To reiterate briefly, one of the important points made in the documentary was that in the 80s we began to say that getting a college degree would mean earning $1 million more over a lifetime. In adopting this perspective we began to move from thinking of higher education as a general social good (to be supported largely by the state) to a private good, an investment in one's personal human capital. Much like a house, you invest and borrow money with the idea that you are making an investment that will pay off. Not long ago this was especially true, and we all know the end of that story.

But here's the thing I wonder. When 25% of adult Americans had four-year degrees, maybe on average they earned $25K more per year than the other 75% (though you'd also wonder what the median was). But what happens if 35-40% of Americans have four-year degrees, are they still going to out earn the other 60-65% by the same margin? And if they do, will it make as much of a difference?

Then factor into that all the people getting undergraduate degrees in China and India now.

We should all know this. 100 years ago, it was unusual to have a HS diploma. It was a degree that had value. It still does have some value, but not much. I don't know if a undergrad degree will ever become the equivalent of a HS diploma, but a two-year degree might. And a four-year degree will be worth relatively less and an increasing number of people will be headed to grad school, which in turn will devalue that degree. When every public school teacher in NYS has a masters degree, what does that do to the value of the degree?

My point is that you need more education just to stay in place. You can't invest $20K in college and borrow another $20K with the idea that a college education is going to buy you a step up into the next economic class. Yes, it may be the case that our new economy will require a better-educated workforce. It used to be the case that you could be a middle-class factory worker without tertiary education. That's disappearing. Now you need the college degree to afford the exact same house that factory worker lived in. Except now you also have massive student debt.

So can we really continue to say that a college education is a private gain? Or do we have to recognize that it is increasingly a social necessity, a cornerstone to our national economic security? Once upon a time we made K-12 education compulsory. I don't think we can/should do that for tertiary education but I think we need to consider funding higher education in a way that doesn't begin with the premise that its an investment that is going to pay off on a personal level. There is a big payoff but it is in strengthening the overall education of our workforce, not in the relative strengthening of one individual's earning power as compared to her neighbors.

You aren't going to be able to flip your degree the way people used to flip houses.

Watching this PBS documentary, Declining by Degrees. The college has been showing it on campus, but I haven't had a chance to get to it, so I got it through Netflix. It tells a story about higher education that I think is familiar to faculty. There is a growing sense that higher education is struggling to meet the needs of students. As we know the problems are multiple and complex. I can't get into all of it in a blog post, but I wanted to talk about it from the specific perspective of the faculty's role.

So the familiar criticisms of faculty are:

• We aren't especially interested in teaching. We are primarily tenured, promoted, and otherwise rewarded for our research. So perhaps it is understandable we put our efforts there.
• We aren't particularly trained as teachers. Not so true for rhet/comp folks, but certainly there are disciplines where pedagogy is not part of a graduate education. See the point above. We are trained and hired for research. Maybe that should change but I don't know that faculty can change it.
• We don't hold students to a high enough standard. There is perhaps an unspoken contract that says if I don't bother you then you don't bother me. That's a problem. And that's the one I want to talk about here b/c I was really thinking about this while watching the video.

So here's the thing. Anyone can create a standard by which virtually every student gets an A. Alternately, anyone can create a standard by which virtually every student fails. I can set a standard for what I think should be 200-level work or 400-level work and so on. Having taught at several institutions, I can tell you that those standards are different from one institution to another.

Why? Obviously it has something to do with the level of preparation/ability of the students coming into the class. For example, Gregory Ulmer has this great textbook called Internet Invention. It is marketed as a first-year composition text. One year I used it in a 300-level class at Cortland, the students found it so challenging that they cursed me out over the text in their written comments on the course evaluation form. It was a rough semester.

Could I teach them this text? Of course. Well, part of it maybe. We would have to move quite slowly. It would probably be a rather frustrating experience for the students as well, being continually confronted with a text they are unable to read. And I don't mean to pick on Ulmer here. I think it's a great text. And there are plenty of other texts I could name.

As a teacher, you realize you have to meet the students where they are. Certainly every class has students at a variety of levels but you have to design a course that hopefully is accessible to any reasonably determined student while providing opportunities for challenging the best students.

I don't think this is about setting or holding to standards. I think we need to recognize that our curriculum and teaching practices are based on a model that is now several decades old. Contemporary students struggle in the lecture hall. One can complain that professors give boring lectures, but I don't think the lectures are any more boring today than 20 or 30 or 50 years ago.  In fact I would bet that overall they might even be better with multimedia and so on (though there is the death by powerpoint factor to consider). In any case, my point is that professorial teaching practices haven't gotten worse. Professors have not become less engaged or concerned with teaching (even though pressures for publishing have increased).

