Plenary for New Ideas in Communication and English Conference, March 3, 2006

Promises and Perils: Teaching and Learning in Cyberspace

Plenary Presentation for New Ideas in Communication and English: Popular Culture and New Media

March 3, 2006

Abstract:

English and Communication teachers at all levels are feeling pressure from students, parents, and administrators to use advanced technologies such as the Internet in their classes. Along with exploring some of the major possibilities and benefits of online activities in education, this keynote address will end on a cautionary note by asking educators to consider some of the dangers and drawbacks of cyberspace before taking students online.

The talk:
(Note: due to time limitations, we won't be able to cover all of this in our short time together, so feel free to browse the web site on your own)

Many thanks for having me here! Special thanks go to Mary Shelden and the folks at External Programming who invited me to be here.

I’d like to get to know who you are with respect to your uses of the Internet, and I am sure you would probably like to know something about the other teachers and administrators here, so we’ll start with a show of hands. No, I am not going to ask you to hold hands, form a circle, or sing, so please don’t worry.

How many of you:

Have your own class web pages?

Communicate with students by e-mail?

Communicate with students’ parents by e-mail?

Belong to e-mail or web based discussion groups?

Have e-mail discussion groups for your classes?

Use a chat program like Instant Messenger?

Use the Web regularly to get information?

Have your own blog?
Use blogs in class?
Have your own Myspace or Facebook site?
Use Myspace, Facebook, or a similar social networking site with your class?

And how many of you:

Are frustrated with the chaos of web search results and the unreliability of web sources?

Have had students acting inappropriately online?

Catch students instant messaging or texting on phones when they should be working on a class project?

Have caught students plagiarizing wholesale from web pages?
Have students who use Instant Messenger abbreviations in their papers?

Have caught students downloading things or looking at things they shouldn’t on the Internet?
Have students putting inapproapriate material online through Myspace or another social networking site?

Prologue: What we’re doing here.

What ARE we doing here???

I’ve taken a good look at today's schedule of events, and I like what I see. This group is bravely facing the twenty first century and boldly exploring new technological and cultural frontiers. You've had presentations on everything from film and literature to videogames, and I can say that if you listened to David Gunkel and Eric Hoffman's presentation this morning, you certainly got a great introduction to my topic.

All of us are feeling pressure from students, parents, and the corporate sector to use more sophisticated technologies such as the Internet in our classes. But besides creating a “bright future” for our students, we have to consider the side effects, costs and consequences of our headlong rush to integrate technologies like the Internet into education. In the next 30 minutes, I’ll explore some of the possibilities and benefits of just a few online activities in English and Communication, mainly, since I teach writing, those online activities that enhance written communication. But, at the same I will be considering some of the dangers and drawbacks of taking students online. As the old cliché goes, we don’t want them to end up as roadkill on the information superhighway! Overall, I will be recommending some general principles for using the Internet that might help all of us: students, teachers, and administrators, become practitioners of Critical Internet Literacy.

I’ll be using the web page on the screen to show you some touchpoints on the Internet that you may or may not want to come back to. I have to tell you that I find it easiest to make a web page for every talk and workshop I give, and, as with all of my workshop and keynote web pages, this one will stay on the web for you to come back to, even years from now when it might be hopelessly outdated. So please do jot down the URL: http://www.engl.niu.edu/mday/nice.html. And if I bore you today, maybe some of the interesting pages in the background will keep you entertained.

Introduction: The World Wide Wastebasket

I have a big problem with the Net, the fact that on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Here, I will express my thanks to the New Yorker Magazine for this fine cartoon, that has served critics of the Internet like me for over twelve years.

Indeed, we can’t easily tell who anyone is on the net; we don’t know whether we’re talking to a 60 year old or a 12 year old, sometimes, and we often can’t tell how reliable a web page is. On the Internet, it’s unlikely that there will be dogs sending e-mail or making web pages, but there are some pretty intelligent robots and con artists out there, as you and some of your students have undoubtedly discovered. It’s difficult to get a grip on who put something out on the net, as one of my friend’s students demonstrated when he cited a source “According to Netscape…”

Or, take for example another problem of the Internet, as capably described by Richard John Neuhaus,

"Partisans of the digital revolution protest that the Internet ... is interactive, not passive. But to the extent it is geared to quantity and speed of communication, it is interactive vacuity, a reciprocal fix to keep thought at bay, producing a global village of village idiots."

