More evidence that the way we interact with “text” is changing. To combine and paraphrase something I’ve heard David Warlick say more than once with something Jason Ohler says:
We need to stop paper training our students. We should spend less time training our students how to use paper, and more time helping them use digital tools to interact in meaningful and productive ways with the media forms of the day.Also reminds me of this post:
Note that this is additive - no one is suggesting that words don't matter, that what we traditionally think of as "writing" is no longer important, but that the very nature of composition is more complex now, and that our instruction, our pedagogy, our learning spaces need to reflect that."Text" is changing. Is your classroom?
. . . Writing (composing) is no longer exclusively a solitary activity. And we need to expand our definition of composition beyond only text and beyond only a specific medium (book, research paper, academic journal).
I would really love to see our faculty look at addressing this issue in a more concrete and deliberate way. For instance, we address different types of writing in our LA curriculum - narrative, persuasive, etc. - why not "composing for the web" or "group editing"?
ReplyDelete@Robin - I agree, we need a more "intentional" approach to this than what many of us currently have. And, at the risk of really making some Language Arts teachers angry, I really wonder if our focus should be on "writing," or whether we should be talking more about "composing," which seems to be more inclusive of these various media.
ReplyDeleteThanks for finding and sharing the information about how the world of communication continually changes.
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