Rhet. Comp. at the Nexus

This week’s readings were fantastic.  Dr. Selfe’s deft tour through the minefield of challenges facing composition educators was both broad and deep.  In only a few pages and with impressive evidence she presents a landscape including sweeping national initiatives, real and dangerous socio-economic divides facing access to technology and to education, informed warnings against ignoring technologies potential threat to our very humanity, and intramural squabbling within the Rhet. Comp. community.  Selfe accomplished all of this without a sense of imposing doom, but rather as challenges for educators to solve.  I long to write this well. 

Prensky’s two papers on the generational divide between a new generation of students steeped in computer use and the entrenched educational system seems more timely now when it was written in 2001.  The first day of class I showed Dr. Hocks a book, The Shallows, about how, because of “neuroplasticity,” Internet use is not only effecting young minds but older users too.  Pedagogies failing to adapt to these changes risk becoming moribund and obsolete.  It is not hard to imagine newer more flexible post-secondary educational institutions, schools like University of Phoenix, or Devry, adapting to these realities and becoming more attractive destinations for future students, especially if the job market rewards their skills more highly.

Selber’s article showed me how much effort needs to be invested to effectively harness the computer for educational goals.  As we have discussed in class, it is easy to think getting students wired will, as if by some magical osmosis, teach them to think, write and communicate better.  An un-controlled technology is more a problem for the educator than a solution.  Understanding and effectively using ever changing information technology takes vigilance, study, thinking, experimentation and hard work.

It is fascinating to see composition studies standing smack in middle of the intersection of such powerful changes in our lives.  I am indifferent to much scholarship because it seems passive, irrelevant and easily ignored.  Some PhD’s curiosity about some small corner of the world often isn’t enough to fire my imagination. The issues discussed in this week's reading bundle are different.  The challenges presented to comp. educators here are not overstated, they will only increase as technologies converge.  They are challenges facing our future as a nation, a culture and, agreeing with Dr. Selfe, even our humanity.