Technology

The copyright date for this semester's textbook is 2001. The chapter on technology and writing pedagogies refers to another "current" reference, dated 1998.
In my life, I've seen the hand-held calculator, once a novelty, go from over $100 to $10. It was my mother's "big" gift to my father one Christmas. We all played with the thing of course, discovering that when you typed in "0.7734" and turned it upside down, you had a pretty snazzy way of greeting someone. I was 20 or so when the fax machine came into being as the latest, greatest mechanism of communication at the bank where my mother worked.
Is it any wonder that technologies once considered novel and cutting edge, in just a few short years, either evolve into more streamlined systems or become archaic and useless?
The real novelty of technology is not found in the nuts and bolts, the mechanics and design of the artifact; more salient to this blog entry are the shifting approaches to our electronically-based communication, driven by that technology coupled with our very human need for contact.
In his chapter, "Technology and the Teaching of Writing," Charles Moran addresses the concerns of online communication -- specifically e-mail: "... e-mail as a medium evokes intimacy, up to and including virtual online sex. ... How do we (as teachers) maintain appropriate authority online?"
I do believe that things have changed significantly since Moran's piece. We have learned over a short time how to manage online behaviors -- ours as well as others. The novelty of an artifact tends to bring out the experimental kid in us. But a shift eventually occurs, possibly through a combination of familiarity and maturity (and perhaps some regret): the novelty of the artifact which once elicited less than stellar behavior then shifts to the novelty associated with critical thought and empathy. When we begin to get comfortable with online communication, we concern ourselves with the receiver of the message.
As learned pupils of the technological age, we have also become adept at managing the behaviors of others: through trial and error, we are able to frontload online communication criteria with user-savvy guidelines. We can manage expectations through our technical communications skills to demonstrate how best to convey one's thoughts efficiently. We can gain practical control over our lives, and emotional control over others by ignoring an e-mail. And we can limit the impact of another person's online behavior by simply deleting a message.
Perhaps the biggest technological challenge facing any teacher is encouraging students to distinguish among a growing number of resources, and to develop a keen sense of what is safe and what is reliable. And we should all be cautioned against assuming a child is tech-savvy, when nothing -- not even a computer -- can abbreviate the natural process of growing up.