I got in touch with a favorite former English teacher for work today, a man who’s gone from my high school to be high school director at a school in Connecticut. After finding out I’m in TC’s communications department he brought up instant messaging (see blockquote below). I responded with a screed which I thought I’d post here, because my mom keeps asking to hear about how we, as members of the computer generation, think. More solid observations have been written by Dana and by other up-and-comers, and I’m happy to post links to those if they’re available.
I was thinking this summer it would be very productive to look at how IM
has changed communication and altered students’ understanding of
knowledge. Being a generation removed from it, and a parent, I am very
“anti-IM” as I have seen it wreak havoc in school communities.
(Especially Middle School, you can imagine.) But I wonder if there
might be some saving grace in students’ always-online-connected
lifestyle. You might in fact be the start of that generation, as I
think you and your friends were in constant touch after going to
college…. I imagine someone’s doing work on this already.
When you say “wreak havoc,” what do you mean? In the “official” work
of academic life, the interpersonal life of students which tends to
spill into academic life, or…? It’s funny, to some extent AIM has
become a replacement for the notes Robert, Tinh, Lindsay, Catherine
and I used to pass in Dr. Sheinkopf’s class (sometimes on our TI-81
calculators, in a code we developed!) Big nerds that we were, we’d be
talking about what we were reading for class as often as we’d be
gossiping about how annoying we thought G– C——- was. We filled in
the discussion gaps where the rest of the class wasn’t ready to go.
Without passing notes, I might not have been as engaged with the
reading.
Catherine is online on AIM right now. We’re both in communications
programs, so we compare notes, and she’s using some quotes from my
blog in her master’s thesis. AIM has gotten me through all kinds of
things; like passing notes, it is an emotional safety valve and has
kept me from blowing up at my boss countless times. Sherry Turkle does
an excellent analysis of the psychological dynamics of postmodern
Internet life in her book Life on the Screen; much of what I have to
say about AIM is reflected there.
I just finished reading a book about the power of student literacy
practices involved in passing classroom notes, and how they came into
conflict with one teacher’s goals for her seventh-grade English
classroom. While the teacher attempted to create a “safe space for
sharing” in her writing workshops, the working-class students refused
to bring to class the poetry they wrote on their own. The codes of
conduct cemented by the unofficial literacy practices of passing
notes, signing yearbooks, reading teen zines and writing grafitti on
the bathroom walls disempowered these particular students and dictated
that the classroom would never be a safe space. I’m not doing the
author’s points justice — the book is “Just Girls,” if you have time
to look it up. It was an excellent ethnographic case study, and I know
Dana and some of our peers are looking to it as a foundation for
understanding IM.
While I know it’s not possible for teachers to control or even
necessarily be involved in the secret lives of teenagers,
understanding what IM can do and what kids use it for, instead of
suppressing it, seems vital. I am worried that schools do themselves a
disservice by marginalizing IM just as they do by marginalizing other
sources of meaning in students’ lives. Like many other technologies,
the tool itself is not so much a problem as how it’s used. Howie
Budin, a professor in my department, likes to read quotes from the
days when schools were transitioning from one-room schoolhouses and
individual slates to being divided by grade level and using a single
blackboard; people were very worried then that teachers would
completely lose control of the class when they turned their back to
the kids. If you knew that IM would last as long as blackboards, and
become even more pervasive, how would you teach?
In Communications, Computing, and Technology we use IM a great deal —
the PI on my research project, who is very tech savvy, tends to
presume I have not showed up for work yet if I have not logged into
AIM! My programmer friends are much the same, though they tend to use
IRC for group discussions. IMs leave better paper trails than phone
conversations, so they can be really handy when I’m trying to remember
what the boss asked me to do.
I’ll admit many of us can sometimes be less productive. I’m online
with friends from around the world most of the day, and I chat more
than I should. It’s harder to hang up than the phone — it can run
quietly in the background for hours and then pop up in front of Word
right when I’m trying to untangle a particularly dense thought.
On the other hand, when I have a problem I can’t solve there is a
ready source of human knowledge and insight available at my fingertips
which is generally smarter than Google (currently my favorite
non-intelligent tool). This network helped me get through programming
class. When I read about “distributed cognition” in my textbooks, I
think about my experiences on AIM, and it makes a great deal of sense.
The bottom line, I feel, is it’s a different way to live, and more
than anything else we need to foster students’ development of
structures or attention to cope with it, just as we develop them for
email or reading the news.
heh.
*dismounts from high horse*
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