At their best, computers and writing people engage in the following three activities:

1. They provide the critique of technology and composition (and technology and the classroom in general) that is necessary to sound practice and policy-making (some of this eloquently outlined in Cindy Selfe's 4-Cs address); 
2. They model good practice and help lead technology integration efforts; 
3. They provide a valuable R & D function, testing new technologies and their application and staying out at the leading edge. 

This of course raises a relevancy issue. The C & W field is much more focused on higher education, where the issues are far less important, than it is on K-12. 

On one level, it is in K-12 education where the most challenging issues of equity, access, and basic education are being played out. More fundamentally, technology is changing in dramatic fashion the way knowledge is made, stored, shared, and consumed and I believe that our grandchildren will think quite differently than we do, a reflection of these changes in what Walter Ong calls our "noetic economy." That is a dynamic that is enacted in the earliest grades, not college. 

If anyone is asking whether we should be using computers in the classroom, they are missing the bigger picture. In some ways, it doesn't really matter if computers improve student writing (a question that we asked often early in our field's history and that one still hears from time to time). Computer use in writing is ubiquitous in the places that matter: college, graduate school, and in so many of those jobs that will be most rewarding and interesting in the future. 

As president of a small, liberal arts college that for some time resisted technlogy in the classroom, I have argued that it is almost unethical not to prepare our students for that reality. 

We will someday end the transitional phase in which we now find ourselves, this period where we face major issues of technology integration, training, and understanding. Then, when computers are relatively transparent and as accepted a technology as is the technology of writing, we might not need computers and writing as a field. But for some time to come, we can play a critically important role.