, process as opposed to product, and reader-based as opposed to writer-based. As a result, the assessment process within electronic environments must account for the changes in process as well as in product, moving away from the individual, hierarchical assumptions that typify the product-based, print literacy grading paradigm.
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