The mission of teachers and scholars in computers and writing should be to
rethink our missions with respect to technology, pedagogy, and research. We
should be critical thinkers about the technologies we use in teaching writing.
We should take the lead in the way technologies are shaped and constructed. One
way we do that is to become developers of the technologies ourselves. Our
obligation is to not reject technologies but to try out new technologies
critically, and to be informed and critically oriented toward computing
technologies in the classroom. Most of all, we must be willing to help improve
them if at all possible. The changing purposes of education must incorporate
the changing technologies with which we shape those purposes, whether we are
educating ourselves about the available educational technologies, participating
in the construction of new technologies, or critiquing existing or proposed new
technologies. In essence, what C.P. Snow articulated as two cultures have
merged into one. Humanities scholars and teachers can no longer say that their
culture is separate from the technoculture, and if they continue to do so, then
we will lose.
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.
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