Response to “Technology and the Teaching of Writing”

Though personal computers have been affecting mainstream society since the early 1980s, I think it was my generation, the early 20-something crowd, that’s been the educational transition group. In grade school I was writing reports about dinosaurs in cursive, and in middle school I was double-spacing Revolutionary War essays and taking full advantage of the word count feature. And now my little sister, a teenager herself now, tabs between her Google searches for non-Wikipedia sources and Facebook comments.

Charles Moran’s essay brought up the idea of the computer becoming as common as the pencil in the writing classroom, and I think this kind of movement, for good or for ill (and Moran certainly doesn’t paint the technology movement as a writing panacea), will continue until every student has a laptop on his/her desk. While I think this shouldn’t be something to be avoided, I feel that a lot of the writing formats and processes that are outlined in standard writing are being ignored in our step to technology. This spans the ideas of email, electronic revision, online discussion, and other forms of writing we take for granted when we learn the rules of composition, which originated on the paper page. It seems like no one is taking proper time to get students attuned to these tools. Maybe we feel that students will fill in these gaps, or maybe we’re not too sure of the rules ourselves.

Take email for example: I’ve been using email since AOL was considered a new and exciting step into the World Wide Web. However, I’m still unsure of its language and expectations, especially since I became a graduate student at IUPUI. uMail has become an integral part of communication between myself, my teachers, my department, my job (which has its own LISTSERV), and several community newsletters. Even today though I still struggle in deciding whether or not to include “Signed” or to just type in “-Dane” at the end of the email. Do I even need to address the person’s name in beginning? I’m obviously more formal with communicating to new people, but I often waffle on the rules with familiar superiors.

And to be a bit “meta” here, it’s taken me a bit to loosen up on my writing style for this blog. Only recently have I tried to ask for feedback and to ease up the traditional response format. Perhaps this isn’t such a problem for blog-savvy people, but it was a noticeable difference for me, especially in an academic context.

Some would say that these are minor issues in the grand scheme of technology in the classroom, and that much of the language and expectations will come about based on the relationships between the sender and receivers online. But I think these issues lead to a bigger issue of cognitive separation of technology’s purpose in the classroom. A computer is more than just a computer: for every individual, it’s defined by the tasks it does regularly. For my dad it’s a really big calculator and email chain receiver. For my sister it’s a non-stop social network. We can get into a rut with what we assign the computer to do for us, and while many of us have solidified what the computer means for us in our personal and business hours, I don’t think we’re comfortable with it yet in an academic context, especially as a tool to push students to become better scholars.

Research takes the biggest hit here for me. I agreed with all of Moran’s findings on searching for articles online. Even if there are plenty of databases and sites to be the exception, I’ve never associated the internet to be a place of lengthy discourse and critical thought. Many students still find it okay to quote Wikipedia as a primary source, or bend their essays to quotes from articles appear first in their Google searches. I’m a member of many message boards, ranging from hubs for my friends to shoot the breeze in and political boards that have thousands of members. Common memes get thrown around to reflect the boards’ cultures, but a prevalent one is “tl;dr.” It’s an abbreviation for “too long; didn’t read,” and it’s typed to show another poster’s annoyance at someone’s previous comment. Sometimes it’s a wall of text with no paragraphs, and sometimes someone just writes too much for the reader. Others will just say they don’t have time to read the poster’s “novel” and will mock them. I don’t mock these posters, but I actively scroll away from posts and articles that have too much text in them online. In a cyber world where cable connections, search engines, instant messages, and streaming media are now commonplace, I feel that the internet is a culture of “tl;dr,” and not conducive to students’ research.

With the proper context, I think the “tl;dr” culture can be somewhat overridden in the classroom. Little exercises can really get students into using the computer as an academic resource, and not a compositional shortcut. One resource that gets ignored by many new students is the interlibrary loan system. In choosing between a comprehensive journal held by another library and a mediocre .pdf article, the student will most likely choose the later, as they’re more familiar with .pdf files. What if on the first day of the class, the teacher had them all register into the interlibrary loan system, and had them order a book for in-class credit? What if the same thing was done with registering for a wikispace, or a blog? If these things are taken as seriously in the classroom as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, perhaps students will use them as a natural part of the class. While it’s not critical that every class has a LISTSERV and a blog with everyone using them (these things will never replace one-on-one peer discussion), I feel it’s important to show the class a stable routine early, and to make sure no student is left behind when technology enters the composition classroom.

While I don’t pretend to have all the answers, I do believe as teachers we need to figure out some definitive roles for the computer role in the classroom. What is it supposed to do? What is it not for? In church people are traditionally quiet and reverent, and at work we often treat customers much differently than family. But too often on computer lab days I see more than a handful of students typing replies on their social networks during a teacher’s lecture, perhaps imitating note-taking, perhaps not even feigning that. Here in the classroom, students still see computer the same way they do at home. As a teacher, I see that as perspective that needs changed the most in the classroom. I’m still feeling out my own limits of technology as a teacher (I really don’t want to be “the PowerPoint guy”), but one thing is certain: Facebook will be blocked from the network when my class starts.