 | "Our increasing use of technology has changed our reading and writing practices. This townhall focuses on those changes engendered by technology. How have the multiple forms of electronic texts changed our understanding of composing? By what processes are we building these understandings into our writing instruction? Portfolios, hypertext, synchronous and asynchronous communal texts, and 'the database essay' all have a place in this discussion." |
Michael Day -
Dene Grigar -
Johndan Johnson-Eilola -
Jim Kalmbach -
Becky Rickly -
Paul Taylor -
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Jim Kalmbach – "Technologizing Pedagogy"
I believe that the key to understanding the impact of technology on pedagogy is to simultaneously embrace two opposing thoughts:
- Technology changes nothing about pedagogy
- Technology everything about pedagogy
In The Computer and the Page, I documented publishing-in-the-classroom activities in every decade from the 1880s to the present. From letterpress print shops associated with progressive elementary schools to typewritten publications to mimeo to ditto masters to offset to photocopy machines to laser printers to the Web, the technologies have changed but the fundamental pedagogical activities have stayed the same. At the same time each of these technologies had/has its own sets of social, rhetorical, and technical issues. The teaching is always different and always the same.
From this view, one of the central roles of technology in the classroom is to provide an ever-changing ground in which to explore the central issues of teaching. Each new technology provides a new opportunity to ask ourselves, "Why do that? What is added to the classroom? What is lost?" Just as each successive generation of readers misreads or reinterprets literary texts in terms of its own issues and concerns, so too, successive generations of teachers use new forms of technology to revisit central issues in pedagogy from new perspectives. Technology is way of exploring or acting out the major debates about the nature of teaching and learning.
 
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