I may have been too hard on Selfe...

It was Jennifer’s (her blog) comment that the length of the history provided may have been an intentional way of illustrating how much work had gone into getting all these classrooms this technology and how much money had been spent, and how in the end, the classroom conditions were basically the same, that made me start rethinking the Selfe essay.  “Wiring the schools had not saved them. The problems with America’s public schools – disparate funding, social promotion, bloated class size, crumbling infrastructure, lack of standers – have nothing to do with technology. Consequently, no amount of technology will lead to the educational revolution prophesied by President Clintion and others” (Selfe 146).   The more I thought about it, the more this writing strategy seemed to work.  There were 145 pages of explanation of what was done to reach this educational revolution, and because we weren’t paying attention to the real problems (and the real solutions our schools needed) none of it panned out to anything.  We had spent all the time, effort, and money, and because we focused it in the wrong places and ways, our schools had seen no real benefit.   The issue wasn’t that these students didn’t have access to the internet; it is that through our own lack of funding and involvement they had a real lack of access to education.