bleckb said: "I'm also starting to think that the more we focus on digital text production when students lack the ability to read or produce a traditional text, an essay, that we do them a disservice." My concern echoes his, and make me wonder: if we focus on multimediated literacies, who gets left out?

I'm worried that the folks who get left out are the ones who can't read and write in the traditional sense. Everytime there's a discussion about new media, it takes place in relatively old media, words that build sentences that build paragraphs (sorta) and build essays, in the Montaigne-esque sense of the word. These are the essays in our print journals, newspaper editorials and the like.

Those who would be left out, I fear, are the already marginal and marginalized students, those who show up at the community colleges (nearly half of all starting higher ed students in America, maybe more), the regional and small public colleges--usually former teachers colleges--attended more by working and lower middle class students who lack mobility.

The elites will always get on well enough, but those on the lower rungs are the ones who not only won't/don't get the necessary support and teaching in a traditional sense as budgets are constantly being trimmed, but they'll also be left further behind in a multimedia environment. One way I've seen it put is the students who need the elite teachers don't get them, and the students who get the elite teachers don't need them nearly so much.

It would be great to have the Peter Elbows and Cindy Selfes of the world(not to pick on anyone. These are just names that popped through my fingers onto the screen) of the world working with the students who need what those people have to offer, but instead they are at prominent colleges and universities while no-names such as myself work with the students who would benefit most from the best teaching has to offer. Yeah, these folks "train the trainers" but that still keeps the lower classes at the mercy of the upper classes. I think my leftist leanings are coming out here.

I don't mean this to disparage the work that I and others do as no-names, because I know we do a lot of good things, but the system is skewed, as if it isn't obvious, in favor of the "already haves." It's something of a play on the rich get richer, and the poor struggle just as much as ever in just about every arena to hold their heads above water upon which the rising tide floats the yachts of the wealthy. Okay, that's a mutilated metaphor, but you get the gist.

I'd better stop and go for a bike ride, or work on my national novel writing month project, before I bum myself out here!

bradley || bleckblog.org

As long as pay is low for teachers at two-year schools, we will not get elite professors working with those who can really benefit from them. I live and teach in Florida, where education problems seem to thrive in the humidity and tropical heat like kudzu, and just finding a director for the English department at our university was a near-impossible task, mainly because the state refuses to fund its public colleges and universities and one cannot attract the elite when their salaries will barely cover the mortgage payment. What is most painfully obvious is the divide (I call it the literacy gap) between high school and college students. Reading at the secondary level is not a priority here. Once a student hits the benchmark in their FCAT Reads testing, they are no longer encouraged to read and thus the only reading they actually do is on Facebook or MySpace. Then, when freshmen enter my classroom, they have great blogging skills (a major change from four years ago) but their writing, frankly, sucks. I have to work some sort of literature into my composition courses just so they get an idea of what formal language is like. I have them read scholarly journals. We are currently working on ethics in literary biography, which seems to help, although I still meet with resistance to reading with some students who simply state "I just don't read," to which I answer, "well, how do you manage to study for your other classes?" I never seem to get a good reply.
I am "old skool" literate. I grew up in a different era. Technology seems to have stolen the written word from us, but maybe I'm being pessimistic. I tend to get cranky because I am old.