I don't mean to blame the students either. The point is just that the old methods clearly do not work as well as they once did. As my mom used to tell me, "You can't change other people; you can only change yourself." And perhaps in changing your own behaviors you induce changes in others. But changing the overarching culture of higher education is not going to happen without changing the material conditions under which faculty and students work.

The documentary articulates the failure of the social contract that went from looking at higher education as a social good to looking at it as a private good. Now more students pay more to go to college with the expectation that they will get good jobs at the end. Instead, we could have a system where students pay less (and the state pays more) with the expectation that an education is a social good that benefits our society (if largely in an economic way by improving human capital). When the documentary shows students really flourishing, it is in small classes or personal relationships with tenured faculty who have active research lives. They go to Amherst where the student-faculty ratio is 9:1 and faculty teach 2-2. If you are teaching 20 or 30 students a semester, that's quite a bit different from 60 or 100 or more.

But that's only part of the answer. If the 10 students in your class are working 20 or more hours every week, they still don't have time to do the reading or really take advantage of the classes they are taking or other events the college offers. And it's not only an issue of time, it is also an issue of culture. There needs to be a change in how we think we should be spending our time--not only in college but in general. Why should students think that for 4 years in college they need to be "intellectual" and then after they graduate they can go back to watching reality tv? It really doesn't make much sense. But we are insisting that college students behave in a way that many college graduates do not. I live in a neighborhood of college grads. I don't see people engaged in a "life of the mind."

Finally, we will never live in a nation where everyone has an "above average" education. It's an obvious mathematical impossibility. Education will always be relative. With the growth of economies around the world in comparison to ours, it is only logical to accept that their educational systems will come to rival ours (in many instances public education elsewhere is already outpacing us). Sending more and more people to college will obviously devalue the 4-year degree. We can't think of that as a crisis.  Instead we have to realize that even though a four-year degree means less, the fact that more people have them means that overall we will have a better educated population.

One last thing in this long post. The theory has been that a 4-yr degree will earn you $1M more over a lifetime. That's a figure cited in this documentary. So people rush to college. But that's not the way it works folks. When 2 out of 10 people get these degrees, maybe those 2 get the $1M. But if 4 out of 10 get degrees, is there suddenly $4M to dole out? I don't think so. Instead, the value of the degree goes down. As more people go to college, the value of the degree as a "private good" (i.e. as a means to make more money) probably declines, particularly when you consider the increase of higher education on a global scale. Instead, you need more education just to keep in place! The idea of higher education as a private good is really illusory.

A new report was issued this week from the National Survey of Student Engagement. You can read the full report at http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2008_Results/.  Part of the report deals with online learning, where the survey concludes

Controlling for student and institutional characteristics, the percent of first year courses primarily delivered online was positively related to active and collaborative learning. Though this result seems counterintuitive, the online setting may offer more opportunities for collaboration and faculty who teach online courses may be more intentional about fostering active learning experiences, such as asking questions or participating in discussions. For both first-year students and seniors, the percent of courses delivered primarily online was significantly related to level of academic challenge. Online courses seem to stimulate more intellectual challenge and educational gains. This suggests that integrating technology-enhanced courses into the curriculum for all students might have some salutary benefits. On the other hand, it is also possible that faculty who are incorporating new technologies are inherently more inclined to provide engaging experiences for their students, regardless of how content is delivered.

I'm not sure why this is "counterintuitive." Actually, I suppose I do know where that comes from--the idea that students and teachers cannot make real connections without face-to-face contact. I do think it is interesting how the report notes two possible reasons for this outcome:

• Online courses seem to stimulate more intellectual challenge and educational gains

or

• faculty who are incorporating new technologies are inherently more inclined to provide engaging experiences for their students, regardless of how content is delivered.

It's an interesting interpretive problem. I would suggest that both could be true. That is, (some) faculty who are inclined to provide engaging experiences for students turn to online environments because those environments offer affordances that stimulate intellectual challenge and educational gain. Now asking a room of faculty if they don't want to provide engaging experiences for their students is somewhat like asking a room of people to raise their hands if they are racist. Instead, it's one of those things we always suspect of the "other guy." Still, this would seem to indicate that we can still do more--institutionally and as professions--to reach out to faculty about the possibilities of engaging students and the potential of the online option, at least as a component in classes.

