August 28, 2009
100 Levan
Aligning Practice With Purpose:
Literacy, Technology & Pedagogy
We first broke into groups, where we shared and discussed our biggest day-to-day teaching challenges. We then came back together to talk about them and what role(s) we imagined where technology may or may not help address these challenges:
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PDF version
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PDF version
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PDF version
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PDF version
Click here or on the image for a larger version
PDF version
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PDF version
Discussion notes
If we want to foreground pedagogy before technology — letting technology support our teaching, rather than the other way around — it is worth noting how deeply pedagogical these terms are: “student expectations” … “time” … “participation” … “getting everyone involved” … “reconciling grades” … “apathy” … “process” … “thinking” … and how many decades have been invested in trying to solve them.
Concerns about technology in the writing classroom:
- Time-wasters for “playing”
- Doesn’t help teach writing
- My own comfort level using computers isn’t great
- Time for learning is limited
- It’s just another trendy thing that reduces rigor
- Access: not all students can afford computers
Opportunities for technology in the writing classroom:
- Ideas about audience expanded and change for the better
- Easier to share for editing and peer reviews
- Integrating meaning-making rhetorical elements such as color, layout, formats, typography beyond just MLA formatting
- Access to more of students’ real, actual, genuine literacy practices — social, academic, critical
- Engages students with more dynamic texts and platforms
- Do print epistemologies restrict what we can know about composing?
Recommended Reading:
Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. 240pp. — we can meet in the WQ to talk about this one:
