It's What All the Cool Kids Are Doing

Of course, it's possible for me to dislike an idea, even to disagree with it, without necessarily thinking it's wrong. Just let me say that now.

J. Elizabeth Clark's article makes me flip-flop so much I feel...spin-ny. 

So ok, Clark and I started off on the wrong foot. She stated, "almost every facet of our personal and professional lives has shifted to new uses of communicative technology. With the pervasiveness of Web 2.0 comes a shift in our cultural norms" (27; emphasis mine). I'm a little wary of the assumption of "ourness", because it seems to oppose a "not ourness." Who is silenced in the assumption that there is a cultural and technological "us"? Teaching at community college, I've had many students who have never even typed a paper on a computer, let alone had fluency with email or internet. Does that mean they are not part of "our" culture? That they are abnormal? Maybe they are, by a strict definition of the term, abnormal--but what harm do we do them by insinuating that such people are not "21st Century" enough? Do they become invisible because they are not part of "our" culture as Clark conceives of it? 

However, Clark won me back a little bit with her John Dewey-love, and her interest with "the civic importance of education" (28). (I was also enamored with her history lesson on page 28—history minor, right here). In fact, I would have liked her to focus more on her definition of education for civic participation. I'm not satisfied with her insistence that we make “the now” our central focus. (Again, I wanted more explanation. My first instinct was to smart off about that very history section I just praised: jeez, for someone who's all about pushing “the now,” she seemed to have found something interesting in the “then,” didn't she?) I'm pretty sure she's not equivocally cutting off the past as a realm with nothing to offer us as teacher or our students as learner. But what is she saying about “now,” exactly?

I suppose most of my actual evaluation of Clark's proposals is dependent on how they are approached. For example, she seems to believe in the great success of Second Life as a teaching and learning space: “In my Composition 1 class, I am using Second Life as an environment for the equivalent of digital field trips for my students, and I base writing assignments around these field trips.” My gut response to this is a mild form of despair; why not take real trips, to real places? (Don't beat me up over definitions of “real” at the moment; I'm going somewhere with this.) I suppose I can answer my own question, in that it's likely such “real” places don't always exist that can coincide with her assignments. As she continues, “As a class, we take field trips from our college's computer lab to different sites in Second Life that intersect with writing assignments.” But again, my initial reaction is displeasure. Why not compose writing assignments that can help students engage with the physical places and communities around them? Why make these interactions exclusively virtual? Clark might say that its because in the world of “the now,” learning to make connections in the virtual world are as important as any others. Or, she (or any other instructor answering the call to her pedagogical banner) might say that she uses these virtual connections as a means of teaching connection with all places, connecting the skills it takes to be a good Second Life neighbor with the skills it takes to be a citizen of our physical neighborhoods. I agree that the digital world can be a powerful mediating force for learning how to interact with the world. But for me to feel compelled by Clark's pedagogy, I would have to believe that the teaching going on is considered in this light, rather than simply as approaching digital literacy of and for itself alone, as the “now” way to live in the (virtual) world.