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January 31, 2005
hi-tech/hi-touch
In 1983, in the fair city of San Francisco, I heard a talk by Tony Campolo called "Coping with our High Tech Lives." He couldn't have imagined at that time the places hi-tech has taken us since then. Anyway, in the talk he compared the hi-tech/hi-touch effect to the yin and yang. I'm not a techie. I can learn how to use hi tech stuff, and appreciate how it makes some aspects of life easier, but for the most part every new addition of technology has me looking for the simpler way. Take blogging, for example. The mere fact that I am expected to "do" it means that I have a strong urge for stationary and pen. I'm not sure I write anymore than I did before, but I am certainly more aware of it.
So this week, reading for class on the ways blogging can affect pedagogy and classroom practice, I find myself wondering how much, if at all, this new technology actually improves writing. Convenient? Yes, for revision and archive, although a series of kept journals also provide the scope of a writer's history. But not really, not when it requires being connected (which, although easier than ever through wi-fi is still a specific space thing) and glued to a computer. Is networking the equivalent of Campolo's hi-touch? and if it isn't, then what do we add to our lives to provide that touch?
Just wondering....
Posted by cageyer at January 31, 2005 09:09 AM
Comments
I am grappling with the same question, Chris. In fact I am unsuccessfully trying to create a post about this right now. Right now I am kicking around the ideas brought up in the Brooks, Nichols, and Priebe piece of which blogs students found more beneficial and that the teachers saw as productive toward community building. Up until now, I have been thinking about how blogs can help me get my point across better. How they can extend the discourse community of the classroom out of the classroom into the writing process. But I have not taken into account how that would look.
It seems as if there is a benefit in students just writing. (You know it is like that old statistic that as long as students are writing and getting feedback they will become better writers no matter what we do in the classroom.) To me this brings up all kinds of interesting implications for what we do in a writing class. How do we meet institutional goals? Do we subvert the traditional argument driven writing experience or add a dimension to it by blogging? What is our job as teachers of writing if students improve by writing on their own terms? Like I said, I don't have answers for all of these questions, but they are things I am considering.
Posted by: jenwingard at January 31, 2005 07:32 PM