Take THAT, Google, MSN, and Facebook!

Neuhaus challenges us to ask whether the Internet is simply a vacuum, a mind-suck, some sort of crude trick played on society to make us think that we’re accomplishing something community minded, when we are really just turning into a bunch of village idiots, mindlessly spewing out vapid and ineffective text. Howard Rheingold detected the problem in his 1993 book called The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rheingold asks: Is the tantalizing promise of a great democratizing network in the living connections between networked citizens just a cruel illusion, a simulation of democracy designed as a decoy to keep people from getting in the way of "business as usual" politics? I have to believe that Neuhaus is wrong about SOME of the Internet, and that in the future, educators and citizens alike will reap the benefits of this great connection machine.

So, with the most cutting criticism behind us, let’s explore just what are some of the best uses of the Internet in English and Communication classes, and what drawbacks accompany some of these practices? I'll give you a brief glimpse at some of the promises and perils I see, a catalog shaped by my interests that will hopefully connect to yours.

Promise: Using the web for gathering information

Most of us know that in its decade or so lifespan, the Web has become one of the foremost repositories of information on a large number of subjects. It’s particularly good for information on subjects that are relatively new, such as computer technologies, or arcane, such as camembert cheese or collecting vintage slot machines. But it’s much less helpful for abstract subjects that cross disciplines.

Many of you regularly have your students mine the web for information, and those of you who don’t probably find yourselves getting more and more homework assignments peppered with facts and statements gleaned from the web, whether you like it, and whether you allow it, or not. Certainly it’s something of a miracle of the kind we read about in science fiction books to have such a large body of searchable information at our fingertips, and we probably have every right to argue that our students need to learn to use this huge database to survive in life and work.

But don’t you ever lament for the touch, feel, and smell of a clothbound book? And do you ever fear that our students may lose that experience, not because all the information has gone online, but because the economics make it impossible for schools to maintain libraries filled with books? I do – I love books -- so I try to help spread the word that the Internet is a fantastic resource, but that its disembodied information should be balanced by the tactile experience of roaming the stacks and paging through books. Indeed, April 23 is UNESCO's World Book Day, when we can celebrate books with our students. However, I got a message from the ringleader of an online discussion group called Writing and the Digital Life yesterday, saying that denizens of online worlds should proclaim a World Not-Book Day. Go figure!

One solution might be Ebooks. I am sure that some of you know about ebooks, these electronic contraptions that display text and try to mimic the feel and display of a real book. Perhaps, as we look toward the future, ebooks will be the compromise that combines the portability of the codex book with the versatility and searchability of online information. Some day soon the technology may have advanced to the point where we can mimic the touch and feel, and even the smell and sound of real books with ebooks. In the past week, we've heard promises from Sony that a technology called Electronic Ink or EInk for short, when used on something called Electronic Paper Display (EPD), will give us the flexibility of digital content, but the readability of print in terms of contrast and lighting. However, the fine print says that you have to get content through Sony Connect. (with thanks to Nick Carbone and David Blakesley for the tips on EInk and EPD)

Peril: Protecting students from the worst of the web

As much as we want to open up the Internet to our students to let them explore and find information, there are some serious pitfalls that we have to get beyond in order to make that experience productive. Especially for younger students, the untamed, frontier-like nature of the dotcom web makes it a frightening place, full of inappropriate sites with violent or pornographic images, and fraught with traps set by wily corporate enterprisers to gather personal information or make a quick buck. Once, more than a decade ago, I had to sit with my daughter in her school’s computer lab to make sure she didn’t stray into rough territory, but these days many schools use programs such as NetNanny or Cybersitter to protect students from seeing pages they should not. How many of you use such software or firewalls in your school? How many of you have run up against the limits of these programs and have been frustrated when you can't get your class to a trusted page because the filtering software blocks it?

