britterguth@hotchkiss.org> wrote:
> This is a fascinating conversation. Here are my thoughts, for what they
> are worth...
>
> I cam to Hotchkiss after a wonderful career teaching College English.
> Technology was an excellent tool for helping students manipulate and
> analyze texts. Programs like Zotero helped them compile better research;
> Google Docs helped them navigate collaborative writing; Second Life helped
> them explore literature on a deeper and more personal level. But, those
> wonderful tools were partnered with texts (Dante's Inferno, for example);
> the technology did not stand alone.
>
> We should never sacrifice content at the altar of technology, but we should
> be realistic about the kinds of navigation and processing skills our
> students will need in college.
So my question is then, does plain old, non-sexy, word processing matter
anymore? Is it still important to teach students how to format documents to
some standard, and in such a way that when the time comes that they have to
revise them, it's not as much work as writing it all over again? Are tabs,
margins, headers, footers, footnotes, text-wrapping around pictures,
non-numbered title pages that are part of the same document (but don't count
as page 1), and inserting table important anymore in this wikified,
podcasting world?
And let's not forget desktop publishing. For those who do eventually go into
it, aren't those "boring" things I just mentioned exactly the kinds of
things you have to look out for and deal with? Aren't even web pages
designed with some nod to traditional typography and page layout?
Are we so sure that what they do ten years from now will be so radically
different from this week that we're willing to say "They'll pick that old
stuff up if they need it, go with the new stuff"?
I'm not so sure about that. While it's definitely true that the tools of
2019 will be very different from the tools of 2009, the change between any
two years along the way will be incremental, and we can't afford to throw
out today's tools because we're sure that no one will be using them in 10
years. After all, they might still be using them in 7.
And maybe the old tools will just take on a new form. From 1984, when I saw
my first IBM PC, it took about 10 or 15 years for the typewriter to pretty
much go the way of the dinosaur as a regularly used tool. On the other hand,
the skills that had been taught in many a typing class go on in the form of
word processing, and the people who write word processing programs have
taken the time to put in as standard features all the little things that we
struggled to get right on the typewriter, and to combine it with typography
and publishing. Ah, the typewriter has gone away, but typing hasn't; with a
better tool it's become something more and better.
Podcasting? To me that's time-shifted radio with a minimum of equipment. In
fact, I use podcasts to listen to radio shows like "Wait Wait, Don't Tell
Me" and "A Prairie Home Companion" that I can't listen to in real time.
Perhaps the future of radio lies in the podcast, but not everyone is going
to want or need to do their own. 30 years ago, when I wanted people to hear
my music so I could become a songwriter, things like YouTube would've been
really great. But again, that's not for everyone. And those tools will
change too.
I guess I figure that *everyone* still needs the "nuts and bolts" stuff,
which is evolving incrementally. *Some* people will gravitate toward
*creating* stuff in some of the newer, sexy, forms like podcasts, videos,
wikis, etc, but that won't be the majority.
One last example. I love listening to audiobooks. It allows to "read" while
I'm taking a walk or driving, which would otherwise be "dead time." But as
much as I love audiobooks, it's notoriously hard to highlight or put a
Post-It note on a particularly interesting page of that audiobook so you can
check it out later on. Or photocopy that page to send to someone else. In
those cases I find myself having to get an old-fashioned *book*, and hoping
that it has an index I can check for a key word in the passage in question
so I can find it.
It's all incremental.
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