Digital Divide

The HASTAC II conference last week inspired me to try 2 things, right now, in the analytical writing summer course that I started teaching last Wednesday night: 1) to experiment with social networking tools in teaching writing as suggested by Howard Rheingold in the opening night keynote and 2) to center the writing assignments on real world problems that will produce work available to the public so that we don't end up adding to what Kate Hayles called in the plenary session "the largest source of wasted labor in the United States: student essays." Most of all, I wanted to take Brenda Laurel's advice: "Don't point at it; do it."

So after an hour or so of introductory chatter, I marched 11 students from Barry University's School of Adult and Continuing Education to the computer lab and guided them all through the process of setting up profiles on the social networking site www.moli.com (full disclosure I'm a paid, part-time blogger there). That first step took a lot longer than I anticipated, as did adding each other as friend. Thank goodness for four hour sessions.

The students range in age from late 20s to early 60s; there is one white male, one black male, and the rest are women of various shades of black and brown, mostly from islands in the Caribbean. While, predictably, two of the 20-somethings were all over social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, most of the group had only heard of such things through their kids. One gentleman complained that he couldn't type. Oh, prerequisites!

Eventually everyone managed to make a blog entry on their choice of one of four broad topics: immigration, education, housing, and healthcare. (I'll be meeting with folks at the Human Services Coalition, a community policy group here in Miami for help on pegging the assignments to pressing local problems).

Roughly a third of the class got around to commenting on each others' entries. Then it was time to go. In general, the group expressed enthusiasm about getting up to speed with the digital age. After all, they're carving time out of lives otherwise dedicated to working full-time and often raising families to earn an undergraduate degree; when they're done, they want to be just as prepared as their younger, traditional undergraduate peers.

This first experiment has me a little worried, though. I've taught this course to this population about a half dozen times now and I know the concepts -- all leading to analytical writing conceived of as print essays with a thesis supported by a linear, logical argument -- are extremely challenging. That's not even factoring in second-language issues.

Plus, I worry whether this kind of writing is what these students (or any students) need to learn anymore. Yet I'm convinced the objective of analytical thinking is absolutely critical. So now I'm wondering how a social network reconfigures the expression of analytical thinking and how the daunting task of social networking ramps up the already daunting endeavor of thinking and writing analytically.

That's why I'll be blogging about this experience, looking for all the help and suggestions all of you out there can give me.

Image: Not my class, but you get the idea. Courtesy of EPA Smart Growth, via flickr.