I usually have a pretty deep appreciation for the perspective of luddites. The Lee Adamas of the world do much to temper the irrational enthusiasm for the new shiny of whatever technology tends to be making waves at the time. As much as I am enamored by technology, I understand that too often we try to throw technology at our problems without thinking about what new issues may arise.

However, I took particular interest in and disagreement with Chapman’s claim that “the nonlinearity of the reading experience, the widely acclaimed hypertext, undermines logical patterns of reading and thinking. The linearity of a written text is not a limitation, it is its glory” (249). Now, again, I’m all for linear texts. I think they absolutely have an important, fixed place in knowledge-making and I would never want to see linear text completely abandoned. On this, Chapman and I agree.

However, Chapman is mistaken that linear methods of thinking, reading, writing should be the privileged method. Nonlinear thinking allows us to find unintuitive connections between concepts or phenomena that purely linear, logical lines of thought would ignore out of convention. Nonlinear reading allows us to resist the designed nature of the linear text and approach it in ways that encourage alternative perspectives on the ideas presented therein. Hypertext allows us to approach text in a way that prioritizes individuals’ personal styles and allows one to think critically about how best to approach the text, since the writer is no longer leading the reader by the nose. Nonlinear writing forces the writer to consider the myriad ways in which their text may be accessed, which should (if the design is good) make the writer more cognizant of how their text is arranged.

So, yeah. Hypertext doesn’t privilege linearity. Big deal. Wanna fight about it?

My time in Second Life on Tuesday was a bit odd. When I created my account, I selected default everything to start, just so I could spend as much time as possible exploring what the program had to offer. I hadn’t played it since it first came out, and I remembered close to nothing about it, other than it was a kind of weird 3D chatroom. A good chunk of my time was spend trying to customize my avatar and trying to make it do something other than stand/run/fly, the commands for which were prominently displayed on the bottom of the screen. Commands for more complicated gestures seemed to be hidden within some sub-menus that took me half the class to find, and even then, when I found them, I didn’t have much drive to do anything but put on a silly outfit and dance like a fool. It was fun, but the distracting kind.

I can see Second Life potentially being helpful in the way that customizing an avatar can tell us a lot about the rhetorical choices one makes in self-representation in online spaces. I would probably opt for a more simplistic system than Second Life, which has a bit of a learning curve when it comes to changing one’s appearance. Even when I finally figured out how to change my clothing, I couldn’t preview the way anything looked without assigning it to my avatar, which overrode the last thing I wore. This made trying to find my preferred appearance a bit cumbersome.

As far as a place to conduct digital classroom discussions… A chatroom would be a lot easier and about as effective. The learning curve is far too high, and (unlike learning HTML), there really isn’t any long-term benefit to learning how to interact with Second Life. There are just better platforms that don’t require quite so much investment to use.

When authors focus on bringing games and playfulness into the classroom, I more often than not put on my Mr. Skeptical Hat. Bringing play into the classroom can be a really difficult endeavor, especially when we’re dealing with play mediated by technology. It’s difficult enough to get students to engage with new and shiny technologies, but if they see the activity as frivolous, they seem to be even less likely to engage. So while we may have the best of intentions with bringing the fun via new tech, it’s a really risky move. We see this in the Haas and Gardner piece, where they had to spend TWO WEEKS to essentially teach their students how to play a text adventure game. One class? Maybe two? I can totally see that being worthwhile, but two weeks eats up about half of one unit for me. I don’t have time for that, and neither do my students—especially considering the fact that they likely won’t have to interface with something like that ever again.

If we want to bring playful tech into the classroom, it needs to super accessible in terms of learning how to interface with it or there needs to be some legitimate transfer between learning the fun tech and learning useful tech.

*Teaching document design using Photoshop/inDesign
*Having students do on-the-fly research during discussions/debates
*Collaborative and simultaneous editing of documents in Google Docs
*Remediating written documents into audio formats using Audacity
*Creating board game components (boards, cards, figure designs)
*Editing Wikipedia

One of the themes that cropped up consistently between these articles is the barrier of complex user interfaces and hardware limitations in early word processing setups. It is difficult to imagine trying to compose a piece of writing on a screen that can only handle a few lines of text at a time—and I’ve grown up with computers my entire life. Compounding the difficulty of merely seeing what you want to write, there seemed to be a huge barrier to entry in learning keyboard shortcuts and functions to make the word processor copy, paste, format paragraphs, etc. I have a hard enough time teaching my mother how to Ctrl+C to copy, let alone trying to teach a whole class a suite of shortcuts that they’ll need to rearrange the texts they have produced.

The Moran piece “Using What We Have” was fascinating, both in terms of seeing early collaborative writing exercises being explained and in how completely alien some of these programs/procedures sounded in relation to my computing experience. I have no idea what Interchange is and the naming conventions that he was using for his file directories were a bit foreign to me as well. I can’t imagine having read this at the time of its original publication. I can’t imagine reading this as a teacher with little or no computer experience because the article was written in a way that presumed a pretty sophisticated level of knowledge.

I’m hard pressed to remember a time when I didn’t have a computer in my house. My dad is a lover of gadgets and really fostered my love for technology from an early age. I can remember him setting up a few programs for kids on the computer in the basement, but it took me very little time to track down solitaire and MS Paint. When we got the Internet, I would spend hours exploring, chatting, and learning everything I could about how computers worked.

It is probably a sign of my (relative) youth that I’m a little surprised at student reactions to computer-assisted composition. But then again, I shouldn’t be. There’s a huge barrier of entry when it comes to digital composition that I often take for granted; I had the luxury of growing up on the computer and I learned digital literacy at an age where my little brain was a sponge for knowledge. Some of the observations made sense to me: early word processors were not exactly user-friendly, and complain as I might about the changes MS has made to Word’s UI, it’s still fairly intuitive to use. But I was taken aback at the observation that the even the blinking of the cursor was a distraction to students trying to compose on the computer. I find myself distracted by the unrelenting notifications popping up on my phone and computer, to the point where I WISH the only distraction I had was the blinking cursor.

It was really helpful to read early best practices for introducing students to composing in a digital space—especially Dinan, Gagnon, and Taylor’s piece. I can see adapting some of their strategies to more complex computer tasks, such as photo editing or visual arrangement in inDesign.