Teaching Years Ago
As readers of Kairos know, the world in which we teach is a vastly different place, as a result of the many changes that technology has brought us. For those like myself who have been in the classroom for ten or more years, we live, for better or worse, in a brave new world. The greatest of these changes is the more common body of knowledge and skills that students and teachers who have adequate access to hardware, software, and bandwidth report. This knowledge is often described as "computer literacy" (though, of course, this term is problematic). As a result, there's a sense of openness to the use of technology in our classrooms. This was not the case in the early days of my teaching in the late eighties. Then, every technological innovation in the classroom had to be paid for (instructionally speaking) in terms of classroom time.
Of course, in many classrooms, many of the innovations of teaching with technology were impossible because the technology itself didn't exist in a given institutional situation. For these teachers, the virtual classroom simply wasn't an option. For those of us with support, however, the problem of teaching the technology was doubly complicated. There was (and is) concern that teaching the technology somehow is not the concern of the English teacher, and there was a lack of good materials. I remember a time when most of my students did not have access to any computer-based technology; now most of them have computers at home, though they may be older models with inadequate storage space. And slower connections are still the norm, at least in my university community.
