These missions are more tightly entwined than my formulation might suggest. This is because it is highly likely that our students will bring new literacies and new practices into our classrooms with them, along with their pagers and cell-phones. They are developing these literacies and practices not in school but in spite of school, at video arcades or net cafes and chatrooms. This may be especially difficult for our older colleagues, myself included; but it is not only for the graybeards that the bell tolls. In such an environment we must enlist our students as collaborators in the ongoing effort to understand the way emerging technologies and literate practices coevolve. Our teaching is our scholarship. 

Computers and Writing is no longer a marginal field: our longstanding concerns about the impact of technology now share center stage with questions of equity and access for students and, as tenure withers and full-time jobs disappear, for faculty as well. This change in the status of our work is bound up with fundamental shifts in the way our networked classrooms are situated within universities and colleges, and the way universities and colleges are situated vis-a-vis government and industry as well as the rest of the educational system, especially K-12. Simply put, the classroom is no longer a private space, and our networks are no longer merely local. The classroom is a node in a network connecting multiple contexts--educational, governmental, corporate, social--in which information moves in increasingly complex patterns. To change the metaphor, the walls are two-way glass: its not simply a matter of our looking out from a privileged, invisible position, but also of our being visible as never before from the erstwhile outside. We rightly fret that such visibility makes it all too easy to impose accountability measures based on inappropriate or outmoded criteria. 

Ten years ago, Shoshana Zuboff introduced an important distinction which is relevant to our situation today, between automating procedures on the one hand and informating systems on the other. Educational administrators, like corporate executives ten years ago, are too often seduced by the notion of automation: they want to believe that they can get major gains in educational productivity (whatever that is) and save money at the same time, by automating existing practices and procedures. Thus, to take just one example, there is growing interest in tools that automate creation of Web sites for classes, as at UCLA. The goal is to reduce the cost of producing and updating course bulletins, and to pave the way for marketing some courses to extramural audiences.. But the existence of class Web sites on such a scale may have an effect in transforming/informating the system as a whole. Zuboff described how a new computer system, for example, forced workers in a paper mill to view their work as part of a much larger process. For the first time, they saw how activity elsewhere in the process affected them, and how their work affected work downstream. I think this is where we are now: our connectivity, still very much incomplete and wildly uneven, is beginning to show us how what's upstream and downstream affects and is affected by what we do in our classrooms. This is the challenge we face. We must learn to work and see ourselves working within a vastly complex system of education, where seemingly small perturbations at one level-like introducing computers into classrooms to help students revise their papers, or putting up a simple Web page cascade outward, producing immense and unforeseen effects throughout the system