Chew on that and share what gets spat out.

Your points:

a) I do mean to include oral language in the arc of this discussion. (Have you read ‘Spell of the Sensuous’ by David Abram, about the pitfalls of written communication moving us away from our oral and sensory experience of the natural world? Amazing book, I suspect you’d love it.)

b) As such, as you’ve pointed out, it becomes important to examine which types of multimedia facilitate (or do not facilitate)– what types of language. This is what I mean by E/LA teachers “considering [their tools] carefully”; no specific criticism intended.

c) My conviction, as a language teacher and tech skeptic, is that the uncritical and overweening use of multimedia does not lend itself inherently to the better learning of language arts. And since you could really say that about any classroom tool, I would go one step further and say that I feel most multimedia *in essence* has a dangerous capacity to pull us away from mastery of the full range of language– and indeed, better learning in general. Yep, I’ll say that. Bring on the tomatoes.

d) Why? I could spend six other comment boxes on this, so I’d just refer you to my blog and search on the term “technology.” Meantime, maybe you, or Dan, could specify why you think Dan’s quest for “the perfect image” in learning (to bring it back to Dan, since this is his blog :) ) is equally relevant to all disciplines.

— Dina

Can you define what you mean by “language”? Are you basing all of this on the “written” word/phrase, something that is — dare I say — relatively a new thing as far as the masses communicating to one another goes?

Communication as an “oral” premise, around the proverbial fire pit (amidst other language locales), kinda ran things for most of the arc of human experience until only a few centuries ago (when suddenly both teller and receiver were able to ‘read’ what was written down). Oral words have always spoken to something more primal/visual than a dictionary definition or grammatical super-rule.

One could argue without much effort that auditory and movie-like visual “language” has a much stronger connection to the human need to communicate/understand than the written word, which actually puts distance between deeper truths and the audience/speaker.

And since I am one of many “Language arts teachers in particular”, I’m curious what you mean by “consider this point very carefully”. That seems to be a bit of a strawman rather than a carefully constructed explanation/response. I’m also curious if you’re using Marshall intentionally or if the “media *is* the message” line speaks to something else that I’m missing at first pass.

I remain curious, but I must admit to being a tad confused by the way your wielding the tool/multimedia/language/message sword in this recent response. I don’t doubt your conviction. I’m just not sure how the subject-specific line is the sand re: media has been drawn.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. As a gardener, I often use my hands. Yup. Just my hands. It ends up being much more about vision and dumb luck then the right hoe/rake from my experience as a gardener.

More specifically, we cannot escape that the media *is* the message, as someone much smarter than me said once. Language arts teachers in particular, I would argue, need to consider this point very carefully when choosing to teach language with anything other than language.

Deconstructing technique and content seems valuable for any/all subjects, but the very idea of debating media as a format being more prone to one side of the academic hallway vs. another seems to miss the entire point.

If you can swing the club, then it works. If you can’t, it doesn’t. Period.

The elegance of math, its application, its functionality, its symmetry, its patterns: I mean, really, where else *do* you go in making those things live in the classroom, other than video?

Whereas in the world of words, video serves perhaps to augment concepts of literacy…or provide an experience of the voice of language; or perhaps a new medium in which to manipulate language towards an intended result (scriptwriting). But ultimately, anything that takes you away fundamentally from words isn’t language arts. Pretty simple.