Book Review: Breaking Down the Digital Walls: Learning to Teach in a Post-Modem World (By R. W. Burniske and Lowell Monke)
Abstract
R. W. Burniske and Lowell Monke have written a book about education and technology that requires a patient reader, one who is willing to reflect on issues without demanding resolution. This suggestion for a target audience originates from the authors in the beginning of their book on learning to teach in a “post-modem” world. The recommendation is useful, though, in preparing readers for the authors’ use of dialectical discourse. Drawing on Freire (1997), the authors define dialectical discourse as “a continual interdependent cycle of communication, critical thinking, and insight growing toward the light of truth” (p. 226). They highlight this type of interaction, as it is their main educational goal for past and future telecollaborative projects—to get students to emotionally engage in open-ended inquiry while being sufficiently detached to reason and accept ambiguity and tension.