Since I have an article related to this, I noticed when ProfHacker said, “Digital natives? Naive!”

The Economist.com asks, “Is it really helpful to talk about a new generation of “digital natives” who have grown up with the internet?”

And the answer is?

Writing in the British Journal of Education Technology in 2008, a group of academics led by Sue Bennett of the University of Wollongong set out to debunk the whole idea of digital natives, arguing that there may be “as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations”. They caution that the idea of a new generation that learns in a different way might actually be counterproductive in education, because such sweeping generalisations “fail to recognise cognitive differences in young people of different ages, and variation within age groups”. The young do not really have different kinds of brains that require new approaches to school and work, in short.

….there may simply be too much economic, geographic, and demographic disparity within this group to make meaningful generalisations.

After all, not everyone born between 1980 and 2000 has access to digital technology: many in the developing world do not.

And that, is indeed, the crux of the matter in my article, Incorporating Digital Literacy Into the Composition Classroom.

Though many students are already fluent participants in net writing, there are other students, even in today’s colleges, who have never used the internet for anything other than required registration and email. To most students from a low socioeconomic background, the internet, if they use it at all, is simply a new kind of mailbox, sitting empty and collecting junk mail which occasionally needs to be thrown away or not, depending on the capacity of their server (Rothbaum, Martland, and Jannsen).

Why do you want to work at a community college?

What have you found hardest about teaching?

How have you translated your face-to-face class into non-traditional experiences? (Online.)

What have you found challenging about teaching?

Discuss how your philosophy shows up in one of your assignments.

Discuss how your teaching values process and product.

What have you done that is collaborative and interdisciplinary?

What have you specifically contributed to your community and college beyond your teaching?

Several of these were new questions to me.

Interesting discussion.

Xchanges online journal UG Issue 7.1 (6/28/10)

Call for Papers:
The Xchanges online journal is a refereed interdisciplinary Technical Communication, Rhetoric/Writing, and WAC journal published by New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech). Xchanges is seeking submissions of major research projects or Senior theses completed by TC, TW, or Composition/Rhetoric students during the 2009-2010 academic year. Undergraduate theses/research projects may be submitted in either traditional print or multimodal web formats. Theses or research projects must present innovative, original research of interest to technical communicators, to those engaged in the research and practice of Writing Across the Curriculum, or to Rhetoric/Writing professionals and students in a range of professional or academic settings. The focus of the journal Xchanges is broad and inclusive, thus the journal editors are not stipulating research-topic parameters for this issue. To view our last undergraduate research issue, Issue 6.1, please visit the journal at: www.nmt.edu/~xchanges.

See the rest at UPenn’s site

For graduates:

The link is here.

For Issue 6.2, Xchanges is seeking article-length submissions by graduate students from American and international graduate programs in TC, Writing/Rhetoric, and English Education that address, in any interpretation, the above theme. Projects may be submitted in either traditional print or webtext formats. We are eager to receive submissions that examine the ways in which new multimodal writing platforms and contexts create opportunities and challenges for student writers, workplace writers, and participants in public digital discourses online. Few possible directions for papers are represented by the following three paper-title samples:

“The Evolving Ethos of Textual Production in Cyberspace”
“Collaborative Writing Online and in the Classroom: Competing or Complimentary Models?”
“Social Networking Tools, Scholarly Discourse, and New Methods of Academic Publication’”

Because the focus of the journal Xchanges is broad and inclusive, the journal editors sought a capacious theme for Issue 6.2 and thus wish to receive a broad array of approaches to the issue theme by graduate-student scholars.

I have presented nineteen papers at conferences.

I have written a book and twenty reviews, articles, poetry, and chapters that have been or are being published.

In that time I have also spent over 1,200 hours with my parents, since my father’s stroke.

That’s out of 13,400 possible hours.

Writing all that down, I can’t believe I have managed to do all that. But I did.

The auguries are not particularly good if it is also true, as it is in my experience, that professors of literature are among the worst offenders. If those who teach youth are unable to control themselves, and to keep their disagreement within the bounds of common civility, what can we expect of youth itself?

The quote, in context, is exactly on this topic, though in a less pointed way. In fact, if you have read the length of the work, you may miss these two quiet sentences towards the end of the discussion.

The work is interesting and thought provoking. It is also a bit painful for college professors of English, since it is we who are being upbraided. Unfortunately, the verbal reprimand is deserved, at least as recounted by the author.

Theodore Dalrymple wrote “Thank You For Not Expressing Yourself at New English Review.

However, I went to the source of the George Bernard Shaw discussion, or at least the only one I could find, and found no comments at all.

Perhaps they were simply deleted or not published by the author. (I do the same to spam.) But it leaves us, as literature professors, at a disadvantage. Surely there are those of our number, perhaps even ourselves, who have ventured to write and publish a vitrolic of which the majority would be ashamed were they aware. However, based on the evidence available to us, these vicious literature professors could have been one or two who wrote before they thought. We don’t know.

Despite the lack of proof about professorial diatribes, the blog post is a call to care. We do not wish to have deserved such a reputation, so let us not contribute to it.

In response to the post, however, let me say that the article above does NOT list copious references to Shaw’s own words, as the author says in the post I first referenced.

Update: I kept looking and found another post where he says he received negative emails. So, these could be negative emails, but again, there is no source citing of Shaw and there is no record of vituperation. Perhaps Dalrymple is simply exaggerating for effect. Or perhaps, as many of us have experienced, our memory does not match the facts.

Another point is that the post which was quoted to begin my own entry seems to be predominantly about not allowing comments because people write without thinking. But the negative responses he received were via email. You can’t not receive email.

Paleography is the study of handwriting in terms of knowing the era in which a work was written and sometimes determining exactly who the writer was.

The most incredible panel I went to at MLA this last year relied on paleography extensively for their new understandings of early modern documents.

There is a problem at the University of London. In order to save $$$, they are thinking of cutting the paleography program. It’s the only one in the UK.

‘The Chair of Palaeography at King’s College in the University of London is the only one of its kind in the UK, and is of fundamental intellectual significance to a broad and interdisciplinary scholarly community as well as to the wider community beyond universities. Many other classical, medieval and early modern disciplines depend on the accurate deciphering of manuscripts and documents and their proper understanding, while the study of writing offers a gateway to the comprehension of our own history, writ large. We therefore urge the Executive of KCL to reconsider their proposal to cut this prestigious Chair.’

Go and sign the petition to help save the department.

Found because I read MedievalStudies.

I looked at the three page article and realized that it took me over forty hours to write and edit. It may have taken more than that, but those are the hours I remember.

It is so gratifying to see one’s work in print. I am thrilled.

I hope it happens more often.

I doubt I will adopt the program wholesale, since I have a son who is functioning in a regular class and would be nonfunctioning in this one, but I like the idea of giving it as an option to do for some of the reading responses. If my son would be nonfunctioning in this one, it tells me there are probably people who are nonfunctioning in mine.

I’ve already recommended his approach to a grad student who was looking for ideas for teaching freshman composition for the first time. (Silly me. I didn’t recommend this blog.)

So I went to the presenter’s blog and found an interesting illustration for one of the reasons why I think his approach has validity.

Good talk. It made me think and that’s always useful.

FYI: If you are in Texas I highly recommend the Conference of College Teachers of English and/or Texas College English Association as good, small, friendly conferences.