slow off the blocks
I am really slow to get back to my writing and thinking about college students and new literacies it seems. While I have been reading plenty, like the Spellings report (too early to figure out where the link is — will fix later) on higher education, my own thoughts seem slow to come up here. I know what I see in terms of the technologies the students use all around me, just walking across campus or logging in to a library computer to check the catalogue I come across them. Students are text messaging each other, checking their MySpace and Facebook pages, using a variety of media to talk, keep tabs on, and think about each other and themselves. Many of these technologies are not only new to many faculty but worlds different from the ones they use to teach a class — often a more passive watching of PowerPoint slides or getting links to readings off Blackboard. Usually the most intensive is posting to the course discussion board, which I know from experience usually ends up to be at least slightly stilted, occupying this nether world between a written paper and a rehearsed comment made in class.
Why the differences? There’s an authenticity, immediacy, and engagement to their uses of technologies that I want students to experience in their academic worlds as well. Not to coopt their MySpace pages or text message their assignments in, but to build bridges between the tasks and goals they see as essential and courses that seem distanced from reality. Not only do too many students come in to college not ready for the kind of immersive work we require (80% of colleges, Harvard included, offer remedial classes) but many don’t know or understand the tasks involved in “academic literacy.” Hell, I’m having a hard time even figuring out a definition for that one in my field, and we’re the ones who’re supposed to know. Give students new technologies and connectivity, though, and they’ll develop a host of literacies and practices — learning how to use tools and language to talk to, learn about, and define one another. Where did this disconnect come from? What can be done to bridge it?