Dànielle Nicole DeVossWriting, Rhetoric, and American CulturesDirector of Professional WritingMichigan State University

How have digital, networked technologies changed

?

the Internet, circa 1968

the Internet, circa 1989

the Internet, circa 1992

the web, circa 1993

the web, circa Monday, November 16, 2009

Monday, July 27, 2009 at 10:00am ESTTom has 264,987,947 friends on MySpace

Friday, October 16, 2009 at 2:07pm ESTTom has 268,880,678 friends on MySpace

Tom made 3,892,731friends in less than 3 months

93%

More than 300 million

active users.

More than 40 million status updates daily.

“ Elements of effective writing instruction can be amplified in networked spaces. What happens in blogging and in podcasting is these things that can seem almost imaginary to students become real.”

(Paul Allison)

“writing”(1,110,250 items)

“ From my perspective, [digital technologies are] not just something that helps kids improve their writing; they help the teachers be more effective teachers. And that has to have a payback to the kids. ”

(Joe Bellino)

• MULTIMODAL

Students worked with textual analysis and representation, wrote their own poetry, and selected images and audio to complement their poetry and connect their work to concrete specifics.

(Reva Potter)

“ Using these multimedia approaches to traditional subjects enables me to tap into the multiple intelligences of my students.

It forces me to learn, apply, and strategize new tools that may aid in my students’ learning of the traditional canon of the ELA (reading, writing, speaking, listening). ”

(Clifford Lee)

“They are so excited when they hear themselves reading their piece. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I wrote that. That’s my story. I’m a writer!’ ”

(Renee Webster)

Robert Rivera-Amezola

“ What I want to bridge is what is happening in the world today in terms of communication and what we believe should happen in the classroom. I would suspect that a lot of these kids will grow up not really writing [in a traditional sense], but having to learn to communicate in modalities that weren’t available to us when we were kids.”

Julian Marsano, an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn, New York, has his students develop media literacy through digital production.

Students engage critical thinking skills by selecting among and mixing digital resources to create public service announcements.

• June 2007: Stephanie Lenz posts 29-second recording of her son bouncing along to the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy”; uploads the video to YouTube

• June 2007: YouTube informs Lenz that it had removed the video from its website after Universal claimed that the recording infringed a copyright controlled by the music company

• under federal copyright law, a mere allegation of copyright infringement can result in the removal of content from the Internet

• Lenz consulted with the Electronic Frontier Foundation; video was reposted

fair use• protects criticism, commentary, news

reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research

• allows teachers and students to use copyright-protected work for projects, mash-ups, remixes, and more

• Media Literacy through Digital Production project was a Media Spot collaboration, designed to apply the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

Section 107

“ I’d love for this document to be a proclamation that students should be able to say whatever they want, whenever they want, in a responsible manner, and be treated as if they were responsible adults. But I realize that is a bit idealistic—and also likely to get me shut down…So, I need a practical policy that balances my concerns with the district’s.”

(Bud Hunt)

cover for July 2007 Redbook original photo

• Digital can be democratic

cell phone pic taken and posted to twitterin Tehran, Iran (June 2009)

CNN journalists told not to leave their offices on threat of arrest

state-run media continued to note minimal problems with“a few hooligans”

400 new tweets every minute

5864 letters were written,representing 205 schools

in 2008, students were asked to write letters to the next president

project was co-sponsoredby the National WritingProject and Google