I loved teaching in front of live classes again this winter.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t change my mind about teaching online. On the contrary, it reinforced my belief that I can reach students whether facing them in person or reading their words on a screen. If you connect with students\u2014if you do the hard work of listening and meeting them as individuals\u2014how you connect doesn\u2019t make a huge difference.<\/p>\n
We embrace the media of our time and are biased towards it, but a hand-written letter is as good as a phone call is as good as texting on a screen. A series of photographs can say as much as the human voice.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the skill of the communicator, not the medium, that makes one message better than the next. Every art form has its masters.<\/p>\n
Even if you prefer movies or audio books, your mind still deciphers messages in text and music. Communication is always partly translation. Real connection is always a struggle. Which is why anything\u2014facial expressions or smoke signals or tapping on a pipe between prison cells\u2014works.<\/p>\n
I think studies that favor paper over screens<\/a> are biased. They are too comforting. Of course pencils create more brain activity; they\u2019re familiar. We are prejudiced against the fear and strangeness of Web devices, but we are not zombies hypnotized by them. I already wrote about how smartphone cameras could cultivate cognition as easily as they offload it<\/a>.<\/p>\n The quality of all mediums is just as true in a classroom, and more relevant there. School is where students should struggle with the different communication forms.<\/p>\n Teachers should struggle too\u2014that\u2019s how you teach students that struggle is appropriate in communication.<\/p>\n I already discussed the number-one Internet concern I heard from teachers this winter: It\u2019s difficult to learn technology in the middle of the school year<\/a>.<\/p>\n My winter continuing ed students expressed the same thing in a slightly different way. From the start, they followed and enjoyed my assignments and lessons, but they wanted more specific instruction on the platforms themselves.<\/p>\n Like the teachers, they wanted to grasp Twitter and Google\u2019s best practices fully before using them in front of others. As adults, the continuing ed students and the teachers didn\u2019t want to struggle in front of others. They wanted expertise.<\/p>\n Expertise grows difficult as software programs and applications multiply, come and go, improvise, and change before our eyes.<\/p>\n There are two ways language experts understand grammar\u2014\u201cprescriptive\u201d and \u201cdescriptive.\u201d Prescriptive grammar is the written rules of how we should and shouldn\u2019t communicate. When people correct grammar\u2014and write others a \u201cprescription\u201d for how to write better\u2014they illustrate prescriptive grammar. People who enjoy rules love chastising rule-breakers.<\/p>\n The grammar we use in daily practice, spoken and written, is called descriptive grammar. It evolves daily in our conversations and computers, whereas written-down prescriptive grammar tries to catch up with that improvisation. The descriptive is always ahead of the prescriptive. Most of us break the rules of grammar all the time and still communicate well.<\/p>\n Descriptive grammar also comes from artists who write a book, or make a movie, or paint a picture in new ways that we criticize and eventually adopt. They understand the rules of prescriptive grammar in order to play with them.<\/p>\n Using the Web, communicating with it, and teaching with it are extraordinary. I make choices all the time about how to move forward because there is no universal Web rulebook. Web grammar is permanently descriptive. It progresses in drafts<\/a>, or beta testing, for both teachers and students, who can now only be similar descriptive artists.<\/p>\n This is not throwing out the rulebook, but improvising with it. If an improvising author strays too far from the rules of communication, the audience won\u2019t just misunderstand the message, they won\u2019t even realize that a message was sent. The audience keeps the author in check.<\/p>\n Yet improvising authors are more fully engaged with the process of communicating\u2014it\u2019s no longer a clich\u00e9d procedure, but an interactive process.<\/p>\n I teach voice because a good voice translates to all mediums. It trumps format or medium. Joyce Carol Oates<\/a>, Oprah Winfrey<\/a>, and Jane Goodall<\/a> can start a podcast as easily as they start a newspaper column because they each have something to say. They are all improvisers.<\/p>\n They are all on Twitter too. We know their names because they are good communicators and can reach any audience with any microphone. I\u2019d take any one of them over Artificial Intelligence any day of the week.<\/p>\n Developing your voice is much harder than learning how to use the postal system or Twitter or any communications system, but it\u2019s universally adaptable once you do. The question for these dynamic and ever-changing forms (and times) is not how to use tools correctly or best, but how the current tools best serve your interactive voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n Learn that lesson and you might just invent some communication technology yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I loved teaching in front of live classes again this winter. It didn\u2019t change my mind about teaching online. 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