Thank you Jon for this insightful post.

I work in the field of adult literacy, and observe first-hand on a daily basis in my teaching the legacy of residential schooling for First Nations learners. Many adult learners share a lowered tolerance for the classroom setting -the shared space, the lighting, the noise, the distractions, the goings in and out, the set start and end times.

It drives me crazy to see how well students do with hands-on work on English and Computers only to be halted by testing. For one thing, many learners talk through their learning, but in a testing situation they are not allowed to talk it through. Oftentimes, after the student has handed the test in, I ask a number of questions to check. In many cases, a student is able to give correct answers when I read the test questions aloud, even though the answer is wrong in written form.

Instead of telling students to write out their ideas, I get them to map them out, using a number of graphic organizers, and then get them to prepare a talk based on the organizers. I record the talk, and then get them to use the recording to prepare for the written paper.

Empowering students to assess their own learning, and monitor their own progress, is more important and transformative an act than being the evaluator, and removing the choice and responsibilities from the elarner to adjust their learning themselves to improves their strategies for future.

Students should be engaging in the learning process over a longer time period, adjusting and refining their activities on the basis of feedback and preliminary "rehearsal" grading.

Interesting to see the identification of gender issues. I would expect by changing game design you would alleviate some of those issues. If we get the CMF project, it would be interesting to explore some of those issues in collaborative development.

Hi Jon,
The other day I was listening to a program about Marshall McLuhan on the radio. Apparently he would have liked to have lived before the widespread use of written language and lamented (if I was listening correctly) the ways in which the technology of written language has changed the world, the way we communicate.

As someone who does not love to read I've been considering what distance education without the use of the technology of the alphabet might look (sound) like. Not an easy task but an interesting rabbit trail and a good reminder that technological advances are nothing new. Maybe the difference between ordinary stuff and emerging technologies is just the edge to which we take them for granted.

You might be interested in Christopher Dewdney's 1993 book The Secular Grail, whose prose poems (especially the sequences "Ground of the Ideal" and "Shadows of Thought") extrapolate the McLuhanesque premise of language-as-technology, to posit language as a "self-replicating, lexical organism imbedded in our species"(139)--that is, as a viral kind of artificial intelligence. Dewdney develops some of these ideas further (and in a more openly McLuhanesque mode) in Last Flesh  (1998), suggesting that language is "downloading consciousness" (76).

In a decidedly non-McLuhanesque mode, Tony Burgess adapts this notion of language as a viral AI for his great Canadian zombie autobiography, Pontypool Changes Everything (1998).

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- cpaxfodyrmtz

Deep thought! Thanks for cointnbutirg.
- Evaline

One could express the same feelings about technical writing and instructional design, if one finds the military that thoroughly repugnant.

I wonder if the author is the same H. Van Dyke Parunak, biblical scholar, with whom I corresponded when I was writing my master's thesis on the discourse structure of the Book of Romans?

Now *that's* a fascinating connection! Can't be many people with that name.