Of course there are problems with these filtering software packages, not the least of which is the fact that they routinely screen out some valuable pages, as a search for breast cancer information from a protected network might reveal. For example, a few months ago, I received an inquiry from an indignant high school English teacher in Longmont, Colorado, who is helping his students to blog, but getting frustrated by the number of political sites that are blocked by his district's filtering software. He claimed that the filtering reflects either gross stupidity or the political sentiments of those who program the filters, and wanted to know whether NCTE knows of any policy on censorship, to protect the free speech rights of his students to access information on the Web. Sadly, I did not know of any such policy or resolution, but promised to take it up with the NCTE committee on Instructional Technology and Assembly on Computers in English. But how on earth would such a policy be enforced, and who would set the standards? If you read NCTE's SLATE newsletter, you know that English and Language Arts educators have an even bigger problem just keeping great works of literature from being banned. How much more difficult would it be to convince school boards in some small US towns not to censor?

One might claim that these filters can be fine tuned or used selectively, but this kind of tuning to maximize educational benefit requires time, effort, and money; scarce commodities in the world of teachers I know. In the future, perhaps school intranets will be intelligent enough to recognize the level of access appropriate to the age of the student, and the access authorized by that student’s parents and teachers. Such an intelligent network might also be able to save up students’ requests for blocked pages and/or electronically refer them to parents or teachers for authorization. This would be an improvement on the blind censorship we see now in school districts.

Peril: Plagiarism and copyright violations vs remix culture

Another big problem we’re seeing more and more now at the college level is plagiarism, directly from the web. You would think that college students would be smart enough know how easy it is for their teachers to plug stolen passages into web searches, find the sources, and fail them for the class for plagiarizing. But many students are even being suspended or expelled from college for this act, which rates as one of the most heinous crimes of academic dishonesty. As director of a program with 3000 students in 160 sections taught by 90 instructors and TAs, I see about ten plagiarism cases a week toward the end of each semester, and I know it’s just the tip of the iceberg. And 95% of it comes right off web pages, and is extremely easy to detect using Google or any search engine. On our keynote web page, I’ve provided you with links to an article about the extent of cheating, a site about Internet plagiarism, and a funny example of one of the sites from which students can buy papers on the web. Tired of thinking up new approaches to Death of a Salesman? Just click here, put in your credit card number, and we’ll do the rest!

But some claim that it’s more the "anything goes" remix culture of the Internet that’s really what’s behind the outbreak of plagiarism and the inability of some students to understand why it’s unethical. Of course the advent of the copy machine and the ability to duplicate audio and video tapes changed our thinking about the ethics of copying because these inventions suddenly made copying easy and cheap. So now look at the world of computers, that can copy files a million times over in seconds, and duplicate compact disks and movies in minutes, and at a very small cost. Connect these computers to the Internet and you have a recipe for massive copying and sharing of information in the form of texts, graphics, music, and video. Why bother spending money on or searching for that rare recording when you can get it quickly on the Internet? As we know, file sharing of music and movies is rampant even though students know it’s not legal.

Similarly, some of our students think, why bother saying it yourself when you can easily cut and paste words from a web page that say it much better than you could ever hope to? Why take a picture of, or painstakingly draw, a diagram of something for your project when you can very simply download an even better image from the net and paste it into your text? The convenience of the web, accessible from every computer in every home, lab, workplace, or library, lulls people into thinking that they can grab whatever they need from it, without looking back. If someone else said it better, why should we have to even make a clumsy attempt to say it as well in our own words?

Web files do not command nearly the reverence that print publications do, mainly because the effort to put information on the web is usually not nearly as great as the effort and expense of putting information in print form. Based on this lack of reverence, many feel that webbed information need not be protected so stringently by copyright laws. However, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act provided strict penalties for those who copy electronic files, putting most of the power in the hands of the companies who hold the copyrights. But many educators are happy about the passage, just a few years ago, of the TEACH act, that restores to teachers fair online use of some copyright protected materials. Recently, Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, whose writings are frequently seen in the pages of WIRED and other magazines, has emerged as a champion for fair use of audio, video, graphical, and text-based materials on the Web.

