It's an increasing reality that our students use email, word processing, internet research, and other computer applications as basic tools for completing their work in college, and command of these technologies are presupposed in the workforce. In her address to CCCC last month [April 1998], Cindy Selfe illustrated that "technological literacy--meaning computer skills and the ability to use computers and other technology to improve learning, productivity and performance--has become as fundamental to a person's ability to navigate through society as traditional skills like reading, writing and arithmetic." I want to push this by saying that functional, rhetorical, and critical command of communication, information, and composition technologies will become as basic to our classrooms as the abilities to read and write critically and reflectively: we can agree that, if students leave our writing programs without being able to read critically, we have not done our jobs; and if they leave without knowing how to write critically in different rhetorical situations, we have failed; but we are coming to realize that, if students leave us without the abilities to use word processors as tools to facilitate the writing process, without rhetorical command of email generated writing, without critical experience finding and analyzing web-based research material, without an understanding of different modes of online conferencing, then we have not positioned them for success as literate contemporary readers and writers.

Let me make clear the extent to which I believe we should realize this: technological literacy is not a component of academic literacy; if it is "as fundamental to a person's ability to navigate through society as traditional skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic" (as Selfe tells us), then technological literacy is a major component to functional literacy. And if we send our students away from the composition classroom without knowledge, experience, and rhetorical command of communication, information, and composition technologies and the conventions of those technologies, then we must consider them functionally illiterate--functionally illiterate graduates of our writing programs.

Finally, it occurs to me that arguing this before the 1998 Computers and Writing Conference may be an extreme example of preaching to the choir. If it is so, then I challenge the choir to sing. Sing with the tunes that the composition field and our departments value--empirical research and teacher research on a publication-level, and teacher-training workshops on the service-level. And sing with the lyrics that will turn our pedagogical directions toward including critical technological literacy--using technologies and consistently reflecting on their effects on learning and society--as a fundamental component to composition instruction.