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Session L8

New Media Strategies for Writing Classrooms
reviewed by Joel Wingard
jwingard@moravian.edu

This was yet another “truncated” session: this time the session chair, Jaynelle D. Nixon, and the first listed speaker, Kevin O’Donnell of East Tennessee State U., were absent.

Speaker #2, Joannah Portman Daley of the U. of Rhode Island, said she would use an economic framework to look at a set of binary relationships within creativity, saying that creativity is highly valued in a knowledge economy but not so much in the classroom. A handout provided some examples of “old” and “new” economies, and the speaker said that students are put at a disadvantage by this binary, whereby what they do as digital natives is under-valued in the academy, which is dominated by digital immigrants or digital novices. The knowledge economy is too rigidly structured for “outside-the-box” creativity to be encouraged in school. Writing instruction, the speaker said, needs to go beyond the traditional text-based approach to embrace digital technologies because the current situation reinforces students’ belief that the digital creation they do isn’t “real” writing. The speaker offered the example of a social networking profile page as a new version of the traditional personal narrative essay. Her handout had lists of features of these two comparable assignments. This showed the traditional personal narrative as a stale, predictable, and clichéd piece of writing, in order to contrast with the “liberating” digital assignment. In addition, the speaker said, a social networking profile page instantiates a more sophisticated nature of “self” than does a text-only personal narrative.

Overall, this speaker made a careful and thorough case for the superior value of the social networking personal profile page – rhetorically, practically, and theoretically. But it was also, in the fashion of an academic paper, a belabored case.

The next speaker was Susan Achziger of the Community College of Aurora, Colorado. She described a Webfolio as a portfolio on a Webpage and offered the benefits thereof. She showed examples of her students’ Webfolios, each of which was compelling, and offered a discussion of the “how-to” of developing Webfolios. She also had excerpts from student evaluations that commented on their experiences with Webfolios.