In the future, as generations of citizens who have never known a world without the world wide web come to positions of power and make the laws and rules that protect and enable us, I believe that we will see some changes in copyright law as well as changes in plagiarism policies. We may see more laws emerge from the old hacker ethic that “information wants to be free” as well as from the ethical statement underlying the copyleft movement advocated by the Free Software Foundation. In this model, anyone can freely redistribute any files or original works as long as they don’t charge money for them, and as long as they credit the creator of the work. Many of you will remember that the pre-1995 Internet, before the National Science Foundation gave up control, was extremely protective of the user’s right to share information, to the point that commercial and for-profit ventures were scorned and laughed off the Internet. The early Internet was touted as the great new space for collaboration and free sharing of ideas across vast geographic distances, and it fostered some groundbreaking collaborations among scientists and educators. We cannot return to the pre-web, pre-commercial Internet, but we may be able to adjust our attitudes and laws about ownership and sharing of information as we get used to teaching with the new Internet.

Similarly, since so much of webbed writing is collaborative and has the goal of forging connections among disparate sources, in the future, teachers may be able to acknowledge that sometimes wholesale borrowing and patchworking of other websites is necessary and permissible, as long as every effort is made to identify the sources. It might make sense, in some ways, to acknowledge that everything that can be said or expressed has already been said before, and that our goal of pure originality is but a myth.

Promise: A public space for student work

Moving along, beyond the web’s value to educators and students as a source of information, it can also offer our students a venue for making their work public. More and more of you, I expect, are having your classes make web pages and web sites for a variety of purposes. The advantages are many, in that web pages offer students the chance to publish for real audiences, making information available for other classes around the world, or merely to showcase their achievements for friends and relatives near and far. In venues such as Nancy Patterson’s eighth grade language arts classes at Portland Middle School, students don’t just write papers about poems. They learn about poetry and allusion, and the relationship between texts and graphical representations by making web pages. I once got a long excited e-mail from Nancy saying that one of the most important factors in her students’ learning and success in creating hypertexts was the concept of play. They were sucked into learning because they could mess around with the tools, and have fun making meaning on the web. Similarly, Ted Nellen’s cyberscholars work with distant cybermentors who help them brainstorm, draft, and revise their web texts through Internet collaboration.

Promise or Peril: What is writing, anyway, in the age of the Internet?

This brings us to an important observation about the future of teaching writing and communication. If so much information is moving online because of the ease of access and relatively cheap web publication costs, and if many of our students are going to be creating documentation directly for the web what responsibilities do we as educators have to prepare them for that future? Should we keep our students working on paper merely because that’s the way we were taught, or should we boldly enter the conversation to redefine terms like “writing,” “text,” and “publishing” as the changed context of the web seems to demand of us? And if we leap, what aspects of print culture might we be losing?

Surprisingly, even some of the most traditional theorists of writing are now beginning to change their tune when it comes to how we define writing. They say that we cannot limit our understanding of writing to mean just what is on the printed page, whether that page is created by pen and ink, or by a word processor. Now, we must consider something of the relationship between texts and graphic design. We must also consider the structure of online texts, especially the difference between texts meant to be read linearly, and texts meant to be read hypertextually, that is, with the user choosing links to other chunks of text. And now that processor speeds, storage capacity, and Internet bandwidths are all getting big enough, we have to consider how much multimedia we’ll want to assign and to accept from our students, who think nothing of attaching a 100 megabyte film clip to an e-mail, simply because it’s a “cool animation.”

Lawrence Lessig is an interesting scholar to follow, not only because of his forward-thinking ideas about copyright law and the Internet, but also because of his notion that more and more of the younger generation are part of what he calls a remix culture. They download and reuse music, images, video, and writing, co-opting it as part of their own work. To what degree can we hold the line on what constitutes writing, and what constitutes original work? Just take a look at sites like YouTube to see the outer reaches of where we're going with online composition and remix communication. Of course we're seeing the mindless video recreations of Hampsterdance and Badger Badger Badger! with such remix gems as They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard!, but on the other hand, a video like Microsoft iPod might give you pause about agreeing that "the Internet is a Global Village of Village Idiots."

In her 2004 CCCC Chair's address, Kathleen Blake Yancey gave the field a glimpse of what composition and the teaching of writing might become if we acknowledge that many of our students are going to be coming to our classes with their own native web and computer literacies, and if we find ways to incorporate those literacies, such as computer gaming, online chatting, and facebooking, into our composition curriculum. The challenge, then is to redefine our traditional notion of composition as simply writing in alphanumeric characters to something much more broad, that would include hypertext, visuals, video, sound, and even animation. But if we make that redefinition, we need to make sure that all students can get access to the tools for this rich multimedia, multigenre composition.

