99-Year-Old Woman Uses iPad

99-Year-Old Woman Uses iPad

In other news:

• Asian Drives to Destination without Mishap
• Black Teen Graduates High School
• Woman Changes Light Bulb and Car Tires

To be clear, I don’t mean to belittle people’s disadvantages and social hardships–just commenting on how the rhetorical intent or move to liberate, because of the spectacle, can actually become socially counterproductive.  This whole thing does get me thinking about the assumptions we have about technology/new media and demographics–kind of in the same patronising vein as talk… ing… ve… ry… slow… ly… for… E… S… L… stu… dents… (because we all know that they have to watch Hollywood movies in slow motion to understand the dialogue).

The obvious pedagogical lesson here might be: Thinking older students to be technologically illiterate could be a big oops.  But, more recently, I worked with a younger student on writing up sections of his e-folio for a class, moved on at my own pace, using new media jargon because I thought not only were we probably on the same wavelength, but he would probably teach me a thing or two, so I was just trying to “speak his language.”  Wrong.  And it pains me to think that I could have been making him feel stupid for not keeping up or understanding me.  And this is on top of what messages he might already be exposed to, through peers and mass media, that normalise a certain standard of new media literacy, which are definitely a huge pressure.  I apologised, offered him a Hello Panda chocolate snack, and the session moved on smoothly.  So, conversely, assuming our fresh-out-of-high-school students to all be multimodal multitaskers might also prove detrimental.  To reaffirm Nate’s reminder last Tuesday, the digital divide is alive and well.

Luddite No More

Over this past winter break from SFSU, I visited my mother in Connecticut for a few days and had the opportunity to check out a few of the local community colleges, namely Capital Community College and Manchester Community College. I was blown away by these shiny, new, and seemingly wired campuses. A computer in every classroom? Sure, maybe for Harvard, but I never dreamed I’d see that at community college. (The community college in California where I work doesn’t even have functional clocks and overhead projectors are a rare commodity.)  So naturally, when reading the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments, I was curious about the question of access to technology. According to the Position Statement, administrators should be responsible for ensuring access and, thus, bridging the “digital divide.” In the midst of California’s behemoth budget crisis, one would think wiring every classroom might not be at the top list of the administration’s priorities, but it is becoming increasingly clear to me, thanks to Michael Wesch’s The Machine is Us/ing Us and Andrea Lundsford’s Stanford research on students’ literacy habits  (discussed here) that there is no turning back. Literacy has changed and our students’ understanding of texts and communication goes far beyond the printed word. My tech eyes have been opened and I’m excited to see how I can capitalize on the interest and expertise in new media that our students bring to the class. I hope our community colleges in California get on board and find a way to meet new definitions of literacy with the material need for technological resources.