Posted for Mark

Mark Johnson
Blog 11

First, I must comment on something of which I am all too aware: I picked a really bad time to become a teacher. Imagine—for all of you young, inspiring, future teachers reading this—growing up in a time when computer s were, in existence, yes, but huge and scary and almost something from science fiction books. Now imagine starting teaching career years later and trying to play catch up. I mean it is not that I have no aptitude for today’s technological wave. I am carried along the artery of perpetual advancement into the future with the rest of you. My only disadvantage is having come from one very different era and ending up in this cyber-techno world; your advantage is that you do not know the comparison between the two eras.
Herrington’s and Moran’s tour, through the blindingly fast “evolution” of our writing systems, has forced upon us--however reluctantly for many older folks —the need for a newer pedagogy. I mean, imagine how educators used one system for long periods of time. Now it seems the beginning of a perpetual need for a changing pedagogy at a rapid rate and smaller intervals of time between newer systems. This, my friend, is the negative to all of the presupposed virtues of the great wizard, the great “Apollonius” of our time, technology (Keats). And this, this, would prove the division between the relic teachers of print composition and the windfall of technology.
We are fortunate, though, to witness writing in a multi-dimensional way. What tools we have with classroom equipped with computer labs, networking ideas across the once seemingly unbridgeable chasms of distance, culture, time. Everything is at the writers fingers. But do the basics of composition even have a place today? I am alleging that they should. Are we witnessing “better” or more capable writers today, even with all of the tools out there?
For all you perspective teachers, consider Vitgotsky’s “cultural tools”. I think we can consider the technology we are using and beginning to use in writing education as some of these tools. The question as to whether or not these “tools” have a place in a child’s cognitive development or not does not so much concern my thinking on this subject as does how much of these tools should make up the greater portion of a child’s cognitive development. Well, like it or not—as far as you “older” educators are concerned—these tools have a definite place.
The social aspect of writing, the seemingly limitless meaning of expressing meaning—as with the hyperlink access of students which the chapter describes, most certainly leaves little room for lack of imagination for the student writer. Or does it?