SB:
What is different (weird OR comfortable) in this space for you now as a teacher? What is your comfort level now, after that experience, with "electronic publishing," for students? What did you learn that was monumental, if anything? What will you do differently next time, if anything?
WB:
Well, seeing what my students can accomplish encouraged me to try to do more. I now have a digital camera and I'm trying to learn how to work with images myself (I have an undergraduate degree in studio art/photography from 100 years or so ago, in terms of technology), and I hope to make the time to have a student teach me a bit about web design. Using Blackboard has been good--I'm better at setting up and facilitating discussion there--I had to learn to design my syllabi for the Blackboard not just post something flat out there. At the same time, I don't have Ethernet at home and the use of Blackboard has in some ways doubled my teaching and on-task time--I've always multi-tasked, now I don't wonder if I'm quadruple-tasking and some days, I think, "Is this really any way to live?" The digital camera required a new computer and big 17-inch flat screen for my aging eyes. All this involves a pretty steep learning curve when some days I want to be writing poems into my private journal (and I'm torn and no longer torn--I want that palm pilot/I don't want it). So I live in a continuous swirl of emotional, scholarly, pedagogical reactions to technology.
Work Cited
Bishop, Wendy. "Inventing the Writing Center (or Roads Taken by Rebels with Causes)." Printed in Southern Discourse 5.3
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