For me, it was a relief to see that we were going to read an article that questioned what college English should be. That’s why I was a bit disappointed when Jeff Rice maintained that English should be about teaching networking and learning how so many parts of our lives are interconnected. I mean, doesn’t our generation, more than ever, already understand and take advantage of this fact? We’ve been there for the birth of the internet, e-mail, eBay, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, blogging and instant messaging. We understand perhaps better than any other generation, the effects and prevalence of globalization. We’ve seen the rise of social networking through such entities as Speedating, groups like MAGNET (Madison Area Growth Network) and networking sites Facebook and MySpace. Novices to the idea of networking we clearly are not.
So what should college English be? Clearly there are several possible answers to this. After all, English is a department and College English is not the winner-take-all English course that every college student would choose. I believe that it is still important to read from the Cannon, to appreciate all literary works and to learn to think about a writer’s words critically and analytically. I do think that College English, like other courses taken at a university should serve to prepare students for their lives post-college. Incorporating new technologies into the classroom would be essential to bridge the gap between what we think as a traditional English course and what we would think of a more modern one. Even a course on classics could take advantage of the most modern forums for student interaction and production.
College English should be about a lot of things, but simply networking? I don’t think so.
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2 comments:
Interesting point. I do have one argument against what you said about how it's useless to teach networking to a generation that is already an expert at it: the Web 2.0 we are aware of has always been in our minds more of a social thing. When I heard we were going to be blogging in this class, the first thing I thought of was a 15 year old emo kid posting about how much life sucks. When I think of forums, I normally think of social forums. One thing that I think tends to go over our heads is the potential for these things to be used for an academic purpose. We have yet to learn how you can manipulate the devices of these new media to present a point in the same way we would use devices in prose to present a point in a paper. I think teaching us how to use new media for more "adult" purposes such as these is worthwile.
I agree with the point that networking is an important tool to learn and that it shouldn't be the only focus in what we learn now but if we don't teach netwroking to the generation that is "already an expert" how does technology grow. There is always somethign new to learn and for something to grow we have to want to tecah it and want to learn.
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