For a graduate class I am taking, we need to describe our vision of the ideal future of writing. Here’s mine:

“Writing will survive, but it will survive in a debased form. It will lose its richness. We will no longer read and write words. We will merely process them, the way our computers do.” Nicholas Carr, writing in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica Blog. The culprit: technology.

As for me, while I see the potential pitfalls of technology, the changes I am seeing are all positive. In fact, I believe that advances in technology will make more people writers and will allow those writers to share their work with an ever-increasing audience. Students will enjoy writing, and will do it on their own time because it allows them to connect within and without their community. Most importantly, students will be empowered by writing.

Connection:
Writing has always provided a way for us to connect to others. Technology is allowing that reach to go farther and to more people. Sometimes people say that a drawback of online communities is that people will write things they never would “in real life”. This can also be a positive. Recently I told an English teacher, Tim Gillis, about the Parent-Teacher-Student journals described in Engaging Parents Beyond the Back to School Night. He decided to add a parental component and asked students to interview their parents about whether or not they had ever read Moby Dick, the class text. Some parents talked about how they had never read it, but remembered other books they read. Some liked what they had read in high school, others didn’t. Graham’s father took over the computer and wrote a very poignant response. You can see all the responses at his blog, Moby Tweet.
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