“At what level and in what discipline should these web and multimedia skills be taught, and in how much detail?” we will have to ask ourselves. But most importantly, we’ll have to ask how we can balance online activities with other face to face and kinesthetic approaches to meet the needs of students with varying learning styles.

Peril leads to Promise: Sorting through the dreck and paying attention to trends

But if the web is composed mainly of amateur and half-botched projects from students, along with the ravings of maniacs, what does this say about the reliability of web pages? Along with the critical media literacy many of you teach in your classes, we need to add critical Internet literacy, so that our students don’t end up stuck in the sticky goo that comprises much of the web. I have been very happy in recent years to see so much attention paid to evaluating web pages, for I think that this is becoming an essential skill that we need to teach at critical points in a student’s career. Since it’s already been covered at this conference, and since we don’t have much time, I will just call your attention to a web site I have prepared on evaluating webbed resources, which has links to even better sites. You can borrow anything from this site to use with your classes; be my guest. But one of the best sites I have found for the secondary level is the Michigan State University Six Tickets to Web Evaluation Site. They spell out web evaluation techniques in a useful form that middle and high school students can easily grasp.

All in all, the more dependent we are on the web for information, the more we educators need to focus our critical literacy skills on the Internet. It’s a lot like the scrutiny of TV’s effect on youth in the 60s and 70s; every new media form demands that we PAY ATTENTION, as Cynthia Selfe insists, to the far reaching effects of media such as the Internet on the expanding minds of our nation’s children.

Promise: E-mail encourages more writing and different social relationships

We all know that the Internet is far more than just the World Wide Web. E-mail, once a very strange concept to me when I was introduced to it in the late 1980s, is now a household word and a large sector of our population uses it for daily communication. We’re seeing what I call an online epistolatory renaissance in the culture of letter writing that is now blossoming on the Internet, something I might compare to the pre-telephone letter writing habits of the literate in days long past. Not just teachers of writing, but all teachers should rejoice in the fact that we now have yet another medium in which to encourage our students to write more. And evidence shows that in general, people are writing more, and in all kinds of contexts through e-mail. What’s more, e-mail discussion groups, IM, and Facebook are changing the demographics of dating and marriage. These days, it’s a normal occurrence for two people to meet in an e-mail discussion group or chat room, start a relationship, and end up married. Think of the difference between this new model, where what you think and say attract a partner, and the old system of meeting and dating based on physical attraction. Hey, if Rush Limbaugh could meet his wife on Compuserve, (scroll down for this information on the web site) anyone can!

Promise: Making use of the living database of experts on the Internet

Initially, e-mail writing may be nothing earth-shaking or spectacular, but for many students, composing e-mail or a Myface profile may be the only writing with a clear purpose that they do. And perhaps, if we teachers show them models of the kind of online scholarly discussion that leads to new discoveries, such as the online disproving of the cold fusion energy theory in 1995, they will begin to get excited. Further, their favorite TV stars probably won’t answer their e-mails full of questions, but the writers of their textbooks and favorite stories sometimes will. This sort of e-mail contact with real world sources of expertise in many areas is a phenomenon that Howard Rheingold termed The Living Database or Grassroots Groupminds, to show how, through the Internet, we now have access to individual human sources of expertise, probably not in print anywhere, but that can help us in our life and work in many ways. And, as I have described in a chapter on e-mail and collaboration, as networks of connected human beings, these groupminds understand questions in plain English; they aren’t dependent upon us hitting upon the right key words to get answers. The beauty is in the fact that we’re using software and hardware to connect up what Stephen Marcus has called the neural wetware of our brains, minds, and ideas.

Promise: Publishing for the people!

Recently, some of the grassroots energy has migrated out of e-mail and into the weblog or blogging phenomenon, which makes it possible for anyone to post a daily journal to the public web, without doing any web page creation. With these weblogs, online writers are challenging our traditional boundaries of public and private, and the possibilities for our student writers are endless as weblogs open up new forms and new public spaces for writing. Technorati is a site that allows you and your students to keep track of what's going on in blogs, and "Into the Blogosphere" will give you new ideas on how to use blogs in your classes.

