Tech ed history & conversations

Describing a tech-savvy teacher is difficult for me because so many of them were simply not. Of course there were a few in high school and before who tried to integrate things like powerpoint but this never seemed especially creative or useful for any purpose beyond learning how to use a program. And while I was an undergraduate studying a liberal art so many of the classrooms eschewed the use of technology altogether, unless you can count a blackboard, by which I mean a black chalkboard and not a white dry erase board, as tech. Or perhaps the human voice itself counts as tech. In any case with those mostly fine teachers there was little in the way of what we would recognize as technology in the classroom.

My most useful brush with tech has been at this university as a graduate student, where I took Anna Baldwin's Oral and Media Literacy. I liked this class because we spent half a semester learning ways to promote interesting and engaging conversations in the classroom, which was exactly the method that my best undergraduate teachers must have used. But in the latter half of the semester we looked into using tech to make that conversation possible outside of a seminar setting. 

The upshot is that after a mutiny against the sadist-designed moodle forum feature, we began to use wikispaces for our discussions. We had different pages for different topics and we used different text colors followed by our initials to differentiate contributors. Aside from a few jokes about my colorblindness I found this approach to be shall we say mega-preferable to the godawfulness of moodle. I found it so useful that I used a similar strategy in a summer reading group I participated in online with people from three continents.

The point with a thing like wikispaces and a teacher like Doc Baldwin is that what's actually happening isn't the use of technology but the promotion of conversation that just so happens to take place virtually rather than in a seminar room. To me as an English proto-teacher the conversation is paramount and I want to use pieces of technology to make the quality of contributions better or to encourage students who prefer writing to speaking.