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No technology to see here, folks. I'm assured that stone knives and hand-spun suturing silk were involved. Move along.
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My mother is appalled. All that money just to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. My dad just wanted a cool gadget. Guess which genes I got?
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10th Grade. Some class with the word "Computer" in the title. Mr. Snodgrass taught it. Mainly, we used a PDP-8. There was a lot of switch-flipping, flashing lights, and even punchcards. Total Star Trek: The Original Series vibe. By the end of the year, the class had a couple TRS-80s and we were programming in BASIC.
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... but only for a few hours. Ed Trotter lived down the hall in the dorms, and had just received the computer from his parents. He shouldn't have left the door unlocked, but he did. My roommate and I played some kind of missile attack game, and wrote some rude little program that annoyed Ed.
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In my third year of teaching high school English, I was given the newspaper class to advise--but only with the proviso that we put Apple Mac computers and Aldus PageMaker in the room. Digital, baby!
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Film scholar Julia Lesage teaches a class in new media creation, and I learn to make Hypercard stacks. Highlight: a clickable storybook, "Knox has Cat Troubles," written for my not-quite-three son, Drew. Ass-kicking animation for its time, if I do say so myself. And assuming jerky stop-frames constitute ass-kicking animation.
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The University of Oregon receives a generous endowment and constructs a state-of-the-art classroom for exclusive use of the composition program. Recognizing the cheap and available grad-strudent geek that I was, they appoint me to run it. I use a wonderful program called "Assimilator" to maintain the computers (the program's tagline: "Resistance is futile!"). Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher to come to our colloquia, helping us think about how to use technology to support student learning.
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I bought a Palm Pilot (look, it's clear--that means it's even more techie!) with the hope that a geeky device that looked like something from Star Trek would help me organize my life as a new Assistant Professor at Chico State. Or maybe that was just an excuse to buy something shiny.
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I start requiring my students to use blogs instead of reading responses and other written work. Why? Blogs are cool! Isnt' that enough reason?
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I am awarded an odd title at the Northern California Writing Project, but I go with it. I begin networking with like-minded geeks across the country. I become involved in tech leadership with the National Writing Project. Teachers sharing knowledge about smart use of technology enriches me (and my instruction!).
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Christina Cantrill of the National Writing Project introduces me to the wiki. Ears ring. Mind spins. Future students groan in anticipation of the next development of my pedagogy.
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James Gee's work gives me a rationale for learning how to make multimodal texts alongside my students. On due date, students clamor for a public showing of their projects. They'd never demanded a public reading of their essays in prior classes. Hmm. Maybe that's significant.
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A Writing Project colleague enlists my help: she wants her high school seniors to make multimodal academic projects. Sign me up! We create a stay-at-school-and-work-all-day field trip (without the field trip) to help students get the work done. Public showings for students, staff, and parents ensue.
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One hundred students in a jumbo Freshman Composition course conduct inquiries into social media. They present their results as videos, comics, websites, and games. They embrace a "meta" state of being, using as resources for presentation the subjects they investigated.
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Asked to provide a "testimonial" for the multiplicity of composition, I discover and use for the first time the web-based timeline creator, Timetoast. Guess I'm getting a little meta, too.
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Colleagues from the National Writing Project collaborate to present an inquiry into the ways digital media have intersected with writing instruction at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco.
![pkittle steals an Apple ][e ...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/photo/2270593/image/430914fdfae81425731350ace5e317b6?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAJB6ZCNNAN7BE7WDQ%2F20250913%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20250913T095332Z&X-Amz-Expires=604800&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=a39ff3ae69d115b4455978a4ddd80e1e395dfa842d18d705485f7e8590908ae9)
