The Lamppost Blog

A new semester is starting, and with it the opportunity to re-think the way I structure courses. And since the Ontario English curriculum has been recently updated, there’s even more impetus for me to rework courses from the ground up. Naturally this process includes considering how best to integrate blogging into the English courses I’ll be teaching. Bud Hunt’s September 2007 English Journal column “Linkin’ (B)Logs: A New Literacy of Hyperlinks” has encouraged me to ask myself: am I teaching students to write with blogs, or am I teaching blogging, with all of the possibility that this new technology offers for communication? I suppose that I have been taking writing online, without teaching students how to use features like hyperlinks to communicate in entirely new ways.

Jeff Utecht has given me another, related set of questions to think about when it comes to evaluating how technology – in this case blogging – is being used in the classroom:

What if we turned these stages of technology adoption into questions that an evaluator could use during the evaluation process?

1. Is the technology being used “Just because it’s there”?
2. Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in Old ways?
3. Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in New ways?
4. Is the technology creating new and different learning experiences for the students?

This could be a simple list that any evaluator can use to decipher how the technology is being used in a particular lesson.

I like those questions. I like wondering if I’m using technology to create new and different learning experiences.

And now to revisit those course plans and work towards a practice that achieves new and different learning experiences while working within the bounds of technology access, policy, and student learning goals.

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