Back in May I attended CALL, the College Association for Language and Literacy – the professional association for college English instructors in Ontario. Five of the sixteen sessions this year dealt with teaching and technology in some manner, which is more than last year. The conference was held at Fanshawe College in Ontario, where all the classrooms on the main campus are wired. In addition, the English department is blessed with a wonderful ‘Teaching and Technology’ leader in Wendy Wilson. Wendy gave a terrific presentation on how she’s been experimenting with wikis with her sixth-semester architectural technicians for their required technical writing class. Next fall, she’s planning to have her sixth year students help collectively create the material that her first-year students will be using.
What I found most interesting about the conference overall was the tension between those who want and enjoy teaching with technology and those who don’t and won’t. There were a couple of interesting discussions around access – most of the people in the sessions clearly assume that college students all have laptops or relatively easy access to technology. And indeed, much of what people in higher education aspire to assumes that we’ve achieved one-to-one. However, there are programs (like nursing, for example) that attract a high number of new immigrants. One delegate, an instructor who teaches English to these students at Humber, was passionate about the lack of access many of his students have. The usual response was made by the audience – but they can use the lab! His point, however, was that these students didn’t know how to type. They worked, often full-time, as well as going to school. For them, digital was a very significant hurdle.
It was a very thought-provoking discussion. And it left me wondering more about some of the research I’ve read in the last year about how digital can privilege those students who already do well but it widens the gap between those who do well and those who don’t. Which isn’t really the point – the promise of digital was really about closing that gap.
Laura
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