J. Rocky Colavito

We haven't asked enough about the basics [of communication in the information age].If information is doubling every three or five or seven or ten years, where has all that information gone? Is the world really awash in information? And if it is, is that the end to all the world's problems? We are counting articles and pointing to large numbers, but not looking closely enough at the information being generated. . . . we are arrogant about out own abilities to handle information despite endless examples of our frailties.

-- William Wresch, Disconnected: Haves and Have-nots in the Information Age (5)

Are the new technologies a magic bullet aimed straight at success and power? Or are we simply grasping at a technocentric "quick fix" for a multitude of problems we have failed to address?

-- Jane M. Healy, Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--for Better and Worse (18)

ESSAYING" THE TERRITORY

In a flashback to the 1980s, I'm reminded of a popular Talking Heads song with memorable lyrics about being "on a road to nowhere," and as I muse over the now taken-for-granted place of technology in the teaching of writing, I sometimes find those lyrics apropos to the current state of affairs. The road composition is currently on is one way toward technology, and rest stops are few and far between. The "enthusiasm . . . and . . . optimism" are augmented by the "increasing professional influence of computers and composition specialists who. . . entered the field in the early 1980s" ( Hawisher, et al. 2 67)). This "enthusiasm" and "optimism" also renders the road downhill, thus precipitating a headlong, inexorable rush to incorporate more and more technology into our classrooms. The pace is sometimes too fast to pick up those "disconnected" folks to whom Wresch refers. The rapid pace also makes us forget some of those "other" educational issues (e.g. classroom practice, teacher training, institutional awareness, and public accountability) that. Healy suggests we haven't addressed. Consequently, we at times seem to have made a series of "wrong turns" onto this particular road. This chapter, then, assesses and critiques of some of these literal and figurative "wrong turns" that composition theory and practice has taken into the Information/ Computer/Technological age. The experience starts, for me, about twelve years ago.

And So the Story Starts

Our profession is not preparing teachers to deal with technology in its current forms, and we are certainly not preparing them to deal with technology as it changes in the future. . . . attention is focused on specific hardware configurations; demonstrations of existing software packages, programming languages; or computer-assisted instruction and computer-managed education (cf. Lathrop and Goodson; Lucking and Stallard; and Standiford, Jaycox, and Auten). Almost no time, unfortunately, is spent in teaching educators to think critically about how and when virtual environments can support the educational objectives of teachers in English classrooms.

-- Cynthia L. Selfe, "Preparing English Teachers for the Virtual Age: The Case for Technology Critics," in Re-Imagining Computers and Composition: Teaching and Research in the Virtual Age (24)

Computers complicate the teaching of literacy. . . . Technology, along with the issues that surround its use in reading- and writing-intensive classrooms, both physically and intellectually disrupts the ways in which we make meaning-the ways in which we communicate. Computers change the ways in which we read, construct, and interpret texts.

-- Cynthia L. Selfe and Susan Hilligoss "Introduction," in Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology (1)

My first experience teaching composition with a technological component was in the fall of 1986. The preceding spring, I was called to the office of the Director of Composition and told, as only he could, that I was being granted the opportunity to "test-pilot" a section of English 102 (part of our first-year sequence focusing on writing about literature) in our brand spanking new "computer lab." Said lab had six x-shaped tables, with space for four computers upon each. One "work station" was reserved for faculty use exclusively, so there were twenty computers available for student use. The computers were equipped with a now deceased (I think) word-processing program known as Edix-Wordix, whose chief claim to prominence was its ability to split the screen into quarters and allow for viewing four different files at once. There was no network, no Internet, not even modem access (that came a year and a half later). There was also no budget to purchase educational software, and there was no training for me other than a two-hour "how-to" session on running the software.

Preparing the class without guidance was, as you might expect, quite challenging, what with writing new assignments, reconfiguring everyday tasks to incorporate computer use, retooling the syllabus to accommodate training the students in using the software. The class itself went a lot smoother than I could've hoped; I had three students who were very computer literate who gladly served as "teaching assistants," and most folks managed to pick up the word-processing component after a fashion. Still, the problems of access (I had to come in on Saturdays and Sundays to accommodate several students), lost assignments (one poor student never quite managed to get the hang of saving), swapping disks in order to "network" freewriting and other materials, and computer crashes got in the way. I regret to say that my report at the end of the semester about the experience wasn't all that positive, and the Director of Composition subsequently wrote the whole thing off as an experiment that failed.

In retrospect, I believe my initial lack of formal training in using technology, coupled with the institution's desire to move ahead without adequate considerations of what "costs" the technology would incur, created a negative view of the whole experiment. What I needed was a viable framework for bringing technology into the class as a supplement for writing instead of approaching using the computer as course content in and of itself. I needed, as Eric Schroeder and John Boe suggest, a more "minimalist approach"(29) to matters of computing. Trouble was, all my forays into reading the existing research turned up precious little in the form of "how-tos."

Same Stuff, Different Decade

The digital computer provides a richly textured writing space. Computer writing can be as abstract as alphabetic writing. It can be as fast and effortless (as apparently untechnological) as mental writing. Computer writing is primarily visual, rather than oral, and can be as silent as the picture writing of preliterate peoples . . . . The computer rewrites the history of writing by sending us back to reconsider nearly every aspect of the earlier technologies. In particular, the electronic medium gives a renewed prominence to the long discredited art of writing with pictures.

-- Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (45-46)

The computer indeed facilitates the production and revision of text . . . but the ease of word processing tempts novice writers to verboseness and blurs for them crucial distinctions between proofreading and revising. Students are tempted . . . toward premature closure. Deceived by polished output, they come to equate good formatting with good text . . . . A coherent pedagogy for computer writing ing has been slow in emerging.

