And, it's fun too!

I found J. Elizabeth Clark's article, “The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy” spot on, except for the omission of one small word: FUN. I could definitely be wrong, as I've only read the article once, but I don't think that this word or anything similar is used a single time throughout the article as an argument for the inclusion of new technologies in the classroom. In any effect, it definitely wasn't emphasized...

This stood out especially in sections such as “Digital stories: Visual rhetoric and political freedom”, and “Living a second life with Jennifer Government and Nation States: Making text interactive”.
Clark presents digital storytelling in the classroom as a powerful way for students to become producers of “complex, multimodal documents,” instead of just unquestioning consumers, and as a way for them to gain a voice on the Web, stating that “When they tell their multimodal stories and share them on the Internet, their education has an immediate impact on their lives and their interests, allowing them to put their new skills – like research and multimodal composition – into play immediately for audiences that may include their family, their friends, and even wider publics.” (32). Further, she presents the use of games and other platforms like Second Life as ways to make students “more receptive to reading the novel and to writing assignments” and to extend the class community outside of the classroom (33). Throughout, the closest word to “fun” I can find is “engaged”.

While these are all important, highly relevant reasons to include assignments such as those described in a Composition classroom, and indeed, are more important ones that “fun”, I find it sad that this word seems to be a taboo in writing about education. While I certainly don't believe that I should put on a vaudeville show for my students every day, or shy away from worthy assignments such as annotated bibliographies because they're not very “engaging”, if there is a fun way to learn about something, shouldn't we value that characteristic as well?

I think that this issue connects to the reluctance to engage in anything Web 2.0 in the classroom that Clark describes as well. Although it certainly often is related to an unfamiliarity with being a critical consumer and producer of such materials, I know that I personally have felt the occasional twinge of guilt while creating an Animoto video of pretty photos of cats and flowers instead of underlining and scribbling in the margins of texts. And I was recently almost laughed off the phone when I told my significant other I'd spent the past hour and a half figuring out Second Life. For research purposes. I've run into similar issues with students as well, either from those who see digital re-genreing as simply a lark, and love that, or from those who see it as a lark, and are peeved that we're “wasting” three weeks of class on it.

In short, I think that this aspect of such projects can only be overlooked at our peril. Rather, we need to clearly address the fact that these projects should be fun, and that maybe writing more traditional essays could be fun as well if they changed their mindset just a bit. Actually, that's the other thing that worrys me: that over the course of the next 50 years or so, we'll manage to crush the fun out of digital stories and web design as well; that in a generation or so, students will throw their books onto their desk, and grumble to their roommate that they have to make another stupid website.