Our mission
as scholars involved with computers and writing is to understand and articulate
the impact of technology upon literacy broadly conceived, both through
traditional scholarly activity and by designing technology applications
that instantiate and test our theory. Our mission as teachers is to bring
that understanding to bear in helping our students develop the competencies
necessary to thrive as citizens and agents in a knowledge-economy that
includes both print and digital media.
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 |