#3: Why?: "The Digital Imperative"

It is nothing new that as our world's needs change, so do the needs of our students. Educators should be preparing students for what awaits them outside the walls of the classroom. It only makes sense to assume that if traditional methods of grammar instruction have not been working in the past, then these methods will especially fall flat in the digital classroom of the 21st century.

Everyone can be author now, and every blog post and social media update have some control of grammar, some knowledge of sentence structure by the author. There are varying definitions or grammar; whether it is an instrinsic set of rules acquired or learned set of rules applied to writing. I would argue that no matter what your view, students use and know commands of grammar and conventions daily, we simply need to make them AWARE of it, aware that without the teacher sitting at their arm, they created a correctly structured sentence. As Yancey presents in her NCTE publication "Writing in the 21st Century", writing in the 21st century is a "call to action, a call to research and articulate new composition, a call to help our students compose well, and through these composings, become the citizen writers of our country, the citizen writers of our world, and the writers of the future"(1). Our students are authors everyday, that should be the digital imperative for teaching and using multimedia web based instruction for teaching grammar. There seems to inconsistencies between our traditional "essayisitic literacy" in our now very digital culture, explores J. Elizabeth Clark, in her 2009 article, "The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st Century Pedagogy". In addition to her emphasis on students becoming, and acknowleding themselves as, civic authors, she essentially makes the case for online, web based grammar instruction. I think it is important to see the big picure, as Clark does. She makes an interesting analogy comparing the digital age we are now in to that of the enviornmental movement, making the case for activism. "Precisely because we are in the infomation age, we need a movement- akin to environmental movement- to preserve the public domain...The explosion of information technologies has precipitated an intellectual land grab; it must also teach us about the existence and the value of the public domain"(27).

It is not enough to acknowledge changes in the classroom, we need to acknowledge the changes of our world and learn ways in which to teach the value of these changes. Grammar is something it seems no one wants to tackle but if we are reading e-books and writing in blogs, shouldn't we be learning grammar in a way that is congruent to these changing faces of literacy? Multimedia literacy must acknowledge and include the issue of grammar instruction; again, the "why", the digital imperative, is there.

Works Cited:

1. Clark, J. Elizabeth. "The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st Century Pedagogy". Computers and Composition. Vol.27. 2010. 27-35. 2. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. (2009 February). Writing in the 21st Century. Retrieved March 24, 2011, from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Press/Yancey_final.pdf