Despite my comparatively low membership in these sort of sites now, I make the rounds; I am aware, generally, of what-is-happening-on-the-internet. As a result of my past hyper-involvement I can use photoshop and I somewhat know html. I can make a funny picture and distribute it to all of my friends very, very quickly. I can also stumble upon funny pictures/videos/what-have-you and distribute. These are valuable skills, apparently, because my mother sends me chain e-mails that have a half-dozen funny pictures of walmart shoppers every day... whereas I found http://www.peopleofwalmart.com about a month ago on http://www.buzzfeed.com and posted a link on my facebook wall. After three days I was sick of it, I had moved on to bigger and better and funnier blogs that I would soon tire of, and so I delete all my mom's e-mails. She also likes to send me funny videos of people not using fireworks correctly-- as if I haven't been using youtube for years.
Despite my enthusiasm for all things internet, I remain a neo-luddite when it comes to incorporating it into education. I have never not grimaced as the insistence of posting to a class message board, enrolling in a listserv, or blogging. I find this sort of technology staunchly opposed to what we do in academia for two majors reasons: 1) No one cites sources here. And if they do, they're on news sites or blogs that are re-blogging. Aside from that, there is an absolute free-flow of information, ideas, media, and jokes. No one claims authorship. Look at wikis, chans, twitter even... 2) There is no professionalizing or standardizing of the internet. This is difficult because often class projects come in conflict with our private digital worlds, and that can be, speaking from experience, very threatening to students. Regardless-- these points are very important as I feel they are crucial to understanding how the digital world works. While I agree that this medium offers a lot of opportunity for generating and consuming and interpreting texts, it does so in a way that is decidedly un-academic... and I don't say this as an insult. I am not dismissing the low culture of the internet. Rather, it is an alternative culture. And academic efforts to reach it are, again speaking from experience, embarassing.
Internet: Serious Business.
Talk to any 19/20-year-old who has to do a discussion board post for a class or maintain a blog such as this.
More on point, perhaps: talk to any 19/20-year-old about CREATIVE projects like these multimodal examples Shipka talks about.
Trying to stay "relevant" is, to borrow from James, "the older generation confused, frustrated, and taking out their sense of displacement on youth."
Most on-point section of this blog post:
In response specifically to Takayoshi et. al., I understand the need to expand analytic skills to multimodal texts. Authoring though? This brings up an entire slew of problems, related to the two issues I emphasize above....
Additionally, if engaging with multimodal texts somehow enhances one's standard rhetorical and writing skills-- then doesn't the opposite work as well? That is, if we focus on writing and developing critical thinking skills in the way that we do currently, will it not come to affect the way students engage in all forms of media. What I am saying is, even if we do not specifically, say, dissect a movie in class, won't the skills one learns from dissecting a speech come to bear on movie-watching? /relevance
I realize that everything I've presented here figures me as somewhat of an opponent to these texts we read specifically for today's class. This is, for all intents and purposes, a rant... And I apologize for the unfocused nature.
What I would like is for these two institutions to remain separate. Perhaps I am a purist. In my writing classes, I'd like simply to write... And on the internet, I'd like to re-blog a video of a dog going down a waterslide.
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