Digital Is. The Twitter Essay | Twitter. Consider the tangible violence technology has wrought upon grammar. We rely on automated grammar and spell-check tools in word-processing software (so much that they’ve become a crutch). E-mail shorthand fails to live up to the grammatical standards of typed or handwritten letters. And many believe our language is being perverted by the shortcuts (and concision nearly to the point of indifference) we’ve become accustomed to writing and reading in text messages and tweets. For many teachers and writing pedagogues, this is a travesty, a torturous fact of modern life that we all must contend with and defend against in our classrooms. However, I would argue that we are at a moment in the history of the English language where the capacity for something wondrous is upon us.
The evolution of written language is speeding up at an exponential rate, and this necessitates that we, as writing teachers, reconsider the way we work with language in our classrooms. What is the posthuman? 1. 2. We Who Are About To Die. Tweeting is not often viewed as an intellectual pursuit. But Twitter can actually improve the English language. A new wave of high school teachers and writing professors have adapted their methods to demand concise writing. They have called for an end to the bullshit that spawns from traditional five-paragraph essay assignments, triple-spaced in 16 point font and ornately orchestrated to prove a lie: I read Hamlet like you told me to; I also understand it and stuff. These bullshit-busting teachers are using Twitter as a guide. At John Jay College, Andy Selsberg makes his English students write typical five-page essays. Then he has them write essays in the form of Twitter posts, YouTube comments and Amazon reviews of canonical works.
For teachers hip to the 140-character form, Twitter is a way to sharpen their students grasp of language as a tool–and a tool that gets to the point. Ernest Hemingway once said that all a writer needs is a “built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.” Like this:
Retooling Composition: Digital Tools in the Classroom and Writing Center. Expanding Composition Audiences with Podcasting. Digital Literacies for Writing in Social Media. The following is a shortened version of a talk I gave at the "Engaging the Public" symposium held at Washington & Jefferson College on Oct. 1. According to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It, 65 percent of students entering school today will have careers in fields that haven't been invented yet. While #IDontHaveFactsToBackThisUp, I'm willing to make the following prediction about writing: a full 100% of these students, at some point in their lives, will be required to use writing technologies that haven't been invented yet. Consider this: as recently as four years ago, who would have imagined that major companies would have employees whose jobs were to interact with customers on Twitter, or that someone could make a career out of writing for Facebook?
Four years before that, not only did those jobs not exist, Twitter and Facebook didn't exist, and the types of writing that they represent were only in their nascent form. Kairos of Digital Media * accessibility* searchability* persistence. Digital Storytelling – Part I Storytelling has been a great part of our school year, which is already winding down. From… telling about our and Jose, the travel bear ‘s adventurous stories live while in Egyptoutfitting EVERY classroom in our school with their own digital cameras, so teachers and students could create a visual of their daily activities or create a visual of a learning conceptcreating a collective knowledge story across grade level and subject areas demonstrating what students have learnedLife ‘Round Here project, where students assumed the point of view of an object and narratedCreating printed books that narrate the daily life in the classroom, special visits and fieldtrips and the physical and academic growth of the students throughout the year.
…to Professional Development in Technology for VoiceThread , Mixbook , PhotoStory , Audacity , and MovieMaker . Image by CaptPiper The National Storytelling Network defines: Storytelling as an ancient art form and a valuable form of human expression Daniel H.
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