AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Elementary, My Friends

Wonderful, committed, I-sure-wish-I’d-had-her-when-I-was-in-second-grade (even though I had a wicked crush on Miss Fogg) second grade teacher Susan Hunberger has started a blog for her class. The coolness of this knocks my grade-school media experience sideways; yes, David Eddy and I did mimeograph a semi-underground school newspaper back in the sixties, but blogging in second grade would be a massive thrill. Especially when grown-ups from all over the world are leaving comments.

Which brings up a fascinating dimension of the matter: the varying ways that respondents address the second-grade authors. Some leave comments that look to me as though they’re taking part in a conversation with the second graders. That’s certainly what I was trying for — respectful attention to the authors and to other respondents, as though we were sitting around the family dinner table, batting ideas around. Other respondents, though, feel the need to tell the students what’s what. I’m sure Susan has the situation well in hand, but now I’m almost more interested in how Susan negotiates the varying voices that the blog students will be reading. (I have the feeling that this experience will play an important role in a presentation for a conference I’ll be addressing in the spring. I intend to challenge the conference-goers to begin to think of technology less as a pedagogical tool than as a pedagogical environment, though of course I’ll eschew spatial metaphors. I don’t treat gravity as a pedagogical tool; it’s just there, and I count on it to keep me vaguely tethered to the class I’m presumably teaching, but I don’t spend time thinking about gravity as a feature of my pedagogy. This connects with my presentation and Susan’s class inasmuch as the question of authority arises with particular force and complexity when one adds digital communication and technology to the pedagogical situation. Where some writers think the answer lies in filtering and editing web-based material, I will argue that the more immediate, appropriate response involves focusing the more vigilantly on students’ own capacity to ascertain the differences between “reliable” and “unreliable” information, an important human capacity that we ought to be doing better, always, regardless of whether we’re spotlighting technology in our pedagogy.)