Luddites+Among+Us+12-05-08

12-05-08  =Luddites Among Us = = =  At RHAM High School, I used to work with a guy a generation older than me who had just begun using computers. The veterans told stories of when he didn’t even own a phone. When we moved into a new building, members of the English Department tried to help him set up his voicemail. When the phone beeped, my friend shouted, [|“Abandon hope all ye who enter here!”] So much for the redemption of that Luddite!

Luddite refers to [|Ned Ludd], a folkloric figure reputed to have destroyed weaving machines that had replaced human workers. I find that he’s referred to humorously by many teachers as a quasi-hero, someone to emulate for his dedication to human as opposed to mechanical (or technological) enterprise. It’s a nice romantic ideal that is tempting in some ways to subscribe to, but I find the idea of being a Luddite quaint and anachronistic, and I believe that educators’ idealization of such a figure is detrimental to education.

I straddle the technological divide. I grew up with television but remember having a black and white set with a handful of channels. I was eight when we got cable, and the channel box was a bulky plastic thing with switches that was literally on the end of a long brown cable. In high school, mine was the first freshman class to have a required computer course. It was one quarter long. I learned to type on a manual typewriter with Brother Benjamin, who timed us by the clock on the far wall and rang a desktop bell to signal us when to stop. Mine was the last freshman class at UConn without a computer course required for graduation. When I wrote for //The Daily Campus//, we typed our articles on Macintosh computers but still laid out the pages on boards with wax sealant. In grad school, I was introduced to computers in our research methods class, where I first used email and the internet. That course took place only sixteen years ago. Today, my students think I’m a tech-savvy old guy because I have a facebook account, I blog, I maintain wikispace pages for my courses, and I even do a little webdesign.

Personally, I feel like I still straddle that divide between what [|Marc Prensky] calls Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. In two seminally important articles in the field of educational technology titled "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" and "Do They Really //Think// Differently?" Prensky uses an immigration metaphor to describe the divide between those of us who grew up without technology and those of us who grew up with ubiquitous technology. (The articles are posted below). Our students are the digital natives, those who understand technology implicitly and who adapt to its advances with mental plasticity. Most of us, their teachers, are immigrants, newcomers to the shores of technology. Some of us hole up in intellectual and educational ghettos where we never have to use the language of this new land, while others of us venture into the new world and try to acquire the new language, even though it means letting go of our cherished customs and perhaps never acquiring the fluency of the next generation.

When I was a graduate student at [|Humboldt State University] I taught a man named Pao who was [|Hmong], a preliterate group from Southeast Asia, whose family fled the [|Khmer Rouge]. He had spent his childhood in refugee camps. The first essay he ever wrote for me was about his grandfather teaching him to hunt with a poison blowdart gun. The second essay was titled “Coming To America,” in which he discusses the fear his elders experienced boarding an airplane, and the confusion of using a flush toilet. It took a four-year-old child to teach the elders how to use the toilet. Pao was in a position similar to the one I am in regarding technology. He wasn’t as overwhelmed and fearful as the elders, but he was not as adept and malleable as the children. I am not a digital native, but I make great effort to learn new technologies because I see no point in staying behind in the ghetto or the refugee camp.

One of the most frustrating things to me is the fear that I encounter when I do professional development. In one school where the [|Writing Center] and the Writing Project are helping to run a writing center, I suggested that the student tutors might create a facebook group for their writing center. The reaction couldn’t have been more extreme if I had suggested that we hire the antichrist. The administrators were certain that facebook was just a land of iniquity where students posted videos of drinking binges and photos of naked copulation. But they admitted they had never seen facebook. I’ve had similar conversations with other teachers. But this is fear born of ignorance. I have nearly two-hundred students among my friends in facebook, and I encounter very few inappropriate posts. It’s not the norm. In a recent //New York Times// [|article], researcher Mizuko Ito found that most wall posts on facebook were mundane; communications like “Hey, how’s it going?” dominated the posts. Ito concludes, “parental concern about the dangers of Internet socializing might result from a misperception. ‘Those concerns about predators and stranger danger have been overblown,’ she said. ‘There’s been some confusion about what kids are actually doing online.’”

When I posted this article on my facebook account, one of my former students wrote back, “Good article, but it leaves out the most productive uses of facebook, like the event organizing for helping Obama’s youth coalition to get involved. It’s not just about socializing.” I responded back that I have facebook groups for [|CWP Summer Institute alumni], [|a correspondence program between UConn undergrads and students in Egypt studying with a former student], and for planning [|an international conference for the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society].

So explain to me again why Ned Ludd should be such a hero to teachers?

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