The New Literacy / Visions of Students Today

Many people assume that technology is taking over the way our generation is communicating. In classrooms, students are using their laptops for facebooking, emails, etc. instead of using them for school related work. Students are payin more attention it seems to texting their friends in class rather than paying attention to what their teacher or professor is saying. Students claim that school work and what they are learning in clas is not relevant to their lives outside of the classroom; so why bother? Considering the fact that their lives outside of school are consumed by new technology such as computers, the internet, cell phones and, not lectures or textbooks. "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy" written by Clive Thompson, talks about how our generation actually writes more often than past generations due to new communication. It is because texting or communicating through email gives people the opportunity to write for an audinence other than their school teachers. When they write to family or friends they can express themselves more personally in their own style of writing.
In the video, "Visions of Students Today" by KSU professor Michael Wesh, showed scenes of students showing some interesting statistics about how students really spend their time in class and out. Students aren't using technology for class as much as for Facebooking or Myspace use. Students buy books and laptops to use for school that cost a lot of money and don't read them while other people around the world don't have enough for an education at all. Being a student is expenseve and a lot of students take their education and opportunity for granted. The bottom line is that technology has surrounded us and we need to figure out a way to seperate it from our school work, or find a better way to intertwine the two.
As a student myself, I have heard many different opinions about weather technology is dampering our learning in he classroom or weather the classroom should be more open to technology. I am someone who texts all of the time however, through my experiences and observations I believe that texting is a good way to communicate but it is dampering peoples connection and way of communicating when they speak face to face. Students should leave texting for outside of the classroom and use their computers for doing inclass work. Teachers allow you to use laptops in the classroom and use their computers for doing in class work. Teachers allow you to use laptops in the classroom, therefore technology is being used int he classroom already. Technology is a clear example of the growth of human kind, however there still needs to be a line drawn between the world of communicating through technology and using technology to benifit us in the classroom.