Comments on: Writing in the Digital Age

By: FrisB4 (Erin Sutherland)

FrisB4 (Erin Sutherland) — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:25:51 +0000

http://mfeldstein.com/669/ online learning is filtering into classrooms #wdarpi

By: Future Learning Environments: Key Trends And Highlights From George Siemens’ Media Literacy | 1 RSSBLOG.com

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 11:39:09 +0000

[...] Learning Environments Writing in the Digital Age: “In the conversation over distributed learning environments, it is important to begin by [...]

By: Personal Learning Environments: Best Resources From George Siemens Media Literacy Digest | 1 RSSBLOG.com

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:01:05 +0000

[...] Learning Environments Writing in the Digital Age: “In the conversation over distributed learning environments, it is important to begin by [...]

By: Glen Moriarty

Glen Moriarty — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:19:59 +0000

Really good point about how our approach to pedagogy shapes our choice of software. Seems this is mostly unconscious for most of us; seems we are waking up a bit and realizing we need to make our implicit assumptions more explicit. Looking forward to reading the article.

By: Alex Reid

Alex Reid — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:19:49 +0000

Thanks Kevin and Nick. The article I’m writing will deal with this issue of risk and how our changing environment is altering relations within the college community. I’m going to try to address these concerns by placing them in the context of actor-networks (a la Bruno Latour and others). That is, we tend to naturalize teaching practices as the rational results of academic freedom (i.e, we simply choose how to teach) and imagine the rest of the campus as a comfortable backdrop. Actor-network theory allows us to examine the contexts that shape pedagogy (and how they are altered when they intersection media networks).

Teaching in such environments does involve risk-taking, though not in a heroic sense; as Nick rightly points out, we need to recognize the inevitable nature of risk. Doing what we always do means taking a substantial risk as well.

By: Nick Carbone

Nick Carbone — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:58:46 +0000

I like the connection you make between pedagogical risk and experiment and learning risk and experiment. That is, students risk much when they write, speak, and think in our classrooms, or at least much more, in terms of confidence and exposure than we risk as teachers. In a way, then, we owe it to them to also put something at risk, to take a step that’s a bit tentative, an experiment. If we only do what we’re sure will work, we’ll only do what we’ve always done. And even then we can never be sure it will work. But the risk is to always do what we’ve always done that used to work and to blame our students for it not working any more.

But risk and experimenting with new genres, technologies, kinds of digital writing, which can happen in smaller or larger steps, is a way to also put ourselves in our students’ shoes. Which ain’t a bad place to be now and then.

By: Kevin Prentiss

Kevin Prentiss — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:35:54 +0000

Well said. My experience mirrors yours. Students have some of the tools (certainly most of the technical functionality) but are missing the context. This shift in context is what school should provide. It will need to come from faculty like yourself – where the context is the issue and the tools themselves are “mundane” and definitely not the focus.