It seems as though there’s a large body of thought that is based around encasing the written work in some sort of “future proof” shielding, as if keeping the text isolated will prevent it from being maligned with dead links or some other sort of internet perversion.

As I watched a roomful of 9th graders spend almost a week researching and practicing proper MLA style citations, checking with their teacher every few minutes to make sure they were creating the citations properly, I became curious. I asked one of the teachers, “how mission critical is it for these students to be able to produce proper MLA citations?” The response was an emphatic, “Extremely mission critical, as they’ll be having to do this in college.” I shook my head metaphorically; despite this being an amazing writing teacher, her experiences in her master’s courses seemed to have convinced her that the citations on this one research paper would be of paramount importance for success in college, not for success in life.

I didn’t have the heart to ask her the next question; “if this is so important, why do students only do it once a year?”

This to me me is a place where we need to break down a bit more of where and what kind of writing is happening. Look for an edit above soon….

But I would have added that embedded rich media should be used carefully… only where it genuinely advances the argument you are making and taking account of accessibility. It can be enormously irritating otherwise.

One other