Evolving Technologies, Changing Teachers
Because as a writing teacher I understand writing necessarily as an organic, transformative process, and because it is impossible to ignore the intense relationship students have with their computers, I find myself quite naturally drawn to the fluid landscape and "kaleidoscopic powers of the computer," (Murray) sensing that its flexibility and interactive capabilities will re-energize my students' deep and sustained relationship with writing and the world.
 

 

 

We have taken only the smallest of steps in bringing down the walls of the classroom through web technology. Further explorative work is needed to promote an organic, necessary transformation of the relationships between writer and audience, writer and teacher, and writer and process.  Further work is needed to promote faculty and institutional acceptance of the notion of collective intelligence, of the value in eliminating the hierarchical model of education. Instead of isolating learning as the act of an individual journeying through defined stages of a process, we have demonstrated learning as a vibrant act of collaboration through written, linked continuous online communication. We are not subsumed by computer technology if we use it to provide networks between learners, conduits within the student-centered classroom; we are enriched by it.  We are finding our way through the labyrinth, together.

The Knowledge Tree Assignment

 
Writing Across the Arts