In “Technology and Literacy Education in the Next Century.” the authors argue that technological literacy should be incorporated into the classroom as a standard in education to better prepare students for the new millennium workplace. Arguing that students are preparing for a more technologically-centric world and should be better prepared to enter this workplace with a better understanding of the key concepts to digital literacy, Labbo, Reinking, and McKenna explore the key concepts of digital literacy as they relate to technological trends in the workplace and the responsibility of instructors to prepare students to enter the real world with a better understanding of these technologies. Through the demand that students be prepared with these technological literacies, it is apparent that the authors address this article to technologically hesitant instructors. Demonstrating the ways that technological literacy has become essential to the workplace, and providing methods for incorporating technology into traditional lessons, the authors’ purpose of aiding these technologically hesitant instructors in teaching technology in their classrooms reveals itself.

In “Threaded Discussion on the Internet and in the Classroom, Erik Simpson explores the reason behind a lack of student participation in threaded discussions required for their classes. Simpson posits that the reason for this student apathy emerges from the structure required within class message boards that force students to focus on a specific topic for only a specific amount of time. In the article, written by a college English instructor for other English instructors, Simpson attempts to explain the phenomenon of minimal participation and provide a means of improving this participation. To aid teachers in creating more active discussion threads, Simpson demonstrates that allowing students more flexibility in their posting by mimicking the open forum of online discussions provides better responses.

Though Simpson’s article is intriguing and posits an important point in the development of classroom skills, this study does not correlate to my research in any fashion. Working with message boards is a similar concept to what he discusses in the article, but these boards are not terminal, so the work in Simpson’s article does not advance my scholarship.