It's Not What The Software Does > Kella Hammond

I was poking around the blogosphere the other day, and I found a cartoon written on the back of a business card that resonated with why I'm here. As the new resource specialist for the KU Writing Center and the Writing Across the Curriculum initiative, I'm here to support you, the faculty, in thinking about creative, innovative, and meaningful ways to integrate learning technologies into the writing and learning process. Many of you are already doing this, but sometimes it's easy to get lost in the glitz and glam of the hottest application and forget to reflect on why we're using these gizmos and gadgets. And since I'm a visual kind of gal, I thought I'd share what Hugh MacLeod posted on his blog, Gapingvoid.com, over two years ago:

I highlight Hugh's business-card cartoon because ultimately our “users” are our students. Whatever we do to help our students to become better writers, and ultimately thinkers, has to include incorporating meaningful learning technologies, and not just because it's what we do as a premier online university.

Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist and the CASE/Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's 2008 U.S. Professor of the Year, reminds us in a fascinating YouTube video entitled, “A Vision of Students Today,” that we're, in many cases, preparing students for careers that don't yet exist. And while our students' futures may not be clear, we do know that our society will need leaders who have exceptional writing and critical thinking skills to confront the world that awaits them.

I can't think of a better way to instill those communication skills than through a dynamic, cooperative WAC initiative. I'm going to emphasize the dynamic and cooperative parts of that last sentence by inviting all of you to let me know what ideas and opinions you have about the resources you'd like to see developed to support the teaching of writing across the curriculum. Please e-mail me at Mhammond[at]kaplan[dot]edu to share your feedback about how we can best serve our students.

Kella Hammond is a Resource Specialist at the Kaplan University Writing Center.

[This article was originally published in our June, 2009 issue.]