Week 1 Readings

In his article, “The Implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology of Knowledge”, Richard Lanham calls attention to the evolution of text from print based to media based. And while our world is becoming more and more fluent in media based texts our classrooms are slow to reflect and incorporate these societal norms. Lanham highlights some of the ways which the arts have changed and continue to change with the help of technology. Despite the many great advances that he discusses, Lanham points out that humanist have their issues with these new “texts”. He states, “it has prompted a hostile response from the humanities establishment because it creates a different literacy from our customary print-based one” (466). While I certainly agree with Lanham that there are many scholars out there that may argue against the validity of non-print based text, however, it seems to me that there is an increasingly growing amount of scholars that see merit in non-print based text and argue for its inclusion in the classroom. Furthermore, Universities are beginning to also see the need for inclusion of such texts and are increasingly purchasing programs such as blackboard and web CT to allow students the opportunity to be exposed to composing non-print text in a scholarly discussion boards. To me it seems as if Lanham is overlooking the technological strides that have been made in classrooms already. Furthermore, it seems that he suggests an all or nothing mentality with electronic technology. If Universities do not invest large sums of money to the development of technology in the classrooms, there can be no benefits. This notion is clearly stated in the last two paragraphs of his article where is he is ranting about budgets and cuts. I disagree with this all or nothing attitude, and feel that there are many benefits to including any type of electronic technology within the classroom. Some exposure to non-print texts and various technologies is better than none at all. The question I had as I finished reading this article is, what are some ways to include electronic technology in the classroom that has very minimal resources?