Rethinking
The Academy:Rethinking
The Academy:Of course, not all students find the whole experience of being in a non-traditional classroom liberating and exhilarating; many, especially those who have had little or no computer training previously or who lack access to their own or school computers and therefore little time to practice during the class's course, can find the experience and the need to meet the class requirement a seeming impossible situation.
For these students, the requirement to produce a web page - with its concurrent technologies of unix commands and ftp programs - can be so daunting as to provoke the student to drop the class, whether officially or no. That is, students - especially at-risk students who have historically had even less experience and access to technology than middle-class students - can simply disappear during the semester, refusing to read e-mail from the instructor.
For courses like English composition, which are really courses in negoitating the university system, there is little time enough to teach citation skills, research, and writing. The addition of technological skills and requirements to the mix of skills already required to produce the traditional research paper may in fact prove to counter-productive, again especially to students who are already at-risk and underprepared.
Last Modified: August 2, 1996
Copyright © 1996 by Keith Dorwick
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