"Who We
Are, What We Do"
At their best, computers and writing people
engage in the following three activities:
-
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);
-
They model good practice and help lead technology
integration efforts;
-
They provide a valuable R & D function,
testing new technologies and their application and staying out at the leading
edge.
To my mind, that is what we should be doing
in computers and writing and the need for us to do so has never been greater,
as we rush to implement new technologies in America's public schools.
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. |