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When we run into people we would like to label villains in our techno-pedagogical melodrama, I think it is important to consider these words from Cynthia Selfe:

 

“New forms of literacy don’t simply accumulate. Rather, they have life spans. In different social contexts – different portions of the larger cultural ecology – they emerge, accumulate, and sometimes compete with pre-existing forms of literacy . . .  and they also sometimes fade or disappear. We need to understand the effects that such contested landscapes have on students working in specific English composition programs" (49).

 

Who are the villains of our techno-pedagogical melodrama? Those who hurt us personally? Those who disparage what we stand for or who we stand with? Fear of what we don’t understand? Fear of looking incompetent or unhip? An unwillingness to experiment? An unwillingness to risk failure? Those who misunderstand or misrepresent our projects, goals, aspirations? Those who refuse to stand with us? Friends of our enemies? Please, add to the list. Name names if you must.

 

I think you are clever to choose a quote on literacy - or your audience is me and you know your audience well. I think literacy is part of it . Difficulties with technical aspects of a communicative environment do take time to get over. If I were to choose a quote specifically related to the MOO and initial reactions versus protracted use I would go with hooks. Here's one from Teaching to Transgress:

 

"Even those professors who embrace the tenets of critical pedagogy (many of whom are white and male) still conduct their classrooms in a manner that only reinforces bourgeois models of decorum" (180).

 

When traditional structures related to classroom control are threatened by a new environment that is not intuitively attuned to such mechanisms, we deem what ensues chaos - and either learn from it and work through it or designate the environment as "a waste of time."