alumni e-newsletter

By Joe Essid

In the 1990s, when the Internet first appeared on our desktops, many academic “early adopters” gushed a bit about shifting paradigms, “the End of the Book,” and the coming of a generation of students who would force change upon us.

Even as one of the (then) rare humanists who began to integrate chat software, Web design, and e-mail into classes, I took a more sanguine view. I expected gradual change with some unexpected twists. And this “revolution” was a slow one, after all. Step back a second: e-mail, that spammy black hole for our time now, not to mention an essential part of our workday, was “radical” and resisted not only by colleagues but also by more than a few students.

One aspect of that early euphoria for the Net did seem reasonable to me: that we would collaborate more in our research and teaching, given the new networked tools at hand. Lecture-based education would recede, not die suddenly. Moreover, the tools would converge in function and capacity and what designers call “look and feel.” We’d no longer notice e-mail or networked content as unusual.

Today, however, I am thinking that a more radical prediction may be needed, especially for my colleagues in the humanities. In short: we have a generation of non-readers before us (see the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” for the “why” here). Yet this group has, since its early youth, been composing in various ways. My wife’s K-5 students do podcasts, Web pages, and blogs as part of their educational experience. Increasingly, these students will not have any meaningful encounters with the linear form we know as an academic essay. Moreover, their “projects” will have more than words: the tools at hand now enable them to embed, and more tellingly, integrate, moving and still images, audio, and very soon, virtual-reality materials into their work. My Second-Life avatar, pictured here, is not in some video game. He’s standing in a building on MIT’s virtual campus.

It is clear to me that multi-genre, multi-media projects should become the future of academic work. Students will compose this way in grades K-12, and in the workforce. They and their parents will demand it here. And why not? It will be the end of stacked and stapled piles of essays to grade, but with them will we lose the syllogistic thinking that has been at the core of Western rhetoric since Aristotle? Or, in a quotation by poet and hypermedia author Michael Joyce that I’ve overused, perhaps “a sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attendings.” And from this, new patterns of thinking, new forms of rhetoric, emerge.

Am I scared? Um, no. Heck no. I love this - we are halfway in that thirty-year cycle (identified by Robert P. Hughes and other historians of technology) at which a new technology reaches total cultural assimilation. I am learning to multi-task. I am reading somewhat less and blogging somewhat more. In my Eng. 216 class next semester, the students will complete a wiki project, with writing and images and video, not papers. I will grade them down for poor grammar, never fear. But I will also grade them down for poor integration of visuals and for poorly structured linking (that new punctuation of our era).

Think what you will, but I no longer think we have a choice in this matter. Ironically, for the foreseeable future we will have books, and that is good. But we won’t have “papers” much longer. Or staplers.

This, too, will be good.