In my view, this connects with another important finding in this report on writing.

In its examination of writing, the survey concludes

Results affirmed that when institutions provided students with extensive, intellectually challenging writing activities, the students engaged in more deep learning activities such as analysis, synthesis, integration of ideas from various sources, and grappled more with course ideas both in and out of the classroom. In turn, students whose faculty assigned projects with these same characteristics reported greater personal, social, practical, and academic learning and development. Taken together, these findings provide further support for the movement to infuse quality writing experiences throughout the curriculum.

Needless to say (but said here anyway), there are many kinds of writing projects. Networks may provide an excellent means to distribute/publish any student writing, but clearly some genres are meant for print rather than screen. That said, I would hypothesize (though it is not explored in this study) that there might be a correlation between the writing that is done by students in online courses and the general value found in writing assignments. The network component of a course allows students to write to one another, as well as to a broader public. Though "intellectually challenging" is not defined here, in my view part of that could be writing for a larger and real audience.

In any case, taken together or separately, these findings are certainly supportive of the move toward courses that incorporate writing in online spaces.

On the one had, you could look at first-year composition and say that it is the cornerstone of our discipline. FYC programs are what give many of us jobs. It is by far the most commonly taught writing course in higher education. It is argubaly where we came from (unless you want to say we came from Aristotle or something as rhetoricians).

On the other hand, you could say FYC is the weakest link in our discipline. It is the course/problem that was handed to us, predefined. If you look at the growing number of professional or technical undergraduate majors or masters programs or at doctoral programs in our field, I think you get a far better sense of how our discipline understands its paradigms, its methods, and its objects of study. One thing that is immediately implicit in all these programs is the obvious fact that one cannot learn "to write" by completing an FYC program. And yet, that's what FYC was constructed to do in the 19th-century: to teach students to write. And that's the continual complaint we get from colleagues, adminstrators, and the rest: students who have taken FYC still don't know how to write.

But that doesn't mean that FYC should be abolished! It means that appropriate expectations need to be established. Think of it this way...

I often teach juniors and seniors who have completed their general education requirements. They don't have an extensive understanding of world history. They have never heard of many major philosophers. They struggle with math. They are unaware of fundamental scientific principles. But we don't expect a student who has taken one or two history classes to have an extensive understanding of world history, etc., etc. Here's the type of complaint I have gotten many times. A professor teaches a capstone course in her major and asks students to write a lengthy (20-30 pg) paper. She complains how the students struggle mightily with this task. Have the students had any writing courses since FYC? One or two, but maybe none in the discipline. This course is their writing-intensive course in the discipline. So the students have maybe never written in their discipline and certainly have never written anything near this length. That's like imagining that b/c I can screw together furniture from a box store that suddenly I'm a cabinet maker.

FYC can teach students about the general strategies of successful writing (the first three are practice, practice, practice, any guesses to the next three?). FYC can also give students an introductory understanding of rhetorical analysis, which can help them to figure out how to approach new writing situtations: like asking questions about audience, purpose, and genre. Finally FYC can help students understand how different material-technological situations inform compositional tasks. This last one is increasingly important as we meet expanding literacy practices in our culture.

But the bottom line is the FYC is going to do for student writing what BIO 101 does for students understanding of science. You aren't going to take BIO 101 and the show up for a 400-level physics course with the expectation that you'll have a clue about what to do. That said, general education, done properly, is a worthwhile enterprise. And teaching rhetoric and composition as a part of general education makes as much sense as any other subject.

However, I don't think we ought to be defining our field on FYC anymore than any other discipline defines itself by the introductory course it teaches. We should define ourselves through our majors, graduate studies, and research practices, as other disciplines do. It may be true that the value of humanities research is coming under fire in the general public, particularly in the face of the growing costs of education. It is a legitimate question to ask: why do we pay humanities scholars all this money to do research? What is the value of that research? And I think there are good answers to those questions, but it is still reasonable for those questions to be asked and we should welcome the opportunity to answer them and to communicate our knowledge to the broader culture.

On Salon, Michael Lind offers a historical perspective on the dawning of America's fourth republic.The first goes from Washington to the Civil War. The second then up to the Depression. And the third until 2004 (read the article, he explains). Basically they are all about 70 odd years long. Lind suggests each period begins with the centralization of government power and ends with a swing back partially in the other direction. Think of the difference of FDR-Johnson vs. Nixon-Bush. Lind offers an industrial-economic pattern behind these shifts that is fairly recognizable. The shift to steam power and railroads in the mid-19th century. The shift to electricity and internal combustion in the 1930s. And now? A green economy? Maybe.

