II. The Second Leg: The Electronic Word: Approaching the Paideia

Although the technological enthusiasm of a decade ago has faded to the dull hum of cautious optimism, composition instructors still hold out hope that technology, especially computers, can be a powerful ally in the writing classroom. Trial and error have shown just how difficult that can be. Technology is expensive, requires constant maintenance, and still breaks down. Students may be intimidated by the machinery and the software. Instructors will spend an inordinate number of hours learning the technology, creating materials and lessons, and trying to make it all work in the classroom. Too often it becomes apparent that the machinery is more of an impediment than an aid to good writing. Yet, institutions invest a great deal in computer writing labs. In 1993 Charles Moran warned, ". . . there will be high and unavoidable costs associated with the move to computers in composition"(38). Still, he added, ". . . I can't imagine withholding the online writing experience from students who will be writing online for most of their lives, both at home and in the workplace" (38). Time has proven Moran right. More and more students come to the university with backgrounds in computer gaming, word processing and the Internet, as well as an intimate relationship with other electronic media. They simply do not have the same connection to conventional print media, to writing, as students from earlier generations. Clearly, it behooves writing instructors to recognize and address this shift in the composition paradigm and to find ways of "morphing" print- and electronic-based text in the classroom, and of re-seeing text itself.

In the year Moran was warning of the need to bring technology into the writing classroom, Richard Lanham predicted that writing students were on the verge of having the power to illuminate "manuscript in ways that would make a medieval scribe weep with envy" (5 ). He saw the promise of electronic text in its ability to bring traditional ways of writing and reading together with new ways of seeing "the word" that would include image, color, sound, and movement. called this melding a "Rhetorical Paideia," a rhetorical form in which structure and play interact. He described this new electronic environment as a space in which the disciplines, especially literary text and the arts, might meet. This new space, he argued, would allow students to make a text their own, to manipulate it like a soft sculpture; to add or subtract from it; to illustrate, animate, choreograph, score it; to treat it as if it were a play in which real characters interact. In effect, students would be able reach into a text to a depth that simply isn't imaginable with the codex book. This idea of play and diversity in reading and writing, in publication and education, says Lanham, could guide us to more expressive, dynamic text that differs dramatically from conventional writing.

I was excited by Lanham's work and drew heavily upon his optimistic blending of the senses and writing in developing my own scholarship. It seemed to me that my students were ready for just this kind of writing. They were the products of a media-heavy culture in which the senses are constantly bombarded with sound, image, and motion. They tended to have little experience with and training in producing traditional text, yet they had a wealth of experience relating to and interpreting the media in ways that their elders could not approach. It was a stimulating concept, but I found little opportunity to explore the rhetorical paideia as I embarked upon my teaching career. I did, however, continue to grow in my use of technology to teach writing. Lanham's vision, it seems, was more prediction than guidance.

In the years since I first encountered The Electronic Word , I have continued to "play" with the teaching of writing with computers. Teaching writing in a computer center, even via the Internet, does not automatically create the rich environment Lanham imagined. Students have found that instructional technology can be used in ways that match the most pedantic of traditional methods. The false enthusiasm of many early computerized composition classrooms often resulted in courses high on flash yet low on substance. I was well aware of the pitfalls and, after an initial honeymoon, approached the computer writing classroom with caution, even skepticism . I am not alone. In 1994 Sven Birkerts called the West's developing relationship with and dependence on technology a "Faustian Pact" (211), and Neil Postman in The End of Education writes of computers, "I know a false god when I see one." Postman would later write that technology is often developed and adapted without asking the most reasonable, perhaps obvious, questions: "What problem are you trying to solve?" and "Whose problem is it?" Cindy Selfe, who has done so much to research and promote computers and writing, has been warning for years that classroom technology is counterproductive unless it clearly moves the instructional objective forward. And so, after a quick, enthusiastic burn, I settle back into traditional pedagogy, easing cautiously into instructional technology, specifically, computers in the writing classroom.

As a result, the shift toward Lanham's Rhetorical Paideia was not the linear path I might have originally envisioned. Instead, it was, to a great extent, the result of an often unconscious evolution, first from conventional to electronic text, then to a melding, in effect a "morphing" of these very different rhetorics. This occurred partly because this approach to the rhetorical paideia came together through a combination of influences that were often, I confess, accidental.

Almost from the start, I asked students to see electronic text as an expansion of conventional codex print. As the technology in our computer writing lab became more accessible and powerful, I incorporated into the class more information on reading, evaluating and using electronic text: web pages, email, listservs, etc. Soon, students began to ask how web pages were created, and I inserted a brief lesson on web page composition. Suddenly, Lanham's paideia started taking form. As I introduce electronic text, the computer, into my pedagogy, I saw it bringing a new dimension to student writing, one that included enthusiasm for the task, play and, to some extent, performance. Lanham likened electronic prose to a ". . . moving back toward the world of oral rhetoric, where gestural symmetries were permitted and sound was omnipresent" (Word 74). Were moving again toward oral rhetoric which like Walter Ong's sense of orality was ". . . empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced" (45). This new, emerging text remained somewhat distant, as is conventional text, but the gap was closing.

I had established the importance of electronic text in my students' intellectual lives, particularly as a component of a larger text. I began to see that the computer, writing for the World Wide Web (WWW) in particular, has the potential to enhance that text-based experience in important ways and that this was especially relevant to advanced composition for these reasons:

• Understanding and using electronic text helps to define advanced composition in a way that bridges traditional and new composition models, demonstrating the growing significance of electronic, unconventional concepts of text;
• Students' comfort with the computer as a writing tool draws upon the modern student's intimate connection to electronic media, to the monitor, the Internet;
• Blending electronic and conventional forms forces students to become conscious of the similarities and differences of print and web-based text;
• As students see web documents as information displays, they also see a substantive connection between academic tasks that ask them to create such documents and the public sphere - This is writing for the real world;
• The electronic palette demonstrates in real terms the power of a multifaceted, holistic writing experience, of a rhetorical paideia;
• Electronic writing demonstrates, often to students' amazement, that writing can be a joyful, playful experience which sacrifices neither utility nor intellectual rigor.
• Finally, composing and "publishing" electronic text draws the writer out of isolation as by nature, it ". . . speaks to large audiences" (Welch 6) much in the way oratory does.

Yet performance in a virtual realm is still virtual. As a result, Lanham's digitized rhetorical experience retains some of the distance of print. This, perhaps, was the missing piece in Lanham's vision, the mission of the real, of student writers breaking out of the page, out of the computer monitor to perform in the flesh. I saw the presentation in a new light. Students wanted to show-off their work, to bring the color and image, the flash, of this exciting medium to an audience. They were proud of what they were creating.