Recently a student e-mailed me saying that she was doing research on Technorati, del.icio.us, and Flickr and wanted my opinion on what use such things could be in the English classroom. I thought I would answer her here, though certainly I am no expert on such matters. <a href="http://www.weblogg-ed.com/">Will Richardson</a>, for one, would be a far better resource for such a question. Not being, and having never been, a high school teacher, I can only imagine what such technologies might offer.

With that caveat… Basically the power of Web 2.0 applications is their ability to produce, disseminate, and tap into customizable feeds of regularly-updated information.  Thus, to use the ubiquitous English example, you could tap into the latest bookmarks, blog entries, and photos on Shakespeare using these technologies. In addition, if you or your students were doing your own blogging, bookmarking, or photography, you could use these technologies as a way of sharing your work.

So why would you want to do this? Well… part of the argument, a big part, for studying Shakespeare and other canonical authors is that they are still relevant today–people are still interested in their work, find that it connects to their lives, and want to reference it to make sense of the world around them. What better evidence of such things then looking in these places. Googling Shakesepare won’t give you the same kind of response.

However, to venture a little further into the realm of new media, these technologies help us to experience and organize the flow of information across the web. Perhaps an English class should help us to be literate in the world of information in which we find ourselves (and maybe the particular brand of print literacy the discipline traditionally offers has lost some of its value in helping us to engage with the contemporary demands of literacy–see my previous post on this).

Anyway, I don’t want to get into that debate right now. But I think the general question you have to ask is how is the activity of the English classroom relevant to the contemporary moment? These technologies give us a unique mechanism for tapping into that moment. If you can’t answer that question about relevancy (and I figure that you can), then I would suggest there’s a deeper problem afoot than how to use new technologies.

Technorati Tags: academics, new media, literacy

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