E-Forum #2: Suggestions for Researching Student Uses of Technology

I appreciate Kafkaz's comments and questions on the implications of the economic nature of the term "consumers"--while I do think that there is a need in our field to come to terms with student writers as consumers of new media, this study hopefully suggests just how consumed by technology our students are today. Beyond that, the choice of the term "(com)posers" is important here and I would appreciate your thoughts on it. If we think of the critical literacies at the heart of most composition instruction, are students today composing with technology or simply posing with it? Does it matter? I think so. If you think of a typical print-based research essay common to first-year composition courses, what is it's goal? Words like evaluate, synthesis, analyze and phrases come to mind. This, to me, should then be the goal(s) for students composing with new-media, and what I hope to eventually understand (and as Nick mentions it might be really hard to get there without some ethnographic research) is what kinds of new-media composers today's students are? Make sense? Again, I appreciate your comments. Randall

I was interested in the "consumerized and commodified" portion of the hypothesis. I see what you mean, but I wonder why those terms, specifically?

I'm asking because this is a phenomena I've often encountered with film students. Film is such a routine aspect of their lives--and, generally, always has been--that they have a tough time, often, approaching it in active, analytical mode. I never figure that's because of consumerism and commodification, I just figure that's because it's hard to approach anything that's always been a part of your life in a new way.

Gosh, I have always, always loved poetry, and have written it pretty much since I could write at all. When I took my first Poetry class in college, that was rough going for me--rougher, maybe, than it would have been for a student less intimately familiar with poetry, because they wouldn't have to unlearn anything, or learn to go against the grain of their usual interactions with it. For me, it was like trying to pick apart and analyze the process of breathing. Interesting, but it makes it hard to breathe!

I think a similar process was at work with my film students, and is also often at work for today's students when it comes to the "new" media that aren't new to them at all. When (and this isn't always so, even still) these forms or genres or spaces are their native element, then the challenge is helping them learn to approach the whole deal as if it were unusual. We're asking them to take *home* and make it strange, you know? And, at first, that can be a very disconcerting process.

Film students, once they began to get the hang of seeing film anew, often got a little ticked at me: "I can't just *watch* anymore," they would tell me, and I understood.

So, I think I might agree with the "consume and commodify" piece of things, but not so much in an economic sense. I'd say it's more a matter of consuming new media as the body consumes air--it feels natural, like breathing. And it's a commodity in a student's life mostly because it has social exchange value. Here's my blog, i-pod list, facebook, webpage, ringtone, etc. Can I read/see/hear/experience yours?

Anyway, I'd love to hear more on these two terms. They seem key to me.

Kafkaz