Blackboard was obviuosly designed by engineers who have never used tech more advanced than an overhead projector.Having recently been engaged in discussions with my class, other faculty, and instructional technology folks about the "hinckyness" of Blackboard in its current iteration, naturally, I reposted this to my own Twitter stream.
My tweets automatically post to my Facebook page. As a result, a parallel discussion about the eLearning née Blackboard software ensued within my Facebook community. The thread largely took the form of academic commentary about Blackboard, eLearning, Moodle, and course management software in general. That is, until this.
Maybe it was invented by English teachers. I guess it's "obvious" Dave isn't one..The author of the original post is, indeed, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at my university. My first thought was to delete the critical post in order to spare "Dave" (and myself) any embarrassment resulting from the criticism. I had noticed the typo in the original post, but decided not to change it in my retweet of his post. By retweeting a la mode, now I had inadvertently opened my colleague to ridicule. What a quandary: Remove the criticism, thus placing a premium on the original content (and author) but implicitly trivializing the critic (and typo)? Leave the comment but ignore it - again, with the potential to trivialize both critic and comment. Comment on the critique within the Facebook thread and derail the original discussion stream?
I decided the best course of action is to address the new topic -- which I believe is important -- elsewhere. Which leads us to this blog post.
New forms of media often garner criticism over their seemingly lax rules and improvised writing. Each new form seems to have its own abbreviations and other shorthand forms of writing and spelling. The acceptance level for misspellings, typos, and other mistakes seems to increase with each new medium. Controversy over what is acceptable in email, online forums, the web, comments, posts, tweets, and other emerging media is not new.
Along with mechanics, there are other issues associated with the immediacy of these new genres. The content itself can be a problem. Sending an email without editing it first has long been a topic of discussion. Mobile-facilitated social media compounds the problem. Composing our missives on the tiny keyboard and screen of a phone or smart device and sending it from a dimly-lit Starbucks, we focus more on immediate response than either content or form.
And then, of course, there is writing within Twitter's 140-characters. Arguably, communication within such a limitation does force a certain focus in the message. It also opens the door for additional improvisations of style and allowances for error. Once posted, a tweet lives forever in the Twitter stream and in the various other streams to which it is diverted.
In some ways, the tools themselves will adapt to ameliorate these effects. For example, spelling check is now a standard feature of email software. Most blog and wiki tools also include spelling checkers. Word processor and publishing programs allow customization of the dictionaries that the spell checkers use. It would be a relatively easy task to include this feature in new media.
And my thoughts on the criticism of my colleague's typo? Perhaps we educators should be held to a higher standard. But we also must weigh the merits of editing and revision against the merits of timeliness and getting our thoughts out there in the first place. I've certainly made more than a fair share of errors in my own posts, so I have no room to criticize. I don't have an answer, but I am glad he posted.
Regardless of how we will mediate and navigate new media with tools and rules, this brings to mind a bigger question: Other than the obviously identifiable error of a mistyped word, does the current language usage in Twitter, text, and other instant media represent errors or a new grammar?
