with the edges sawn off
I’m looking forward to reading Kathleen Blake Yancey’s report on writing in the 21st century, but I am holding off for now as I’m a bit tired from working late at the UWC. But while it’s on my mind, I wanted to relay a post from my friend Matt regarding Second Life.
More specifically, this:
I’m really just thinking in general terms here, but I believe the real advantage of Second Life is not that students can move to a university, walk to class, then log in to the virtual world, but rather that this can be done from home.
Right. Not to denigrate Matt’s reaction here, but this is a very practical reaction to something that a lot of us look at as a novelty or something that might be useful for teaching our students to write because, well, it’s electronic. So I can relate to his response to this sort of thing.
I should also mention that I attended a lecture this afternoon delivered by David Bordwell, who is apparently a pretty big deal in Film/Lit circles. Bordwell was great, but the gist of his talk (or at least what I saw of it before I had to go to work) was basically this: digital filmmaking techniques–like anything else–are adapted rather piecemeal and only where they make sense. That is, the “digital revolution” hasn’t reinvented the way we make movies, but it has made a lot of things possible that previously weren’t. Makes sense to me.
I think I’ll leave this post open-ended for now, but I’m guessing Yancey’s point is that we ought to encourage composition in any way we can. And although I am probably generally more interested in all things digital than your average English major, I remain skeptical of these so-called multiple literacies–at least as long as our students are (in their other classes and in their eventual professions) expected to write. At any rate, something I will no doubt be thinking about in the next few days.