Lind writes:

It remains to be seen what energy sources -- nuclear? Solar? Clean coal? -- and what technologies -- nanotechnology? Photonics? Biotech-- will be the basis of the next American economy. (Note: I'm talking about the material, real-world manufacturing and utility economy, not the illusory "information economy" beloved of globalization enthusiasts in the 1990s, who pretended that deindustrialization by outsourcing was a higher state of industrialism.)

Not surprisingly I am less derisive of the "information economy" than Lind. I don't know how Lind imagines that the nanotechnologies industry will operate outside of an information economy. Yes. Somewhere there will need to be nanotechnology factories. But that's not going to work like the automobile industry. If energy prices rise this may create some advantage for local/national production because of the costs of transporation on a global scale, but I wouldn't really count on that, b/c the raw materials for automobiles, for example, will still need to be transported globally anyway. On the other hand, one advantage of the green economy is that it requires a necessary local element. The windmills need to be where the wind is.

Looking at this from the higher educational p.o.v., history would suggest big changes ahead. The second republic saw the appearance of land-grant institutions and a significant increase of college students from the 1880s through the turn of the century. Similarly the third republic saw an expansion of higher education from the GI Bill through the 70s. Along with the increased participation in higher ed came a significant rethinking of the entire educational system. Before the civil war, higher education was truly for the elite and most Americans had little formal schooling. The third republic created a period where most Americans received HS diplomas. Perhaps the Fourth republic will be a time when most Americans receive a tertiary (postsecondary) education.

More undergrads will also mean more postgrads. With more people getting bachelors, the degree will obviously be devalued. The overall standards will probably be lower looking just a higher education, but the general effect on the population will be to have a better educated workforce. We will have to figure out how to control higher ed costs and also will likely have to adapt our teaching methods to our new audience. The whole system may shift.

Time reports this week on plans in New Hampshire for kids to graduate after the 10th grade. Students would need to pass a test, much like they do now in NYS and most states:

the new battery of tests is expected to guarantee higher competency in core school subjects, lower dropout rates and free up millions of education dollars. Students may take the exams — which are modeled on existing AP or International Baccalaureate tests — as many times as they need to pass. Or those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years, taking a second, more difficult set of exams senior year.

It's a somewhat counter-intuitive model. The stronger students stay in HS longer while the schools pass the weaker students along to community colleges after their sophmore year. I think the idea though is to provide a more specialized vocational education that is difficult for high schools to offer. In turn the HS can focus more on general, college preparatory education. This kind of tracking may clash with America's mythology about itself, but it might be more efficient. The NH plan makes the community college degree effectively a HS diploma (some number of years of schooling). Still I think we should imagine many students staying in college longer, through some graduate school. This is part of the trend too.

I am already seeing this in professional writing. I think it's a challenge for students with a BA to compete for jobs in publishing or technical communication. For one thing, there are just a lot of people out there with master's degrees going ofter these jobs. There are MAs and MSs in these fields now. If you double-major in comp-sci and professional writing, I could see really competiting in IT for technical writing jobs, but that's not easy. If you start to think about your four-year curriculum as a step toward a master's, then you begin to think of it differently.

In any case, the fourth republic will mean difficult and interesting times for higher education. Right now, about 26% of Americans over 18 have 4-yr degrees or more, about 9% have postgraduate degrees (according to US Census). If you look at people aged 25-39, this goes up to 30% (the postgrade % is about the same, but it can take time to get those degrees). Typically, people with college degrees vote more democrat (according to CNN's exit poll, something like 78% of people with postgrad degrees voted Obama). They are more likely to agree with theories of evolution. They tend toward more tolerance for cultural differences. What will a broader population of students entering college mean for these things? I would suggest that if you think the campus is an ideological battleground now, you ain't seen nothing yet. 

Some conversation around with Collin, Derek, and Jenny about what to do with this blog thing. Clearly there are many more options for user-generated content than there were when I started this 578 posts ago. There's the minimalist microblog and status update. Video. The various social networks. Some are more time intensive, others less.

I was talking FTF with Derek about this a couple days ago and we both said presented with the question of whether we imagined we'd be blogging in 10 or 20 years that the answer was "of course not." One of the things Sifry's 2008 State of the Blogosphere reports on is the changing nature of what blogging is. So even if we were doing something that we still called "blogging," it wouldn't be this.

