While the institutions build robust orientation models that I argue should take into consideration this generations technology identities as a method of delivery, the National Association of Concurrent Enrollment’s (NACEP) primary goal is to spearhead a nationwide establishment of accreditation standards for dual enrollment programs but that accomplishment is years aware. While “it is unclear how the sociocultural context of computing at home and school shapes the knowledge and attitudes students develop around technology”, (Goode, 2010; p. 500) it is important to note that both the institution and the NACEP are beginning to address the intricacies of this gap.

Miles McCrimmon (2010) argues that due to the already blurred and porous lines that dual enrollment has caused, secondary and post-secondary programs should consider how to take advantage of the new liminal space created and how to spur the evolution of the new hybrid educator I mentioned earlier to help this new generation of students to succeed in this environment. This educator that I refer to as Teacher 2.0 must be able to situate course standards into a rhetorical media framework.

While the dual enrollment model enhances the rigor of high school curriculum and forces an increased relationship along the journey from pre-school through college, Karp (2007) holds that this relationship through dual enrollment “may simultaneously prepare students for the academic demands of post-secondary education and create a seamless transition between high school and college” (11). That coupled with the nuanced relationship with increased rhetorical media suggest a stronger link between education programs, programs that continually finds new ways to help students develop their own technological identities (Goode, 2010).

The rhetoric shifts as our students’ technology becomes smaller and small; Cator (2011) reiterates her message that we “need to figure out how we get every student his or her own personal [mobile] device.” Education needs to stop attempting to separate the student’s social worlds from the education ones; no longer are these two worlds separated in the minds of today’s learners. Our education programs must address this change head on. The hierarchy of education in the institutional system is changing and the relationships within the classes are changing, too. 

Internet technologies seem to recast education as a “looser” arrangement “where learning can involve a variety of people and places for a variety of reasons. In this sense, it is suggested that children and young people themselves ‘can transform the future of the education system’ (Tapscott and Williams, 2008, p. 51 qtd. in Selwyn 2009) through the mass innovation of shared learning resources and learning opportunities regardless of status or authority” (370). Today a variety of educators, lawmakers, policymakers and foundations argue that high school students benefit from dual enrollment programs. Dual enrollment increases high school curricular rigor, helps lower-achieving students meet higher academic standards and acclimate to high school more easily, provides higher educational opportunities for students who have financial burdens, and reduces the cost of higher education (Karp, 2007). Instructors and institutions can enhance these experiences by using the read write web to develop critical digital literacies that help dual enrollment students to create and communicate the content of their learning; with education does come a sense of maturity and experience; while this generation of student may have knowledge of the read write web, decades of theoretical pedagogical practices continue to pervade a sense of design, implementation and evaluation that typifies the foundation of learning be it traditional (and outdated) or new and digital; the webbing of the space situated rhetorically between these two ideologies begins to narrow our gap that needs not exist in our open door approaches to educating the traditional and nontraditional student alike.