More and more of our students are getting free e-mail accounts from Yahoo, Hotmail, and Netscape, and using them from home, but some of the secondary schools I have visited prohibit the use of any kind of e-mail on school property. I guess they want to protect the students from invasions of privacy, and protect the rest of the world from a few misguided students, like the ones who sent e-mail threatening the president from their school. However, the advantages of e-mail exchanges far outweigh the drawbacks, allowing students to quickly communicate with pen pals, help collect data from distant corners of the globe, or collaborate on projects with far away partners. Yes, it takes a lot of supervision, planning, and coordination, but those of you who have tried it have seen the excitement in your students’ faces.

Peril: Who cares?

As with all technologies, there are drawbacks. We say that these webs are public and that our students will have audiences, but as my colleague CJ once wrote to me,

The awful, terrible, mind-sucking truth...

Is that nobody out there wants to read student web pages. Nobody except the author and the teacher. Anyone who goes around surfing [student] assigned webs is either an undergrad who has to do it for an assignment, or a teacher who is getting paid to do it for one reason or anther (i.e., teaching, evaluating, giving one of those warm-fuzzy 'awards').

They can do webs on September 11, or pets, or A Clockwork Orange, or Yoga, or Wicca Covens I Have Known, or Marilyn Manson Lyrics Deconstructed -- whatever. Nobody's reading them, nobody wants to, why should they?

Might as well take their codex papers and tack them to telephone poles: as many people would read those as are reading their webs.

It's a conceit, a construct, a space and place for writing, and for creating video/audio "cool stuff" that is only cool for a moment, and then nobody cares

CJ has a funny way of making her point, but you get her drift. I think, though, she admits that if the exercise of making web pages does nothing else, it creates a SPACE and a PLACE for writing, one unlike the printed essay papers that we assigned for years, and for that reason, I think students might have more fun putting writing on the web. Remember that fun, curiosity, and play, when harnessed to learning objectives, can be extremely effective educational methods. Overall, the web is a more interesting and versatile space for new and different kinds of writing.

Peril: Too many people care!
We could also talk for days about what students put on the Web that they shouldn't. Of course, you have heard about the two middle schoolers arrested for putting threats against the president in email, but the most recent phenomenon for self disclosure are social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace. Now, thousands of young people are putting their pictures, their likes and dislikes, and even their weirdest fantasies online for all to see. I guess the premise is that they will make friends this way. But we all know about unintended consequences, right? Think about the prospective employer, or a future mother or father-in-law who pulls up the person in question on facebook and finds more than he or she wants to know about the person's sexual preferences, political leanings, or taste for scatalogical language. Take a look, later, when you have a chance, at articles such as "Facebook: A Little Too Much Out There," "Teens at Risk on Social Web Sites," "Clean Up Your Digital Dirt Before it Trashes Your Job Search," and "Teens Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools"for a more in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and its dangers. But is it all dangerous? A group of electronic portfolio researchers I am part of is investigating how we might harness some of the motivating features of these social networking sites to educational purposes as part of, or links from, electronic portfolios.

Promise: Basic instruction in netiquette teaches online communication conventions. Who or what is Netizen?

Don't even get me started on the crazy email addresses our students come up with, like buttmonkey43@hotmail, because guess what employers will think of an applicant with that address, if for some reason they don't filter it out as junk mail? Email expectations of students and teachers recently made the headlines in "To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me", a scathing article about the lack of politeness in students' emails to their teachers featured in the New York Times. Teachers complain bitterly about how students show no respect for them in their email messages, but where are students supposed to learn these conventions?

I think that in the future, as e-mail becomes an even more normal part of our lives, schools, and work, we will need to spend some part of the elementary and secondary education helping students to communicate effectively on e-mail. Not only do they need coaching on basic forms of business communication, like the memo, they also need some instruction and discussion of the rules of netiquette. That is, network etiquette, the rules of the road for the information superhighway. Even at the university level and beyond, we see people making stupid mistakes in e-mail, such as not signing a name to the message, not specifying a subject heading, writing in all capital letters, and not using a spell checker, to name a few. But is it their fault if we do not address these rules anywhere in our educational system? How and when do our students learn the conventions of this ever more popular form of communication? How can we train them to become effective, safe citizens on the network, or netizens?