So where is all this leading? Whatever this is.  I suppose I started blogging to investigate this question. But in some ways it is a broader question. Why write? It doesn't surprise me that the vast, vast majority of blogs are started but quickly go silent or are rarely updated with no sense of rhythm or exigency. Writing is hard. Yes the blog gives the average person the technical ability to compose and publish texts. My sneakers give me the techncial ability to run a marathon too. And though I jog on a near daily basis, I'm not running any marathons.

Blogging is an endurance event as well. It's not about the individual post. It's about doing it on a regular basis and getting back to it when your habit fails. Actually for me it is a little more like meditation than jogging in this respect. I'm always getting back to meditation and getting back to blogging.

That might suggest that there is some objective, or if not an objective at least a trajectory carved out through the practice of regular blogging. I imagine one can be interpreted from this blog or any other. However, not surprisngly, I don't see this as about telos. I'm not trying to get anywhere (sorry). Instead it is the regular practice of writing that interests me--in all of its myriad components: an engagement with rhetoric and composition that can only come through writing itself.

So "blogging" may change and I may stop blogging someday. I am sure I will. But I will always be doing this.

Who can believe any of this self-serving analysis?

This is what I see that's interesting, though predictable, in CNN's exit polls. Nationally, whites voted 55-43 for McCain, so non-whites won this election for Obama. Even more specifically, whites over 30 voted approx. 57-41 for McCain, while whites under 30 voted 54-44 for Obama. Some how I doubt that there's ever been a presidential election where the clear choice of whites over 30 was not elected. And not only was not elected but lost by a significant margin.

The exit polls reproduce the divides of the elections of recent memory remain intact. White, less educated, Christian, older, rural men and women make the vast majority of Republican voters. Of these, education is probably the least determining fact. That is if a voter has all the other characteristics, s/he's voting republican for the most part, regardless of education (though those with postgrad education vote Dem). On the flipside, urban, non-white, less religious or non-Christian, younger voters are the Dems. it would seem that the primary difference is that there are now more of these kinds of voters in a larger number of states (like VA, NC, FL, CO). But that doesn't explain everything. It doesn't explain Iowa, for example.

The big question now might be whether or not this election means that we have moved to the left as a nation. Were the right-wing pundits correct last week when they were saying how liberal the Dems are or are they correct today when they are saying that the Dems won by masquerading as or turning into Reps?

Or maybe, in our most pollyanna moment, we imagine moving beyond binary politics.

As I've written earlier, I don't believe that democray is a rational process. Politics are affective. Trying to deduce a rational interpretation that says what an election "means," to assume that a rational message is sent from voters, is misleading. And this is not in anyway a slam against American voters. It is instead a position on what human behavior is like, especially on such a scale. I include myself in this. I cannot imagine any realistic conditions under which I would vote differently. Is it rational of me to say there is absolutely nothing one candidate could have done or said to persuade me? I don't think so.

But rationality is over-rated. It's a good faith but ultimately insufficient attempt to explain agency. And the left-right binary is just another part of that Cartesian mapping of political consciousness. Not that such matters are likely to drift into the mainstream any time soon, but I think that if you want to understand the new America, you'll have to move to a post-Cartesian, post-rational mapping of the political subject.

I can agree with a lot of what Wilson says, but I do think he is seeing only part of the issue. He makes three main points as I can see. First is that we ought to be using social media "to start participating and engaging in educating each other." I fully support that idea. But when you are talking about your average college student, I think we need to recognize that we can't expect those students to put together their own curriculum. If you don't know what you need to know then it is hard to figure out how to educate yourself. Clearly there is a fair amount of disagreement over what should constitute a higher education. These disagreements occur between higher education and the general culture, across campuses, within disciplines, and so on. Indeed the disagreements are part of what students probably need to learn about. Arguably our task as educators at the undergraduate level is to help students get in a position where they have enough cultural-disciplinary-professional context and critical-analytic skills to be able to participate in the kind of open source education Wilson is describing. It will be necessary for them as they face the demands of ongoing education throughout their careers.

Wilson does recognize this to some degree. He notes that "You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers." Wilson reflects on some of the great teachers he's had. Those are common stories. However his idea is to get these star teachers out to a larger number of students through video lectures. Some students, like Wilson, do respond well to lectures, but I don't think that's the pedagogic direction we need to follow. In a sense, doing this would contradict his own position by making lectures into a kind of commodity. A video lecture is functionally much like a textbook, so I think you could certainly make use of such material. Obviously many of us already do.

