Poet Ponders the Digital

Like most educators interested in technology and pedagogy, I have followed the digital revolution down many dead-end paths. We want to believe in publishing (and sharing) for the masses, but I'm less convinced today than I was twenty years ago that the masses want to share serious ideas. The masses want to share kitties, their latest meals, breaking celebrity gossip, and photos they will regret sharing almost as soon as the images enter the data stream. Blogger. Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. I have five semi-active Blogger-based blogs. My wife and I have a less active writing blog. I have Facebook pages for the blogs, Twitter feeds, and two Tumblr accounts. The traffic to the blogs is in decline, from thousands of weekly visits to a few hundred. The Facebook pages are also trailing off, as Facebook seeks to charge for promoting content. Twitter just annoys me, with an endless stream of automated tweets. I do have one account from which I follow real people posting real,...

At the university where I teach we are engaged in a debate familiar to online educators: which delivery methods will we embrace and why? When discussing online education it is important to clarify how the experience will be "delivered" to students and how well the delivery method complements the instructional styles of various instructors. I have a decided preference for courses that include either some face to face meetings or live "synchronous" communications between the instructor and students. My preferences as an instructor reflect my preferences as a student, but only when I consider the best instructors I had throughout my education. Online education can refer to any of the following: Distance learning via teleconferencing technologies hosted in a traditional classroom setting; Synchronous learning conducted by an instructor specifically for remote students only; Hybrid learning, in which students meet sometimes in classrooms and sometimes online; Co...