Category: Technology

I’ve posted many things here about handwriting and computers over the years; here’s what I think is the first article on typing: “Exercise still key to computing,” a poorly written headline for an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Long gone are the days of high school typing classes, where the clack of manual Underwoods and electric IBM Selectrics echoed down the hallway.

Students as young as first grade are introduced to a keyboard in computer technology classes. The state’s technology standards recommend that all students be able to type proficiently on a keyboard by eighth grade.

But as with handwriting, there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to teach keyboarding. Schools are preparing students for state tests, or there’s so much more technology to teach than just keyboarding.

There’s also a cool picture here of kids typing at computer keyboards with boxes over their hands so they can’t “cheat” from their practices of touch typing.

From the Orlando Sentinel comes this article, “Who needs pens? School goes paperless,” an article about (guess what!) an elementary school with lots of computers and laptops and such.

First off, I don’t think it’s so much about paperless as it is about just having computers. The idea that this is a “paperless” seems to be the work of a headline writer. Second, I think this falls into the wildly optimistic view of technology. For example:

“Technology is one of the best and worst things introduced in schools in the last 20 years,” [Eugene F. Provenzo Jr., a University of Miami education professor] said. “It can be an extraordinary tool. . . . But it can also be the difference between watching a movie about Venice and actually going to Venice and smelling the salt air.”

I mean, I am of course all for computers in the schools and technology and stuff like that, but this view seems a little rosy. Unless they’ve got smell-o-vision on those computers in Florida….

Jeff had a good point/link on his blog yesterday about YouTube. I’m not completely sure I agree with him entirely (mostly though), but I haven’t read the IHE article about YouTube he mentions yet.

Oddly, the think that most immediately comes to my mind is not YouTube, the article in Inside Higher Ed, or Jeff’s take on it. Rather, the first thing I thought was “jeez, that’s something else I need to figure out for English 516!”

I’m teaching that course online in the winter term and I have an embarrassing amount of stuff to do to get ready to do that. Don’t get me wrong; I have a pretty good sense about what I’ll be doing this coming term, mainly because I’m in the third year of this particular cycle of the course. (What I mean by that is I have found that I have to pretty much throw out everything but the most foundational texts– things like Ong on writing as a technology, Selfe’s “Paying Attention” essay, a few other things– about every three years because they simply become too dated).

But as I have learned before, the tricky thing is figuring out how to make this stuff translate to the online experience. For example, one of the things I’ve done in this class in recent years that I think has been reasonably successful is student presentations on books from a selected reading list on “cutting edge” issues in computers in writing. A lot of it is stuff that I’d like to read but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Anyway, in a face-to-face setting, this is pretty easy to facilitate: students talk about their book project for about 10 minutes or so and they hand in a brief essay. I could of course just ask student presenters to write something that the rest of the class can simply read. But that doesn’t really capture the “presentation” experience. On the other hand, I could ask students to make a presentation and post it– an audio file, a video, etc. But that makes technical demands at a level that I’m not sure I can expect from online students.

So we’ll see. It makes me nervous to say this, but there is going to be a “making it up as we go along” element to this class in the winter….