| C&W2001: "A Cyber Odyssey" Metaweb |
We are members, all of us, of multiple communities. We are parents, we are children, we are neighbors. Professionally, we are classroom teachers, students, program administrators, software designers, Web writers, and editors. We are members of National Writing Project sites, learning communities, curriculum committees, assessment teams, and personnel committees. In larger contexts we are members of and leaders in regional and national professional organizations associated with NCTE, MLA, IRA, and AERA. Some of us are fairly decent dancers to boot! ;-)
Current national debates and mandates call for the knowledge and expertise of this community, presented in forums like C&W conferences and Kairos, but also carried by each of us into the multiple communities to which we belong. Legislative demands for accountability, for example, open opportunities for regressive pedagogical practices (and epistemological assumptions) supported by technology. Branscomb outlines the dangers of content-delivery courses as opposed to constructivist-interactive virtual education. Even portfolios, which should foster student reflection and self-assessment, can – with the aid of technology – be appropriated by institutions (see Mullen, Bauer, Newbold). Increasing numbers of teachers, university faculty, and graduate students are confronting national as well as local demands for technological literacy and assessment thereof. As Glaros notes, "[t]oday, we face the challenge of making the concept of digital literacy and our students' learning of this literacy visible to our colleagues and our public." That is our charge.
Kairos 6.2 brings together diverse strands of our knowledge and suggests ways we can address the challenges we face. Our Townhall discussions, for instance, investigate tools we have used in the past, hypothesize about tools we will likely use in the future, and question our assumptions about how we define good teaching. Our CW2001 conference featured speakers, including Sree Sreenivasan and Gwyneth Jones, relate how technology, thinking, and written expression come together. Featured work in this issue from Beth Hewitt, Bob Yagelski, and Erin Smith respectively argues for a theory-generating stance toward OWI (online writing instruction), builds a nondualist pedagogy for writing and technology, and spotlights the challenges of reading/misreading in webtext environments. And the CoverWeb shares many perspectives revolving around the threads of assessment, distance education, electronic communication across the curriculum, gender theory, hypertext, K-16 instruction, and queer theory (we thank our strand coordinators for all their work!).
In fact, the pieces in the CoverWeb discuss many aspects of the technology question. Some provide overviews of key issues,
some document work which has been done in our various communities, and some suggest directions for the future. Read them. Read them all. And consider another voice: as we were thinking about the multiple voices in Kairos 6.2, another voice chimed in. The November 2001 issue of Technology & Learning features a look at the "Top 10 Technology Breakthroughs for Schools." Their list includes
- Virtual Learning
- Wireless Networking
- Collaboration Tools
- Digital Video
- Application Service Providers (ASPs)
- Handheld Devices
- Optical Networking
- Videoconferencing
- eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and
- Simulations.
Let's end this metaweb introduction to this issue with Gwyneth Jones' conclusion to her look at the interactive process of narration and technology. She writes:
Hawking idea about what might happen at the Big Crunch, when the universe stops expanding, time and space start going backwards, and all the rules are broken...) So, in my book, Kairos meant that the world was becoming imaginary. It was becoming something made of mind, made of the logos, the word. There were no web-based environments in the book, (I was writing in the nineteen eighties) but does that sound familiar...?
Maybe the strangest thing in my cyberodyssey is the way my business, the business of writing fiction has been – not developed, exactly, but deconstructed, by multi-user networks, and by people who think about them. You know, it worries me sometimes. I'm used to having secret characters in my head. My mind has been filled for years with layers on layers of constructed worlds, and imaginary people who seem to me like coherent and satisfying separate selves, even though I have no way of knowing where they 'really' come from, (short of getting myself psychoanalyzed); and I can never arrange to meet them out here, under the clock, wearing a red rose. Or in the airport concourse, wearing a yellow tee-shirt ... I think I can handle my multiple selves, and keep hold of my reality principle. It's my trade. But what about all these amateurs, taking risks they don't understand? Making up elaborate fantasy worlds used to be a professional artform, or a secret, esoteric hobby. Now it's all over cyberspace. What's going on?
Maybe what's going on is a learning process. When I invent my fictional characters, these independent facets of my self, clothed in edited and enhanced versions of my life experience, and let them loose into the basic architecture of the plot, I know what I'm doing. I'm making explicit what happens in my mind all the time. I know, because modern neuroscience tells me so – and also because I feel it – that I'm not one self. I am many, and some of the versions of me are very, very old: but still alive, still demanding to have their needs satisfied in quite unexpected ways (as I discovered when I started playing computer games.) Arguably, storytellers have always had to know how people's minds work. We have theorized about it less, in different cultures or in different times, but intuitively nothing changes there. What seems to me new, is the way I've been joined by much a larger group of people who now understand about the multiple selves, and how that aspect of storytelling works. Is this a final development? Are we leaving stories behind, and heading for some kind Platonic republic, where no one needs art, because everybody can do that for themselves? I don't know. But reading and writing used to be privileged, hermetic activities, regarded as unnatural powers, otherwise known as magic. You have to be able to spell, to cast a spell.
In our time we believe (in principle at least) that everybody should learn to read and write. Maybe knowing how to build and manipulate constructed worlds, deconstructed selves, is the next step, and will come to seem, in the future, equally a basic right, a basic human skill.
As the Internet becomes more and more like television, full of sound and vision, we lose the strange, stripped-down immediacy of a world made of words. And paradoxically, inevitably, as the applications of computer technology get more and more sophisticated, agency slips out of our hands. As one of the characters in my computer novel Escape Plans puts it, 'Power is not when the machine understands you. Power is when you understand the machine.' I'm a long way from any chance of that now. And meanwhile, the woods are burning. That's becoming obvious, a lot more obvious than it was twenty years ago, even in your great country, where the smoke had so much more space to disperse. But even here, in the poisoned world, I'm confident, because of what I've seen in my life so far, that there will be a new cutting-edge, a new growing-point where agency will be restored. Narrative and technology will continue to be entangled, whatever forms they take. Books might disappear, writing won't. When live-action fictional experience can be delivered straight to the brain, when the printed words of the story have been entirely subsumed, buried deep as Boolean algebra (if that time should ever come), we'll still be making our marks on the world, and still trying to understand ourselves, and each other, through all these things we make up; the stories we tell.
We look forward to seeing you when everything is back to Normal. The dance continues.
Linda Hanson and Rich Rice
http://www.bsu.edu/cw2001
