One Of The Most Powerful Threats To The Hopes Expressed By Smith For Literacy Education Is Also Tech

By Author: Amandda
Total Articles: 60
Comment this article

Process and collaboration are potentially enhanced by technology, but community may hold the greatest promise from technology. The Internet, email, and even cell phones can bring YouTube, Facebook, text messaging, emailing, blogs, and a wide range of technology-based tools to expand and enhance the "literacy club," a community of learners existing in a virtual world.

One of the most powerful threats to the hopes expressed by Smith for literacy education is also technology. With the rise of electronic texts and the Internet has come an equal if not greater rise in the concern for academic honesty Thomas Sabo Charm Carriers among students ("Plagiarism and Copyright"; Plumb; "Teaching about Plagiarism"). David L. Wheat has recently posed the ultimate question thrust on us in a digital age: "What is the ethical threshold of collaboration from outside sources?. We are trapped, it seems, if we hope to create community and collaboration in our literacy classrooms— trapped inside the walls of tradition and trapped by the increasing fear among teachers that ...
... most (if not all) students today are using their technological savvy to pull the wool over our eyes (both figuratively and virtually).

The research base in the field of literacy and the work of leaders such as Smith often remain unheard, unseen, when the world which we work exposes the increased threat of plagiarism:

However, the wording in a draft [of a new university honor code] by students at the University of Texas at San Antonio appears to match another school's code—without proper attribution.

The student currently in charge of the honor code project said it was an oversight, but cheating experts say it illustrates a sloppiness among Internet-era students who don't know how to cite sources properly and think of their computers as cut-and-paste machines. ("UTSA Students Plagiarize")

While best practice advocates encourage us to increase community and collaboration in our literacy classrooms, an atmosphere of fear also warns us that students belong to a generation that "think[s] of their computers as cut-and-paste machines."

Recently, I considered the tension between authentic approaches to literacy and the increased concern for plagiarism (Thomas, "Of Flattery"). There, I argue that we can use the promise of technology as part of our pursuit of avoiding plagiarism and careless expression by students. Yet, other threats face us with the rise of technology:
(1)The increased pressure placed on teachers and students by accountability and high-stakes testing also carries with it the threat of using technology in place of teachers, exacerbating isolation by students, and of reducing literacy to skill-and- drill practices. Test-prep through computer programs is one of the greatest threats technology poses.
(2)Technology can increase the worst aspects of accountability and test-prep, but it also offers the allure of efficient testing itself. Computer-based testing of reading and writing is becoming more widespread since it can be less expensive and more quickly scored—although computer-based testing of literacy is often far less authentic than real-world per? formances of literacy by students (Thomas, "Grading").We must not allow our goal in literacy to be efficiency instead of effectiveness and authenticity.
(3)As noted before, technology can contribute negatively to gaps based in affluence among students.

Kurt Vonnegut recognizes the importance of community in our classrooms: "The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, pro-vided that you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one" . In our digital age, we as teachers committed to critical literacy must recognize the promises and threats that we and our students face as a community of learners.

Smith ends his book with a call: "Then teachers must persuade each other and the administrators who control so much of what they do in classrooms that ethnography rather than experimental psychology is the right Thomas Sabo Earrings horse for education to back" . That call signals the perennial tensions between the critical classrooms we pursue and the forces working against us. In the early decades of the 21st century, it remains within our power to choose the promise and to reject the threat. Our moral obligation, it seems, is to create the classrooms our students need, for "education unfit anyone to be a slave"—if that education is one that allows teachers and students to "talk back, speak up, be heard" (Ayers 132, xv).