So, this week's reading had a lot of big ideas and challenging material for me and I look forward to talking some of them out this week in class. In the meantime, I felt particularly inspired by the Seiter and Heverly articles. Both of these articles had sections that felt like they were speaking directly to me and addressing my experiences in the classroom.

Seiter's pessimistic look at the use of technology as a cure all hit very close to home for me and in reading her descriptions of the two students at High Tech High I couldn't help but feel that I was reading a description of some of my own students. As you all know my classroom is designed to be a cooperative learning environment in which learning is project based and in which student's are given access to a laptop that they get to take home and use to further facilitate their education. On good days I feel like we are engaged in granting students situational practice and opportunities on bad days I worry that we are failing students in the basic skills and that we are not providing them with any great technological skills in exchange. I know that I have students who use their laptops almost exclusively for gaming and although some of those students also make use of the other creative software programs on their laptops, I've noticed that these also tend to be the students who fall behind in the actual schoolwork portion of our class. Of course I recognize that my program is slightly different in that there is a high possibility that students who are in my class would not be going to school at all or participating at much lower levels if they weren't in my class but I still worry that in our efforts to expand technology to our students we may actually be causing more harm than good.

Heverly's article about the dangers of digital media in particular the persistent nature of digital media is also resonating strongly for me this week because again I know that we are providing students with the tools to create media artifacts without giving them a proper understanding of the potential dangers or long term consequences of creating and sharing these digital texts. Last week I was going over a computer that a student had turned in and I found a huge collection of pictures of the student drinking, smoking, etc. The student is no longer enrolled at our school so I just deleted the content but I couldn't help but think about the fact that this student saw no problem with taking such pictures with his school issued laptop, that's problematic to say the least. Heverly talks about students not necessarily understanding the consequences when they get involved with the creation of these types of digital media and I think that's true to some extent but I also think there is some element of uncaring that may be somewhat incomprehensible to those of us who came of age in the analog era. I frequently get the impression that my kids have an attitude that bad things may get posted online and that it's just something that everyone does and goes through and that it's not a big deal. In contrast I found that an old friend had converted some old video footage to digital and posted it to Facebook and was completely mortified at the idea that people would be watching my sixteen year old self saying ridiculous things about the boy I had a crush on. I don't really have any conclusions but I do feel like I need to have another conversation with my students about what content is appropriate to have on their school computers though.