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This was a very interesting article I read thanks to the CBC. I’ve cut and pasted it here. Working with kids who struggle with current concepts of what constitute “proper” or “accepted” literary forms, this article challenges one to think.
(http://ow.ly/lAjW)
Clive Thompson on the New Literacy
(WIRED MAGAZINE: 17.09)
As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?
Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.
We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.
…I was born in September…
Watch the video…participate!
Well, it seems that there’s only 2 weeks left before school starts up again. I’m been thinking about it a lot and have been motivated to begin the long but exciting process of putting together class outlines and the first weeks activities for the students. I’ve created a new blogsite for the new school and have even included a couple of online assignments and a welcome podcast (really, it’s just a short message for the students).
Next week I’ll be heading into the classroom and setting things up. It’ll be like starting in my first year. Although I’ve been teaching for 6 years, this will be a new school with new procedures, new staff, new students and new community. I’ll have to cart many of my resoruces from my current school and set up the classroom according to my teaching style. I’ll admit it, I’m excited about the prospect of a new community and school, but at the same time I’m uber nervous. Kind of like my first year teaching. It’s starting all over again.
It will be interesting as I will really be living in two schools-my current one in the mornings and then a short drive to the new one in the afternoons. I foresee many a lunchtime spent eating in my car. But both schools are accommodating and very supportive. Even though being surplussed (i.e. redundant) for half a day is not a nice thing to happen, it has shown me that I’m lucky enough to have a lot of support within my school, the teaching profession in general and even within the community in which I work.
I am inspired by our new Director of Education Chris Spence, to integrate Twitter into the classroom. I’ve been using blogs and podcasts now for a couple of years and have had amazing success, both with the quality of student work and the level with which the students are engaged. I’m an avid Tweeter in my outside-school-life but hadn’t given much thought to adding the microblogging technology into the classroom. That was until I noticed that our Director of Education had created his own Twitter account and encouraged anyone who wanted to to follow along. Well, that got me thinking: Perhaps Twitter is a classroom worthy application after all. If nothing else, it will give my students a little insight into who I am as a teacher and person. After all, the more students begin to understand you as a person, the more they will trust you and respect you. The more trust and respect there is between you and your students, the more authentic learning experiences everyone (including the teacher) will have.
I have now added my Titter updates to all the classroom pages that I use with my students! Consider the experiment in everyday integration of social media within the classroom begun.
Every year Mr. Lopez and I get to work with amazing students who achieve great things. This year, we are proud to share one of these success stories with you.
We have watched this student grow from a quiet, reserved and shy person into a young woman who isn’t afraid to tackle challenges head on. Academically this student has achieved great personal success, consistently proving herself as adaptable, hard working and motivated. She has become a keen self-advocate, ensuring she gets what she needs in order to succeed. This student isn’t afraid to speak up and have her voice heard, particularly when she is passionate about an issue. Through her role in Gr. 7 as SCL rep and her involvement this year with several athletic teams, this student has gained self-confidence, which has ultimately found it’s way into the classroom. This student has also discovered that she possesses a keen wit and isn’t afraid to use it.
This student continues to achieve her personal best time and time again, then push herself beyond. Whether it is on the track, the soccer pitch, baseball diamond or lending her talents in the creation of podcasts and blogs that are heard and read around the world, this student always works to the best of her abilities.
No longer quiet and shy, this young woman has become the embodiment of determination and strength. Ladies and Gentlemen, we are very honoured to present the award for most improved student to DD.
