Promoting technology in a suitable manner in the classrooms, but are there consequences?

When I read the article by Mark Bauerlein, “Decline of a Literate Culture,” it shows the statistic of our nation’s literary reading dropping almost twenty percent in young adults over the short span of two decades. And I felt that I instantly knew the answer as to why, which is a marked increase in technology – computers, cell phones, gaming consoles, and the internet.  All of these things have become more prevalent and more convenient to use as we move forward.  So when I read Tracy Tarasiuk’s article about moving the English class towards a more technological standpoint in order to be up-to-date, I began to understand that although the Internet is one of our ambivalences, insofar that it consumes much of our students time which may account for them not getting homework/projects done; but it can also serve as a great “medium,” like Tarasiuk explains, in getting our students to learn/connect to literature.  The part I respect most about Tarasiuk is that she was willing to take a chance with something she was uneasy at first about, but she was willing to let her students speak to her, in the sense that she observed what their hobbies were and asked what interested them.  So although we may sometimes feel that we are compromising a bit too much for our students because of what had worked for us learning in school should also work for the next generation, which isn’t necessarily true.  Tarasiuk knew how to differentiate her teaching strategies and made it effective, and I think that can only be done successfully if we’re willing to listen to our students and identify what works for THEM, and that involves supplying the right stimulus to have learning occur.

In addition to adapting her teaching strategies, she also found a way for each student to voice their opinion in a way that mattered, such as the wikis where each definition of a word had to incorporate some element of a student’s own interpretation.  So I think this collectivist approach the author takes is really useful, and could be effective in our classroom setting as well.  Furthermore, by knowing how much her students emphasized in putting quality work on the internet (YouTube videos, etc.) that if they work they published would be viewable by a large audience, then the effort put in their work would be more developed.   Overall, she knew how to make the classroom a fun and interactive place where learning was mediated by technology that the students were well acquainted with.  And from this article, we witness again how much it pays off if we’re willing to understand what interests our students and devise a learning approach that works for them (Wilhelm dwelled on this a lot), even if it does seem unorthodox to how we may have come up and been taught in the classroom.

However, it seems to me there is always going to be a pressure for us to keep on top of our students with the use of technology in our classrooms.  It’s just scary for some us to think how domineering all of its use really can be.  I had already been in a classroom that was taught by a professor on a TV screen, teaching to three different locations live.  It’s convenient, of course, but is the direction we’re heading in going to make our jobs obsolete someday, where thousands if not more can be taught by televisions and the like?  It’s easy to make connections to Feed and 1984 where technology had directed the peoples’ lives without the need of any human interaction, and unfortunately, it was for the worse.  Whether it was a capitalist or communist society the aforementioned books presented, it seemed irrelevant because technology was the main culprit for dictating/censoring the people.  What are your thoughts?