The implication of this comment, and others like it, is that students don't get anything new or different from the net, and further, that using class time for online activities takes away from learning and teaching time, or pulls the focus of the classroom away from critical thinking and rhetorical strategies for argument. Although these assumptions irritated me at the time, I had to admit to myself that in my early forays into online teaching, it was possible to say that students didn't get much, if anything, from the net that they couldn't have gotten in the classroom. I personally liked technology (and still do); I wanted to teach online and so I did, sometimes without really thinking through the pedagogy of those experiences.
Ironically, however, the detractors of teaching technology encouraged me to continue to teach online in order to find ways to prove them wrong. I began to look more deliberately for ways that students could get something valuable and unique from being online as part of their writing instruction. I stumbled across a somewhat oversimplified "formula" for incorporating online technology into composition, and used this formula to put synchronous communication to work for me and my students.
What follows are the results of some of my experiences
-- an attempt to answer detractors of online teaching by demonstrating
how students' online work contributed to their writing skills in ways directly
related to many common program goals. It
is possible to follow the text in a linear mode by using the "next" and
"back" buttons at the bottom of each page, or to read it as an associative
presentation of ideas.
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