-- Kathleen Skubikowski and John Elder "Computers and the Social Contexts of Writing," in Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the TwentyFirst Century, ed. Carolyn Handa (90)

For a lot of compositionists, this story sounds hauntingly familiar. Trouble is, we have much more to deal with today than I did thirteen years ago. There has to be some level of success to some of those early experiments, because now we have whole writing courses whose raison d'etre is using the latest technological gizmo or add-on. Some of these successes are qualified ones, but enough positives have occurred to firmly entrench the computer within the space of the composition classroom. Trouble is, there are still some shortcomings as teaching writing with technology lurches toward the year 2000.These shortcomings include the following:

PREACHING, BUT NO PRACTICE

A new, more mature research agenda will aid us in understanding how computer technologies, literacy, thinking, and culture are connected. Such research is crucial for informing the design of curricula for teaching writing and can guide the wise use of technology in writing. But an even more critical (and, to our minds, heretofore unacknowledged) justification for such research is that it can help authorize our voices not just in the proper use of computer technologies for literacy but in the very shape such technologies should take. A critical reason for conducting research, then, is to help us give shape to the technologies that, in turn, shape our literacy acts-to "write" the technology that "writes" us.

-- Christina Haas and Christine M. Neuwirth "Writing the Technology That Writes Us: Research on Literacy and the Shape of Technology," in Selfe and Hilligoss (320)

Conventional texts have certain limitations. Print's truest products, as Alvin Kernan recently insisted, are "ordered, controlled, teleological, referential, and autonomously meaningful" ( Death of Literature141). When literacy serves the interests of individual authority, monological discourse, and linear argument, these qualities may be essential; but they come to have less value as we come to define literacy in terms of communities--positing dynamic, collaborative, and associative forms of writing

-- Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan "They Became What They Beheld: The Futility of Resistance in the Space of Electronic Writing," in Selfe and Hilligoss (221)

The most damning wrong turn of writing instruction's foray into the computer age is the shocking absence of any sustained body of scholarship geared toward discussing the practical side of teaching with technology. When we do find such information, it's either embedded in descriptions of testing procedures disguised as classroom activities found in research studies or relegated to state English journals. I suspect part of the absence is due to the still-existing tension between theory and practice as types of research, but the lack of resolution in this area is compromising this segment of the field of composition. I concede to the argument about some faculty being resistant to change, but I can also suggest that part of the reason for this resistance is the absence of a coherent and sustained system of retraining all faculty in computer literacy and application. Doris Lee suggests several key needs of trainees in this area:

The hands-on portion of the training is crucial, as is accounting for varying paces in knowledge acquisition. But there's still a pressing need for concrete lesson plans, activities, and mechanisms teachers can use in the classroom. More in this area will give faculty greater confidence about using the computer as a teaching tool, particularly when confronted by students who are more expert computer users. More significant, however, is a seemingly universal failure by educational institutions on down to individual faculty to acknowledge how many students lack the necessary tools to succeed in computer-supported classes. Requiring word processing of papers, for example, begs the question of both student access to computer resources and student ability to complete essays on disk. Again, training in word processing isn't normally part of the course content of a writing class, and I suspect most purists would argue that the course is still First-Year Writing, not First-Year Word Processing. But look at what goes begging here, the assumption is that students will come in (to grade level/college) proficient in word processing. This simply isn't the case, and we err by catering writing classes to the "haves" in the Information Age. Believe it or not, some students come to college with no keyboarding skills, and that includes typing.

There is a like amount of assuming that goes on with regard to having access to computers. Schools feel that having open labs, computers in the library, and mandatory "field trips" to the lab as part of course curricula is sufficient time to access technology. Many schools also assume that students can have access to computers at home. Cynthia Selfe, in a recent CCC illuminates the disproportionality in computer possession/access, noting that whites have greater tendency to possess and have easier access to computers, and that whites are more likely than African Americans to access the World Wide Web ( Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak390, quoted in Selfe421). Throwing vast amounts of money into technology in the schools still doesn't seem to be improving access, and the only way to assure access to all students is to require possession of a computer for attendance at an institution, or to literally have a computer on the desk of every student. This whole question of access is just as damning as a lack of faculty training because both compromise the integrity of the classroom by calling into question our even-handedness. On the classroom level, students who lack resources or time to get access are at a disadvantage, particularly if word processing, on-line discussion, or Internet research are course/assignment requirements. On an institutional level, if we continue to surreptitiously, rather than forthrightly, "require" access to technology we send the message that those who lack access are second-class students. Better that we take our lumps financially by either providing more computers than is necessary in order to ensure access, and/or by requiring purchase or leasing of computers as an entrance requirement.

RE-ORIENTING OURSELVES

Although computer technology has altered reading- and writing-intensive classrooms in some dramatic ways and at many levels . . . it has not brought the deep, systemic changes in education for which many computer-using English teachers hope. Some theorists have suggested that far from bringing change, computer technology may have a complex and over-determined tendency to inhibit change.

-- Gail E. Hawisher, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cynthia L. Selfe Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History (8)

Despite our best efforts, the computer, in the early stages of learning, steals center stage from the writing ( Flinn and Madigan). It's like bringing an iguana into a fourth-grade classroom. Some kids play, others panic, but nobody is thinking about long division!

- Jane Zeni "Literacy, Technology, and Teacher Education," in Selfe and Hilligoss, eds., Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology (79)

I don't pretend to have all the answers for all the issues raised here, but I do think it's time for the field of composition studies to re-evaluate where technology has brought us and what it has wrought upon our theories and classroom practices. Most pressing is our need to devote significant amounts of attention to articulating standards and practices to students, faculty, and the public at large. We call it the Information Age, but there's sadly been too little information disseminated in these areas and to these constituencies. Unfortunately, the flow of information has to be on multiple fronts: