Rethinking the mission of teachers and scholars who live at the edge of the computers and composition stage, and who cue the actors/students who write the scripts of their lives (and ours?), means also (and ultimately) that we must retrofit ourselves as we shift from one dominant model of delivering education to many models, and as we shift from one model of defining intelligence to multiple counter/dominant modes of intelligence (including new modes of evaluating intelligence). What will have been valued as "good writing" and what will have played a part in shifting to that new value system, including computing and internet technologies, is very much in question as we undergo the retrofit, the transitions, necessary to shift our pedagogical sensibilities about using computers and computing the users' lived space in which research and learning take place.

In short, nothing is pedagogically sacred anymore, and we think this is exactly how it should be. Nothing should be SO pedagogically sacred as to embalm our students' writing with the fluids of a tradition in which writing "for" a class merely contributes to the massive burial mound of student writing--a mound that we have built on the foundations of process pedagogy. If we want to speak in the future perfect, we must act against the model of "perfection" that has driven our views of what counts as "good writing." When post-process pedagogy, service-learning, MOO activity, electronic expression, information architecture, and other trends like this, finally wrest us from the age of authority and into the age of rhetorical "pings" in which writing packets soar across fiber optic pedagogical channels--then we will have finally given up the very autonomy that steers our students toward having written for burial mounds rather than having created commitments in language that mean something for themselves.