Introduction

I was born in West Virginia and have lived there all my life except for eight years in which I lived in different places throughout Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona working for the USAF.  Although I loved, much about my life in Phoenix, AZ, I knew that, for me, West Virginia was the right place to raise children.  I wanted my kids to be barefoot in the country, climbing trees, and “catchin’ crawdads in the crick” just the way I used to.  So, after those adventurous years in the Southwest, I moved back to Appalachia in hopes of becoming a school teacher and starting a family. I met Albani my first day back in WV and we were married ten months later.  This is our tenth year together and we now have three children.  These days, I teach English and Theatre at Bridgeport High School and I truly love my job.

I have recently switched to the Digital Media & and New Literacies graduate program because I found that I was enjoying the classes associated with that major, and I felt that, in them, I was encountering ideas that were new to me and beneficial to my own students.  I signed up for this class because I wanted to continue my own journey into some of these “cutting-edge” ideas about how digital media has become a part of our daily lives and education.  To some, my interest in this may seem to conflict with the love of nature that I expressed in the previous paragraph, but to me it does not.  To me, an ideal society would balance respect for the natural world with the development of technology, and would allow one to guide the other.

This video entitled "Literacy is Like Velcro" reflects my current attitude toward literacy.  I would be interested to see what my classmates and instructor have to say about it: Literacy Is Like Velcro

This Dilbert comic by Scott Adams illustrates one attitude that many educators have toward digital media:

Here Dilbert's boss reflects the current state of technology in many schools: Let's just acquire the technology so that we can say we have it, so that we look good to the public... We don't need to have a real educational goal or use for it.