Online publishing in secondary education

As a former high school English teacher who’s married to a high school teacher, online publishing appeals to my interest in secondary education. I consider that state of our public education appalling, especially when it comes to the curricula taught in school—not just the content taught, but the manner in which they are taught. High schools now includes computers instruction among their core requirements, but what does that class include—training in the Microsoft Office Suite and basic web skills? Why are we not basing an electronic literacy curriculum on the current state of technology? Simple, our teachers are still living in Web 1.0 and school budgets restrict proper instruction in technology. Furthermore, why are we not using the web to teach our students when they are so captivated with it and use it so comprehensively? Why is PowerPoint still considered an innovative teaching tool when it is so static and limited in its ability? Again, our teachers are still living in Web 1.0 and school budgets restrict the acquisition of technology.

Tackling outdated curricula
School districts, and teachers, rely to a fault on computer class and students’ own computing habits for their electronic education. However, not only are those means insufficient for properly learning about computers and the web, but the latter prejudices students without access to important technology and relies on unmediated instruction, which compounds current instructional problems.

As an English teacher, I value Kathryn Welch’s argument that electronic rhetoric should be taught in writing courses. I agree with Welch about the need for electronic rhetoric to be taught in school (at every level), but I think very few schools want to diverge from the canon currently taught.

The addition of electronic rhetoric instruction would do many of the things that Welch highlights in her ”Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy.” Students will have a greater ability to parse electronic texts and comprehend content just as students do when they are taught the “tricks” to reading period literature. With so much text available on the web, Welch’s notion of “decoding” would teach students to discern a texts true intentions rather than simply rely on the validity of every web document. It’ll also give students a better understanding of the visual nature of texts and teach them to create better visual texts. Another point I agree with Welch on is the role an electronic rhetoric course would have in improving literacy. Currently, individuals are creating their own understanding of electronic rhetoric. Are we going to let MySpace and other popular but non-educational sites dictate their understanding of electronic communication? Formal instruction would change their perception of electronic discourse and electronic culture to a more realistic representation. The cheapening of communication – caused by the haste and shorthand prolific in email, texts, blogs, etc.—is a growing problem among tech users. When teaching, I was shocked to learn that text shorthand was accepted for the essay portion of the state’s standardized test so long as it didn’t interfere with the understanding of the document. It’s appalling. We need to change the way young adults communicate properly, but that can only be done in a classroom setting—we can’t expect them to self-correct such bad habits.

The web, as a medium, is a fundamental part of our society and it has forever changed our world. As it becomes increasingly more ubiquitous in students’ daily lives, its inclusion in curricula becomes a question of social responsibility. Students should be instructed on the web’s past, present, and future states and the rhetorical implications of web discourse in order to foster an understanding of its capacity and the wide-ranging implications of its use. It’s preferable that online publishing would be a core requirement for students, just as math, English, science, and history courses are, but since I don’t anticipate schools making any such pedagogical changes soon, the least teachers can do is include its instruction in a cross-curriculum format.

Identifying the shortcomings
With the digitization of media, there should be countless educational opportunities available to students of all demographics, but there aren’t. For most schools, it’s a matter of money, where will schools find the funds for hard- and software? There is hope on the horizon with the recent introduction of more affordable subnotebook/netbook computers but they alone aren’t a solution to school budgetary concerns and the lack of technology in the classroom. Open source software also offers such a great solution to school district budget limitations, but it has too got its downfalls. Experimenting with Adobe Captivate revealed so much potential for its use in the secondary teaching environment, but as mentioned in class, how can school districts get around the expense of the proprietary software, not to mention the expense of training teachers to use the software effectively? As it stands, teachers are still stuck largely in Web 1.0. How then, can we incorporate web-based education when our teachers aren’t tech savvy? At some point in the next 30 years, I think technology will be more commonplace in the classroom as teachers who are raised on technology take to the classroom with their own technological expectations. It’s a matter of waiting for the technology to become more affordable and the teachers more technologically autodidactic.

Creating challenging learning environments
I worked in an inner-city school, teaching English to high school juniors and seniors who were on average reading on a third grade level. The students were just passed, from grade to grade, without many learning expectations so that when they arrived in my classroom, there were working with an insurmountable deficit. Failing students did nothing to improve their education but instead increased the dropout rate. The school I worked for attempted to improve student comprehension with computer-based teaching called Plato. I think there’s a lot of potential in computer-based teaching, but Plato had none of it. Plato was largely a top-down approach to teaching different subjects on a variety of levels. It was not engaging and interacted very little with the student—only requiring they read questions and answer the multiple choice questions. That was my first exposure to computer-based education and despite seeing the potential, it was a huge disappointment. When I apply Bloom’s taxonomy to such teaching, I can’t find the higher-level learning questions: where are the analysis, the synthesis, and the evaluation learning domains? Such computer-based training uses only the less engaging cognitive domains like knowledge and complication and possibly some application.

So, I wonder how computer or web-based training can be effective, according to traditional teaching theories like Bloom’s Taxonomies and Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. Is there a way to engage different learning types with one teaching module? Even if different learning types are successfully integrated into a module, there are bound to be accompanying accessibility issues.

This subject is definitely not an easy one to tackle. Even though its implementation and success depends on so many variables, it deserves attention considering the potential computer or web-based training has to public education. I’m not certain I’ll ever return to teaching, but if I do, I plan to incorporate more engaging technology in my instruction.