I am willing to acknowledge that I may be wrong about this (which is one reason I am writing about it) but I think the experiment of using Twitter in a college classroom went well today. The other reason I am writing this is because we teachers often spend too much time beating ourselves up over flaws in our lessons. We have just as much, if not more, to learn from examining successes.

In the act of blogging, students are crafting and creating texts, sharing meaningful messages, and engaging in powerful literacy experiences. But, most students don’t see these activities as being literate because they are not school sanctioned.

In my last blog entry I talked about a prevalent opinion among young people I teach that the whole brouhaha over the Digital Divide may be nothing more than a Clinton-era left-wing invention (just like Climate Change!). So I was intrigued to see the following article in the Grand Rapids Press, citing this year’s annual survey by the Campus Computing Project:

As an educational technologist whose specific area of interest lies in the attitudes and experiences of minority learners with educational and communications technologies (ECT), the concept of the "Digital Divide" - with all of its dimensions: the haves and the have-nots, the knowers and the know-nots, the doers and the do-nots (Tapscott, 2000) - has drawn much of my scholarly and professional attention over the years.

Are "modernization" and "westernization" synonyms? Is "modern" technology essentially a "western" - i.e. Euro-American - invention? These are important questions for students and teachers to consider, especially in today's rapidly globalizing socioeconomic milieu.

As educators assigned with teaching the same or similar courses year after year, it is inevitable that we will reuse/recycle some instructional materials from course to course. This is especially true with foundational courses, since the fundamentals of the field rarely change much between one semester and the next. However, that being said, it still remains our duty to ensure that, in reusing course materials, we don't exhibit the kind of professional complacence/sloppiness that invites ridicule from our students!

Those working in the field of multicultural education recognize that there are diverse ways in which human beings are diverse ... culture, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and so on. And when these multiple diversities interact, they produce patterns of breathtaking complexity reminiscent of fractal geometry.

[Editor's Note: MySpace is a social networking site whose former popularity has been eclipsed by other services, such as Facebook and Twitter. While referencing MySpace may date the following post, the underlying concepts are nonetheless highly applicable to current issues. - 2011]

To read press accounts, one would think that Stacey Snyder was dismissed from her teacher preparation program at Millersville University solely because she posted a picture of herself on her myspace site with the caption “drunken pirate” posted underneath. However, like most press accounts, there’s more to the story…much more.

I recently read an article in the New York Times and was struck by the debate over online reading versus printed-text reading. Reading is constantly changing in this world of technology. Many fear is that book reading may be a lost art. Students seem to be shifting their reading patterns and habits from books to online texts.