[Air-L] digital literacy takes a field trip to a farm

[David M Silver]

when i began teaching undergrads about the internet in 1994, i had to
coax and convince them that they should use it. "you'll find email
useful," i'd say, or, "be the first person in your dorm to have your
very own home page on the world wide web!"

later, of course, we - students and profs - flocked to the web but not
to all sites. in the late 1990s, i had to coax and convince my students
to try out lambdaMOO and other more esoteric sites that our class
readings described in detail.

with web 2.0, the things we used to theorize - virtual communities and
online identities - are now, through yelp or lastfm or facebook or
flickr or blogs or wikipedia - are everyday destinations with our students.

coming full circle, i no longer have to coax and convince my students to
log on. these days, i have to coax and convince my students to log off.

thanks to list members for sharing their own attempts/struggles with
logging off and thanks to nicole ellison for sharing her media-use diary
assignment.  for another assignment on logging off, see my USF colleague
andrew goodwin's blog post:
http://professorofpop.blogspot.com/2008/04/why-kill-time-when-you-can-kill.html

finally, i want to echo something kim de vries said in a post to the
list: my students and i did not go low tech nor no tech.  in some ways
we went high tech in that we used more technologies than we normally use
in a day. we used saws, axes, shovels, FIRE, wood stoves, gas stoves,
and pens, paper, and books. 

david silver
http://silverinsf.blogspot.com