A great deal of our communication -- most of the writing, and a substantial amount of the reading -- you'll do in my courses is conducted through media we usually term "Information Technology," using electronic mail, online discussion forums, wikis, blogs, and so forth. Most people are pretty familiar with IT to start with, though not usually in these specific ways, or for producing and exchanging extended texts. You'll get lots of help if you need it -- from me, from other students, from the lab assistants in Dunn Hall. But you will probably not need it; and if you do, you'll find you're comfortable with this before you know it.

Why do this? I believe that the ability to handle written language confidently and flexibly (as a reader and as a writer) is central to education; I believe just as strongly that being comfortable with the tools we use for handling it is important. And IT includes the most important tools we have for that. Saying "I want to study English or Criminology or Religious Studies (or History, Philosophy, Law, Education, or whatever) and I want to become an educated and literate person, but I don't want to deal with computers" is rather like saying, "I want to be a carpenter but I don't want to touch a power saw."

People often argue that electronic technology is "dehumanizing"; they also sometimes suggest that it's a fad which, like TV in education, will be abandoned in a few years. Both, I think, are wrong. A technology is only as dehumanizing as you make it. When the printing press was invented it looked pretty dehumanizing, too. "What happens to all those wonderful, warm, hand-lettered books?" asked the monks (you can see one dealing with the new "book" technology here). But, in fact, almost everything that's gone into making up our culture for the last five hundred years has been made possible by print -- by language that's visible, and holds still while you interrogate it.

Here is a list of some things you might be asked to learn about, or do, or questions you might ask. Where there's an underlined link, you'll find further information, or a set of instructions for doing a task.

• Each of my courses has a main Web site, which you can find from the "Current Courses" page on my STU Web site. The first thing you should do is "bookmark" the address of the course, or add it to your list of "favorites," so it's easy to get back to.
• Moodle. Moodle is the course management program that St. Thomas has adopted. There is a main Moodle page for any course I teach, and it will be linked from my own Web site. Instructions for getting access to Moodle are available when you click on the link to it (you can do that here).
• Email. One of the first things you'll be asked to do with computers in my courses is send an email to me, or to the class as a whole. For most people, that'll mean activating your account on the St. Thomas network. (If you have off-campus access, you can use that, too, though you'll have to set your mail up so that it receives and sends mail from your STU address.) There will be a course email address, through which anyone can send mail to everyone enrolled; there will also probably be email groups set up if groups are working on a project for more than a day or two.
• Wikis. We may use the wiki application in Moodle, or the external program Wikipedia; instructions will be available when it becomes useful.
• Blogs. Similarly, we'll probably use Moodle's OUBlog module, or an external blog program like Blogger or WordPress.
• Discussion Forums. There are a number of these; we'll probably use the one resident in Moodle.