After I got over the humorous nature of the readings for this week, due to the dated nature of their general treatment of computers as unfamiliar objects, I found that treatment to be among the most interesting things about them. They remind me of a concept entering a discourse through a metagame: they stick out awkwardly through the way they are discussed because they are so noticeably outside the mainstream, accepted practices, and their use hasn’t been normalized by incorporation into the center–computers are on the very edge of the periphery of composition instruction in these readings. As such, they have to make arguments where they can, and stress the value of the novelty and the practicality together, since the two can’t be separated. The Dinan and company piece, I feel especially, often exemplifies and cautions in the same breath. It’s doing the hard work of acknowledging and making visible the extra layer that computers add to writing in the 1980’s, that is now either invisible or nonexistent in our present, now that computers have moved into the central discourse of our writing metagame.
As such, the articles are devoted mostly, in my recollection, to describing how to get students to use the computers. I was also struck, as I read the Dinan and co piece, at how the fears the students have of the machine, are still with us and are still as grave: “losing words” ( which I assume means work disappearing into thin air) and breaking the machine. Our terms for these have changed as has the means, but these were the primary concerns of non-traditional students I tutored in Florida, and were definitely concerns of mine in college ten years ago. I don’t think undergrads would use these terms anymore, but I think these concepts are still big motivating fears, they have just either been accepted as necessary risk that can be significantly minimized, or have taken on new forms.
When reading the Moore piece, in particular, I was reminded of some of the things I go through when teaching my students to use Minecraft for their game composition assignments in my 106 class. So much class time gets devoted to helping them learn the processes for opening maps, locating them on drives, moving them, using the controls of the game, debugging networking problems, and learning the quirks of the Minecraft game system, that I was happy to be reminded what a big part of bringing experimental technologies into the classroom that is. It also made me appreciate his “findings” that, while the introduction of computers didn’t significantly increase students’ ability to write, it didn’t decrease it either, proving the parity of computer-inclusive composition is on par with the tradition, and that means a whole heckuva lot in the scheme of things on its own.