Yesterday, in a cold sweat, I woke at 6 AM and rushed to the keyboard to capture what I thought was an epiphany about netizens, because they are not just good worker bees, propogating safe and commercial Internet traffic:

Netizen is timebound. Netizen must respond and react, change and grow. Netizen must be able to respond to changing times, kairos and phronesis. Netizen must stay open and awake, responding to the day to day changes of a world driven mad, driven schizophrenic, driven to be contingent and morphing by the day to day needs of the insistent voices, commercial and social, on the net/web. Composition is becoming the remix of the chatter of voices that come at us, hourly and daily, on the net, digested and spit out. That is writing, or a version of it. The horror, the horror!

In the book I am currently supposely writing, Netizen, I will make the connection between the rhetorical concept of ethos, or authority and credibility, and responsible behavior in online discussion groups. We know that certain people are respected and trusted in online conversation, but why? I'll provide a historical perspective, examples, and some guidelines.

Peril: Spam, scams, hoaxes and phishes!

Yes, I know what you are thinking; through e-mail we get all the different varieties of spam, unwanted information in e-mail including scams, virus hoaxes, embarrassing ads for sexual products, and other bothersome intrusions into our lives. And more and more of us are getting "phishing" emails from the family members of rich deceased foreign officials asking us for our help to free up millions of dollars of an inheritance by using our bank accounts, as well as pleas to write our elected officials about some new threat to PBS funding or a new tax on emails. These and other hoaxes have been spreading around the Internet for more than a decade. Of course, we need to remind ourselves and our students to keep using hoax detection websites such as the Snopes.com: Rumor has it page before responding to or spreading these time and bandwidth-wasting messages.

However, if this spam is part of the media-saturated world we live in, and just another feature of the information overload we all feel at times, isn’t it better at least to discuss the issues with our students, look at age-appropriate examples, and perhaps brainstorm some coping strategies? I can think of no better starting point for discussions of crucial skills, such as time-management and organization strategies, than the question of how to deal with e-mail overload (hint: just hit the delete key!)

And yes, there are some major drawbacks to e-mail: the fact that wit, humor, and sarcasm are extremely difficult to get across appropriately in electronic text, and can easily be misconstrued, but the earlier we discuss these possible pitfalls with students, the better.

Promise: New input systems can teach us new ways to think about writing

On a different, but related topic, in the future we’ll also need to consider what writing becomes when we change the input and output devices and media. Some fascinating innovations have emerged from technologies originally designed for the disabled. Take, for example, the voice recognition input systems, created for the physically impaired, but more and more used by those with repetitive stress injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome. How does the writing process, the process of composing, change when we have to speak our words into a microphone instead of typing them onto a screen? Does the style of writing change, just as we feel it must change when we use Microsoft word and we try to obey the red and green squiggles under our phrases? (Elsewhere, I call this the Microsoftening of the language) Indeed, to what degree are the technologies we use changing what can be said and how it can be said?

Another good example of a technology originally designed for the disabled and now used for mainstream students is the chat software that would allow hearing impaired students to have real-time discussions in their writing classes at Gallaudet University. Trent Batson, the creator, originally called it Electronic Networks for Interaction, or ENFI for short, but it spread like wildfire even through writing classes of hearing students in programs such as the Deadalus Integrated Writing Environment. Batson and others realized that when you have students chatting in writing, you have created a collaborative idea generator, with students reading each others’ ideas and building upon them in writing. When they can see the words of others, they remember them better and can do a more thoughtful job of composing responses, or so the theory goes. And one of the biggest advantages is that the teacher can save a transcript so that everyone can refer to it. The text remembers. Further, through guided role playing in these chat environments, some teachers have had success getting students to imagine what it is like to be in the shoes of different historical and fictional characters. Chat offers so many opportunities for brainstorming and prewriting that we can’t discount it as a mere distraction.

So, as you see more and more of your students feverishly instant messaging away in the lab, even when you are trying to get something else done, shouldn’t you be thinking about ways to harness that energy into productive activities for class? As computers become ubiquitous and students of all ages come to us more and more at home with them, teachers have to become more imaginative; they have to come up with more fun, but still productive activities using the technologies.

