Teaching
To LOL or not to LOL?
Rutgers–Camden professor teaches English to digital generation
Today’s college students may have a better arsenal of emoticons than adjectives. While this may make them popular online, it may not translate into the college classroom, where thoughts are expanded upon and not abbreviated into hip acronyms.
William FitzGerald, an assistant professor of English on the Camden Campus, researches rhetoric and teaches the course “From Song to Cyberspace,” on the history of technologies of communication. To him, technology is emblematic of the world in which today’s college students have learned to express themselves. Instead of using pen and paper as their parents did, current students flip open flashy laptops where their words appear in the font of their choosing – and with automated spell functions to boot.
FitzGerald cautions that computers and other technologies can give young writers a misleading sense of security. “A computer makes writing seem deceptively easy,” he said. “Many students falsely assume that tools to check spelling and grammar will make up for any deficit they have in that knowledge.”
FitzGerald’s biggest challenge in teaching writing to a digital generation is getting students to become aware of – and utilize – the full range of choices in the digital tools available to them. “Rarely in their compositions do they exploit the resources of digital production and storage,” he said. “Not too many think about document design, how to work through drafts, or how to generate and save useful materials for possible future use.”
Rather than ban the use of text messaging in his classroom or warn against the dangers of cyberspeak creeping into papers, FitzGerald explores these new modes of communication with his students. In fact, he sees the key to literacy in the 21st century as the ability to shift from one style of language to another, depending on one’s audience and purpose.
Joe Bolletino, a senior English major, says he was introduced to instant messaging in grade school. “I haven’t taken one note on paper,” remarks Bolletino, who hauls a laptop to class. Fitzgerald encouraged Bolletino and his classmates to submit a presentation composed in various media – a video on how to make a video. Bolletino decided to not only share his creation with FitzGerald for a grade, but also uploaded it on Google Video for others to view.
After learning about the progression of oral practices into written texts, and now as hypertext, FitzGerald’s students have been educated to view their preferred mode of communication as part of a larger process.
“People may look down on text messaging, but it’s its own specialized language,” said Bolletino, and his professor wouldn’t disagree. FitzGerald said that profound variations in language expression are far from new.
“We now have a generation of students who communicate to their friends through a hybrid of written and spoken English with a range of special characters, abbreviations, and acronyms that are well suited to the limited space for text messaging. Despite the novelty of texting, the perceived abuses of cyberspeak differ little from the ‘low’ styles that the academy has been policing for hundreds, even thousands of years,” FitzGerald said.
“What we as academics want is for students to develop increasing awareness of the contexts in which technologies and genres are employed and not to assume that what works in one context will necessarily work in another,” FitzGerald added. “There are far more significant challenges to fluency in standard written English than this latest technological development.”
FitzGerald has published on the personal statement – found in applications for graduate or professional schools or for funding needs – as professional discourse and on the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke, a 20th-century American literary and social critic most famous for his work “A Grammar of Motives.” FitzGerald presently is drafting a book on the rhetoric of prayer.