Saturday, March 8, 2008

"idk, my bff jill?"

During my last drive to Virginia, I spent some time catching up on long overdue podcasts, including Dr. Yong Zhao's keynote speech from the BLC 2007 Conference. He constructed an interesting analogy between the inventions of the printing press and the Internet, stating that the the printing press necessitated that the average person become a reader, and the Internet now necessitates that the average user become a writer. This is such a powerful statement for educators -- that as blogging, etc. continue to shape students' worlds, that writing (specifically, writing for an audience) will take on new meaning and relevance.

Of course, the idea of blogging changing the face of writing has its downsides, too -- the prevalence of texting and blogging has already changed the casual form of written English that is used by many students.




This form of written English has truly become a standard dialect with teens. Many of us squirm at the very thought -- how will students ever learn the difference between you're and your if they can just write "ur" and do away with the whole thing? How can the world possibly go on as it should when the masses are homophone-illiterate?

I wish I were more tolerant, but I am one of those grammatical elitists who has to fight an urge to scream every time an educated adult writes "she think's" or "their going." At the same time, I was actually a linguistics major who believed in the idea that languages should change over time, and that unnecessary grammatical constructions should be phased out over time. Does that mean that I must be willing to embrace the "l8r" generation's form of written language? I'm not sure I can stomach it!

Of course, the "l8r generation" got me thinking about something else I heard recently -- that as more and more non-native English speakers adopt English as their primary language, those of us who speak the American English "dialect" will actually become the minority. The outsiders. The people tied to a past when the U.S. presided over all. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Indian businessmen and women will adopt and develop their own simplified (and therefore more linguistically advanced, believe it or not) English. Those of us still complaining about subject-verb agreement will be wasting our time on obsolete, inconsequential details. Is it possible that those of us complaining about "ur" will be in the same boat?


Sunday, March 2, 2008

Blackboard Exemplary Course Tour

I was recently chosen to record a tour of my Blackboard site for our local Exemplary Sites page, which highlights the "best" Blackboard sites in Central New York. I was very excited to get to do this, and pretty happy with how the final product came out. It is also a great resource to be able to view other outstanding tours and see first-hand how different educators have used Blackboard. I have all kinds of new ideas on what to do next! Click here to listen to my tour...and please, let me know what you think!