So, this same student created another portfolio, I did an independent study with him in the Fall. He’s a junior now, and this was a portfolio that was intended to show his work as a college student. That’s a fundamentally different task. It wasn’t intended to show development. He did show development in the earlier one. His newer portfolio, from a screen point of view, is amazing; it’s fabulous. He took some images and he reworked them. His central metaphor, visually, was a synthesizer. If you think about it, a synthesizer is a very nice metaphor for a portfolio. In addition to which, it is apt for him personally because what I didn’t know but learned about him is that he’s an amateur musician. Now, then that was used to provide some visual coherence to the portfolio. That’s another order of magnitude from what we saw before. Now I have to say, I don’t think we spent a lot of time on reflection and you didn’t see the same development. We spent a lot of time on the visual, we spent a lot of time on the screen. There may be one document where you get to scroll; everything else is clicked. Everything else is repurposed for the screen. Much more visual. And he doesn’t think visually, by the way, which is another thing that I learned. I had bought, what is now to me at least, a huge mythology that everyone of this generation thinks visually because they grew up in a visual culture. Well, you know, apparently not. So when I said to him, “so now, we’ll think about the visual, you know, the images that you think with. What would they be?” And he looks at me and goes, “Huh?” So then, there was a new curriculum that was invented inside this independent study. I think this is the kind of thing that we’re likely to learn, and I have to tell you that it’s just one of more exciting intellectual projects that I’ve been lucky enough to develop over the last couple of years, and I think there’s a lot to learn.

The other thing I’ll say about it is that in the studio -- the class of ’41 Studio, which is profiled in the WPA article that I wrote with Morgan Gresham, my friend and colleague, and it basically outlines how the studio developed and also the online studio that is not a mirror site of the physical space. That studio space is staffed principally by undergraduate students who are from across the disciplines. They do take a credit bearing course that was designed expressly for working in this environment. And two students, one is a marketing major and the other is a health sciences major, did a presentation to faculty all by themselves without being rehearsed, by the way, on their development of different portfolios, and I saw the same kind of shifting there. One of them, Will Dickert, I’m going to ask to write a piece with me because of his development in his first two portfolios, one of which was in a literature class that I taught. That class, and others like it, was actually a basis for this literature book that NCTE just brought out. I recruited Will for the studio and I was delighted when he said yes. So we took that portfolio and another of his portfolios and both of them are pretty much print uploaded. They are smart in very interesting ways and he’s a very smart and wonderful young man, but the one he is creating now is so radically different and there’s no instruction going on. There’s no independent study and there’s no course. It’s Will interacting with different tools in a space that fosters thinking and talking about this way of representing learning and with other people who care about the same issues. There’s a combination there that’s magic. And we have not built that combination into our curriculum, and we need to.

Now if you say, “can they do better than I can at searching the web?” – probably not because searching the web, if you are an academic, is very similar, in fact, remarkable similar to library searching. I’m astonished at how wonderful it is that I don’t have to go to the library anymore. Actually, I think going to the library is a good idea by the way, so I don’t want to give it up or want libraries abolished, but I will say on a Sunday afternoon when I want an article, it’s a wonderful thing to be able to download it and read it right away rather than run to the library. I appreciate the convenience factor. But again, that’s just a digitized delivery system. That’s not doing new tasks with the Internet. I don’t know if the research was asking both those questions and I suspect it was not. I suspect it was looking at practices that are fairly conventional and seeing how well people could manage the electronic delivery of those practices. In that case, the grown-ups, the people over thirty or over forty, may well do better. On the other hand, if you ask them about text messaging or instant messaging I think we do less well. We seem to like the phone. I see a lot of senior citizens using the phone. Everyone still likes the phone. But it is a very conventional use of the word phone. So, I don’t actually know the research, but I think it is important to understand what the different purposes are here and to take a nuanced look at those .

In “New Studio Composition,” you write “students now entering college have more familiarity with multimedia and computer technologies than many of us teaching composition” (18). Yet usability researchers Nielsen Norman Group most recent study found that teens today are less tech-savvy than adults. In their research, they found teens became easily confused with complex Internet sites and interfaces. Is there any relation to this and what you found with this assumption that students are media or visually savvy?

I haven’t seen the research, so without knowing the specifics of it, it is difficult to comment on it. I have a nickel, however, that says that the research probably asked students to engage in fairly academic tasks using the Internet, and I don’t think that’s necessarily the way students use the internet. If you ask them how they use the Internet, or mobile communication devices, or anything that falls into that category, to communicate with others as the recent Christian Science Monitor article published last weekend suggested, if you ask them what they know about genre on the basis of playing video games, if you ask them about why they use email for specific tasks as opposed to instant messaging, what you find, in fact, is that they do have theories about all of these things and they are remarkably smart.