This document discusses how digital technologies have changed writing and education. It provides examples of how technologies like blogs, podcasts, and multimedia tools have enabled new forms of student writing and helped teachers engage students. However, it also notes some challenges like ensuring student online safety and balancing free expression with appropriate guidelines. Overall, it suggests that when used critically and for educational purposes, digital tools can make writing and learning more accessible, multimodal, and democratized.

2. Dànielle Nicole DeVoss
Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures
Director of Professional Writing
Michigan State University

3. How have digital, networked
technologies changed
?

5. the Internet, circa 1968

6. the Internet, circa 1989

7. the Internet, circa 1992

8. the web, circa 1993

9. the web, circa Monday, November 16, 2009

13. Monday, July 27, 2009 at 10:00am EST
Tom has 264,987,947 friends on MySpace
Friday, October 16, 2009 at 2:07pm EST
Tom has 268,880,678 friends on MySpace
Tom made 3,892,731friends in less than 3 months

14. More than
300 million
active users.
More than 40
million status
updates daily.
93%

17. “ Elements of effective writing instruction
can be amplified in networked spaces.
What happens in blogging and in
podcasting is these things that can seem
almost imaginary to students become real.”
(Paul Allison)

23. “writing”
(1,110,250 items)

24. “ From my perspective, [digital
technologies are] not just
something that helps kids
improve their writing; they help
the teachers be more effective
teachers. And that has to have a
payback to the kids. ”
(Joe Bellino)

25. • MULTIMODAL

28. Students worked with
textual analysis and
representation, wrote
their own poetry, and
selected images and
audio to complement
their poetry and
connect their work to
concrete specifics.
(Reva Potter)

29. “ Using these multimedia
approaches to traditional
subjects enables me to
tap into the multiple
intelligences of my
students.
It forces me to learn,
apply, and strategize new
tools that may aid in my
students’ learning of the
traditional canon of the
ELA (reading, writing,
speaking, listening). ”
(Clifford Lee)

32. “ They are so excited
when they hear
themselves reading their
piece. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I
wrote that. That’s my
story. I’m a writer!’ ”
(Renee Webster)

33. Robert Rivera-Amezola
“ What I want to bridge is what is happening in the world today
in terms of communication and what we believe should
happen in the classroom. I would suspect that a lot of these
kids will grow up not really writing [in a traditional sense], but
having to learn to communicate in modalities that weren’t
available to us when we were kids.”

36. Julian Marsano, an elementary school teacher in
Brooklyn, New York, has his students develop media
literacy through digital production.
Students engage critical thinking skills by selecting
among and mixing digital resources to create public
service announcements.

40. • June 2007: Stephanie Lenz posts 29-
second recording of her son bouncing
along to the Prince song “Let’s Go
Crazy”; uploads the video to YouTube
• June 2007: YouTube informs Lenz that it
had removed the video from its website
after Universal claimed that the recording
infringed a copyright controlled by the
music company
• under federal copyright law, a mere
allegation of copyright infringement can
result in the removal of content from the
Internet
• Lenz consulted with the Electronic
Frontier Foundation; video was reposted

41. fair use
Section 107
• protects criticism, commentary, news
reporting, teaching, scholarship, and
research
• allows teachers and students to use
copyright-protected work for projects,
mash-ups, remixes, and more
• Media Literacy through Digital
Production project was a Media Spot
collaboration, designed to apply the
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for
Media Literacy Education

43. “ I’d love for this document to be a proclamation
that students should be able to say whatever
they want, whenever they want, in a responsible
manner, and be treated as if they were
responsible adults. But I realize that is a bit
idealistic—and also likely to get me shut down…
So, I need a practical policy that balances my
concerns with the district’s.”
(Bud Hunt)

51. cover for July 2007 Redbook original photo

60. • Digital can be democratic

61. CNN journalists told not
to leave their offices on
threat of arrest
cell phone pic taken
and posted to twitter
in Tehran, Iran
(June 2009)
state-run media
continued to note
minimal problems with
“a few hooligans”
400 new tweets
every minute

63. in 2008, students were
asked to write letters to
the next president
5864 letters were written,
representing 205 schools
project was co-sponsored
by the National Writing
Project and Google