Probably the most important question facing teachers of English/Language Arts right now is to what extent they should incorporate “new technologies” into their courses.
SJS graduates have reported (literally for decades) that the two areas in which they are generally best prepared compared to their peers are writing and time management.
An alum the other day asked me whether I thought the quality of our graduates’ writing would change now that word processors are ubiquitous and people no longer have to spend as long writing a paper as in “the old days,” when we had to write drafts by hand and then type up a final copy to hand in. I replied that many/most English teachers build in reflective time to many assignments either by requiring drafts or parts of them before the final paper or by encouraging rewrites afterwards.
If you argue that there are two basic components to really good writing–something interesting to say and a facility of expressing your thoughts well–then if you’re considering that alum’s question, you start to ask which, if either of these, the “new technologies” encourage. It is not always true that thoughtfulness is required for developing something interesting to say, but I have found that most of the time it helps. If you do find thoughtfulness and reflection to be significant components of good writing, then many of the NTs do not seem to promote it.
Tweeting, for instance, is rarely reflective; and, it usually conveys off-the-cuff responses (which tend to be emotionally based) rather than well-thought-out ones. In principle, it could be a reasonably powerful technique. If brevity is indeed the soul of wit as Polonius ironically maintains, then just as saying something in 500 words can require much more judicious editing and deliberate use of language than saying it in 1500 words, so (presumably) could saying something interesting or profound in 140 characters require much more careful consideration than saying it in 1400 characters. In practice, if you follow many tweets, though, you will see that the intellectual discipline (if I may call it that) of saying a great deal in a few words rarely shines forth on Twitter.