Peril: Instant Messenger shortcuts bleed into academic writing

An interesting by product of the instant messenger culture is the proliferation of “shortcut” words, such as the use of the number 2 for T-W-O, and the letter R for A-R-E to speed up typed conversation. Secondary school teachers have noticed these shortcuts filtering into students’ written work more and more over the last few years, and are not sure what to do about it. Further, smileys, also known as emoticons, are creeping into formal schoolwork too. In the case of "Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers" (you will need to have an account with the New York Times to see the article, but registration is free) the teachers are fighting a battle against these crude incursions into the territory of standard written English. However, how long can we fight it? At what point does convention take over and the language irrevocably change? Yes, teachers in the future will have to redouble their efforts to teach the conventions, but they must also teach students the value of using different conventions for different audiences. The shortcuts and misspellings are probably fine among friends, but try using them with a potential boss and you will never get the job. As chat communities and discourse conventions on the Internet change, teachers need to understand the jargon and the context in order to intervene effectively at the right point. See "Text-messaging and IM: The bane of English teachers everywhere or harmless shortcut between friends?" for more on the IM phenomenon in English classes.

Promise: Planning for the new Internet and new Internet devices

I know I am running out of time, so I want to close by suggesting the ways in which future innovations of hardware and software, coupled with the wired and wireless Internet, will change the ways we work, play and communicate, and therefore change the ways we educate. I know that advances in technology will make the wireless laptops cheaper and more efficient, but the innovations (such as the T-Mobile Sidekick, the Samsung Palm-based PDA Phone,and the new Motorola iTunes Rokr cell phone) I want to talk about are even smaller, on the level of your cell phone, your digital camera, your personal digital assistant,your iPod, and your global positioning system, all rolled into one. We are talking about digital convergence and ubiquitous computing, everywhere around you and even in your car and appliances, but barely noticeable. These new appliances will be incredibly portable, and they will allow you to choose to receive automatic electronic coupons and invitations from businesses you are near, transmit photographs with the longitude and latitude encoded, check your e-mail, listen to your tunes, surf the web, and much more. I’m hoping that these new appliances will help me match names to faces at cocktail parties, because I’m bad at that!

Speaking of size, because size does matter, we have not quite licked the input problem, as keyboards are still pretty bulky, but have you tried the type that folds up? We may need to move on to higher levels of voice recognition input, of the type envisioned in the Star Trek series [COMPUTER: END KEYNOTE SPEECH!], or perhaps completely virtual keyboards activated by gloves that you wear. The Internet will be the web that binds all of these appliances and allows them to transmit data to and receive data from servers, and, most importantly, directly from other users. Just as the electric power grid is being revolutionized by independent producers with their own hydro turbines or windmills, so will the future internet be an even more decentralized but enabling web of personal connections and contributions. If such a future is in store for our students, how can we make the best use of our resources to prepare them for such a webbed world? I think that the least we can do is to teach critical Internet literacy by encouraging projects that not only challenge and critique current Internet resources, but also put our students in the role of producers of webbed information. We also need to find creative ways to balance the virtual activities with approaches that cultivate and enrich face-to-face personal interaction.

So, I look around me in public places like NIU and the airport, and I see these tiny mobile technologies in use all around me. People are rocking to their own tunes on their IPods, or talking to their own friends and family on their cell phones, or text messaging or playing tiny games on these same tiny phones when we are trying to teach them. I often wonder about how many cases of repetitive stress injuries to the thumbs the doctors are seeing now! But one thing I notice is the isolation: people seem less likely to talk to each other since they are mediating their experience, altering their reality with tiny electronic devices. So my final question is about isolation versus engagement. How can we, teachers of English and Communication, help our students learn to use these technologies, which now include the internet and all the perils of the dotcom mentality, to engage with each other rather than isolate themselves from the world? Let's think about it as we go back to our classrooms and teach.

That’s all the time we have. If you are interested in what I had to say today, please visit the website, and share it with those who could not be here. And be sure to e-mail me if you have questions that I do not answer today.

Thanks!

Link to John Knapp's presentation, "A Lo-Tech Collaborative Idea Generator"

Created by Michael Day
March 2, 2006
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