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#4389 -
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Computers, Literacy, and Being
Teaching With Technology for a Sustainable Future
- Robert P. Yagelski,
I. Introduction
Philosopher David Loy writes plainly what
many of us believe or sense to be true:
In this century it has
become clear that the fundamental social problem is now the
relationship between humankind as a whole and our global
environment. (302)
To unpack such a statement is to begin to
illuminate the enormously complex connections among human beings,
their institutions and technologies, and the physical world. In
this webtext I attempt to explore these connections, focusing on
the relationships among literacy, technology, and our experience
of the world – what I will call our ways of
being-in-the-world. I attempt this exploration against the
backdrop of the condition of our planet at the dawn of a new
millennium – what environmental studies scholar David Orr
calls the "crisis of sustainability."
This crisis of sustainability, I wish to suggest, is to a great
extent a function of our prevailing Western conception of self as
an autonomous, thinking being that exists fundamentally separate
from the physical world. Furthermore, this sense of self is
related in complex ways to writing as a technology and to
literacy as a set of social and cultural practices.
To identify a connection between literacy and ideas about the
self is nothing new, but recent technological developments,
especially those related to increasingly powerful and ubiquitous
computer technologies, have raised anew important questions about
how we understand ourselves and the implications of those
understandings for our communities, cultures, and habitats. If
Loy and Orr are right – and there is persuasive and
increasingly troubling evidence that they are – then those
of us most intimately concerned with matters of writing and
technology have some responsibility to turn our attention to the
relationship between what we do as teachers and scholars and the
potentially catastrophic environmental crises we face as human
beings.
The purpose of this webtext, then, is to begin exploring ways of
addressing this crisis by examining how our prevailing conception
of self is related to literacy and how we conceive of and use
technology, and how these in turn are implicated in the crisis of
sustainability. I will suggest that we re-examine our uses of
computer technologies for teaching and writing such that we
construct literate practices and uses of technology that
contribute to the creation of equitable and sustainable
communities. Central to this effort and integral to the
pedagogical proposals contained in the final node of this text is
the idea of nonduality as a basis for re-imagining ourselves as
beings-in-the-world.
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There's a lot more to read here:
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/6.2/features/yagelski/index.htm