On the other hand, teaching is a very different business. It is primarily about interaction with students. And this really goes along with Wilson's final point, where he turns toward Ken Robinson and the discussion of creativity. In doing so, he touches on the idea of gaming as a way of teaching and testing. In my view, part of the challenge of supporting creativity through education is to be able to get out of the way of the students. However, the other part is knowing how to create contexts that stimulate creativity and focus creativity so that it leads toward learning experiences. There is a lot of talk these days about creativity (some of it from me), but I think that to make creativity truly work for education we need to teach a critical approach that helps students think past typical notions of the creative.

The advantages of social media lie in the potential for students and faculty to produce and share knowledge and media, to collaborate, to form groups to achieve common purposes that address the needs of real communities. I think we are starting to get the bits and pieces we need for educational reform in this area.

• easy sharing of a variety of media
• easy group formation and collaboration
• individual customization (personal pages, feeds, etc.)
• granular privacy

In technical terms the thing that is most difficult for me is the evaluation aspect, tracking all the things my students are doing. This would be easy if I were inside a CMS, but I'm not. My students are out there in a bunch of different places. Right now I just don't have an easy way to do that.

The other challenge is far larger. It's adapting our educational habits, as both students and teachers, to learning in this new way. It requires greater flexibility from teachers and more initiative/engagement from students.

A new UN Report (reported here in the Vancouver Sun) indicates that "Major U.S. cities including New York, Washington, Atlanta and New Orleans have levels of economic inequality that rival cities in Africa." No, the poor in the US obviously aren't as poor as the poor in Africa. But the difference between the poor and the wealthy is as wide. That jives with this OCED report (from AP) that also reports on inequality. This report notes that social mobility is lowest in countries with high inequality such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy. Richard Florida has noted that this kind of inequality seems common in US cities where the creative economy is taking off.

The Creative Class blog also notes Geoffrey Beattie's article in the Globe and Mail in which he stresses the importance of government that will encourage investment that builds rather than the incessant trading mindset that has dominated recent years. Beattie writes

Good government isn't big government or no government; it is smart government that embraces its responsibility to look decades ahead and build the appropriate policy infrastructures for growth and prosperity. Our tax, corporate and securities laws need to foster and reward the builder mentality with incentives and stability.

Now I am thinking of Obama's offhand comment about spreading the wealth and the mileage the McCain campaign has sought to get from it. The US could use with some wealth redistribution, though we are obviously scared of the "S" word. It seems to me that long-term investment in building an economy begins with educating the workforce. Investing in our citizens well-being, education, and the socio-cultural structures that support our communities does not sound like socialism to me. It sounds like recognizing that the long-term strength of our economy rests on this kind of building.

I do think this relates to some of the work we are doing in professional writing, though obviously our concerns are on a far more local scale. We've been meeting en masse with our majors and talking about career potentials and the option of grad school. Who knows what kind of job market they'll be entering over the next couple of years? Even if there are jobs out there, it's hard to know how to be prepared and, just as important, how to find a rewarding career path. As my colleague David Franke said the other day, professional writing is an urban degree. It's not like education, the super popular degree at Cortland. Our students will need to look toward urban spaces to pursue their careers, but they might also want to think about this idea of building.

Puttnam's big picture is useful, even if somewhat familiar to those of us already in the choir. Recently, there was a thread on the Writing Program Admins list about what it would mean to envision FYC as a "born-digital" enterprise. That is, what would FYC look like if we thought of it as digital?

Clearly FYC is not and cannot be born-digital; it will have to be an immigrant. That said, I think the question must go beyond the traditional mechanism of what the individual instructor does in his/her classroom. What Puttnam points out is that the kind of shift we are looking at requires collaboration between business and education. We can build whole new technologies and applications to pursue digital composition, but we can't do that on an individual level. Despite that, this also may not function best through a top-down, institutional strategy. Large-scale collaboration of teachers, researchers, programmers, designers, students and others is also necessary. But I don't think that we can continue to foreground the atavism of the traditional classroom. We need to recognize what is truly valuable about FTF and integrate it into wherever we are going.

Puttnam also moves into a discussion of Ken Robinson and the issue of creativity. This is key as well. Because technological-educational reform isn't really about getting technology to help us better achieve the goals we have established. Instead it's about gaining a better understanding of creativity (including, but also beyond traditional artistic notions), understanding the role of emerging technology in how creativity will be developed and communicated, and building pedagogy from there.