In the age of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — among others — is the English major a relic of the past?

Conventional wisdom may say the answer to that question is a resounding “Yes,” but not everyone is so sure.

“It's dramatically changed, certainly, since my early days when I first became a teacher,” said Bob Dandoy of Butler.

Dandoy knows a few things about what it means to be a language arts teacher in Pennsylvania.

He is a retired college professor of English and linguistics, the acting director of the Clarion University Alumni Foundation, and state treasurer of the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts.

And while both the learning and teaching of language arts has dramatically changed since Dandoy first picked up a piece of chalk, he says people who write off the discipline are jumping the gun.

Dandoy may have retired from the college classroom, but he still works with teachers and works to advance the pedagogy that informs how they run their classrooms at schools across the state.

“Everybody wants to talk about social media, but the biggest change we have, I think, is the speed at which we communicate,” Dandoy said. “It's not just pens and papers and books.

“It's email, the Internet, Facebook, Instagram, messaging. It's a whole new world for communication now.”

Colleges across the country have certainly taken notice of the shift Dandoy describes. If you take a look in the course catalogs of institutions like the University of Florida, you'll see classes grounded in the ins and outs of social media.

The University of Southern California goes so far as to offer a master's program in digital social media through its journalism school, promising students that the offerings will “teach you leadership and management of social media, digital media, and online communities.”

The University of Rutgers offers a “mini-MBA” in social media marketing for a little more than $3,000, and focuses on using analytics and social media in the business world.

For Dandoy, however, the focus has always been the language arts. How have platforms like Twitter and Facebook changed the way students think about writing and reading? That question, Dandoy said, is the keystone to most English classrooms today.

“When I first started teaching, we talked about English education,” Dandoy said. “Now there's media literacy and social literacy. It's not just reading and writing. There's a lot more than that.”

Far from obsolete, Dandoy says, English instructors now find themselves standing at the confluence of multiple disciplines.

People can choose to look at that as a challenge or an opportunity, but Dandoy said teachers and students are better served by looking at the Internet's exponential growth as a positive.

“Doing research doesn't mean being holed up in the corner of the library anymore,” Dandoy said. “Now it's on the Internet with access to art and poetry and so much information.”

If students are being blessed with more easily accessible information than ever before, the trade off is that many of them aren't equipped to sort through the detritus and resurface with objectively correct information.

“That's one of the questions in our universities: How do we get them (students) all this knowledge,” Dandoy said. “My answer is, we don't. We can't.

“You give them tools so they can navigate that and continue to learn, study and grow.”

When the subject is more nebulous — like opinion pieces on social justice issues or so-called “hot takes” on news that gain traction on social media — Dandoy said teachers and students can fall into the trap of searching in vain for what is “correct.”

In those cases they can end up missing the real value of social media, Dandoy said: The ease and speed at which we communicate can allow teachers and students to flesh out the debate surrounding an issue more than ever before.

He points to the social media uproar over United Airlines' treatment of a passenger who refused to give up his seat on an overbooked flight.

The majority of public reaction to the incident was negative toward the airline, but Dandoy has found at least one piece — from an airline pilot — arguing from a different perspective. That kind of diversity, he said, is invaluable.

“I'm not saying she's right. I'm saying that she's valid,” Dandoy said. “You've got to take both looks at that story. To help students be able to do that while reading and writing, that's the challenge.”