As a little girl I had a red notebook, a fairly ordinary school supply filled with college-ruled paper, remarkable only in the raised gold emblem of my older sister’s university. It was special to me, though, as I used it as my journal.
Thinking back on my daily entries, I recounted in detail, for example, the uneventful days of my summer vacation between 5th and 6th grade. As mundane as my writing was, I would never have imagined sharing it with anyone, not even my current best friend or the family dog.
Fast-forward more than 20 years, and the ‘diary’ is more often than not a web-log - the magical morphing of two seemingly exclusive ideals - a universally-accessible interface coupled with the private sentiments of the individual. I guess they call these things a blog.
This blog will be a lot like that red notebook, but without my every prepubescent thought; rather, I’m going to talk about the conflict between the modern student and the traditional classroom. As a teacher, I come from a world of paper and pencils, books and worksheets, while my students are professional consumers of digital images and mass media. How do we bridge the educational gap that this creates?