goodness, Moran’s descriptions are bewildering! I wonder how much they made sense or didn’t to his original audience. how many of his readers would be familiar enough with these systems to picture exactly the procedures and commands he references so matter-of-factly? it’s hard to imagine any kind of pedagogy/technology article being written in quite the same style today. there are so many options and customizations and different systems to be used. most audiences would surely demand more background info on anything like what Moran tries to explain.
I’m using drupal this semester in my 420 class, and my students and I are both bewildered by that too. I’m kind of jealous of thy easy-sounding, engaged way Moran seems to use what he has. I’m not to that stage yet. drupal is so foreign. it’ll be ages before I figure it out enough to make things happen so neatly in class.
maybe when I figure it out, it will facilitate awesome and unique things for my teaching and my students’ composing processes. this is the theme of the other two pieces: technologies changing our writing and revision habits. I know they have changed mine. the old need to recopy things from paper to screen once facilitated and encouraged different writing habits. for some people, that sort of sub-process might still show up. sometimes I do write or draft on paper and revise from those copies as I type. and like Sam talked about with the placeholders she uses, I do similar things. I get very messy with my typed drafts. dashes and bold and asterisks and all caps and question marks all over in the holes where I don’t know what I’m trying to say yet. if I didn’t have the option of so easily copying/pasting, find-and-replace-ing, or typing nonsense only to ruthlessly erase it later, I would probably be much less likely to draft the way I do.

It’s funny to read these articles after a round of perusing cries of “texting is ruining our students’ writing!” and “reliance on technology is melting their brains!” (Which is an overdramatization….but not by that much).

We hear a lot about how our students are digital natives, yet out of the three, Moran and Holt’s articles particularly resonate with me because every year I’m in a classroom I’ve seen the exact opposite. It’s not the advanced computing students are struggling with (like tackling InDesign, or learning how to program). It’s simple things, like knowing you can use the TAB key to indent a consistent amount of spaces, or that commands like ctrl + z is a shortcut for undoing mistakes. Having access to computers isn’t enough…without direct instruction and activities that take advantage of our unique options, students are no better off than if they compose on paper. If anything, they’re worse. And that’s not even touching on the difficulties for students who didn’t have life-long access.

It goes along with what we talked about last week…technology doesn’t ruin our thought processes, but it does change the way we process information. And, if we take advantage of features in the programs we use, we can help our students adopt new ways of thinking that will improve their writing, simply by drawing their attention to new options.

I’m sure there are a bunch of examples that I could list, and others could come up with even more, but going off of Holt’s (and Sommer’s) observation that students are more likely to delete and replace than revise, it can be useful to have students compose in something like Google Docs. Like so many, I know I’m terrible about keeping multiple documents for my various revisions. I, too, just delete and replace. It feels cleaner and, for someone with my attention span, it means I don’t have to try and figure out which copy was actually my “better” one. But platforms like Google Docs or online Wiki pages give writers easy access to the document’s history, allowing them to switch between versions and see changes without risk of losing what they’ve done. Without complicating students’ organization and file folders, there’s a way to get them to reflect on their changes in a concrete way; it just needs to be pointed out and (as Moran suggests) built into structured activities until it becomes common place.

I’ve also found that I personally do better with organizing my research if I use a blog rather than notecards, and I’ve started showing this to my students as well. Most of them already think in terms of tags and keywords thanks to hashtags and word clouds. Since blog entries allow multiple tags and instantaneous sorting, I find it easier to organize myself and to reference as I write. It’s not all that different from the pen and paper approach I was taught, but the tech itself allows me to work faster and make more complex connections because other sites have already made tagging and searching second nature.

After parsing through today’s readings, I find myself continuing to think about the implications of the idea of the computer as an entity that seems to operate outside of the writing process, as something for which new processes (such as revision) needed to accommodate, as something that causes people like Kantrov to point out that “what is critical is how teachers choose to employ the technology in their classrooms and computer laboratories” (63).

Indeed, in light of these readings, I find myself preoccupied by similar concerns that have already been posed by others here. Like Sherri, I wonder how far we have really come and if the ways that we think about the intersection of computers and writing processes have really progressed in any meaningful way. And, like Alisha, I too wonder about the writing processes of experienced and inexperienced writers and how we might navigate the challenges we face in working on such processes with students.

And I’m also struck by something that Kantrov argues: “The greater access students have to more appropriately designed tools, the less students and instructors will have to struggle to accommodate the technology to the composition course’s goals” (73). Namely, I wonder, here, how it is that we might realistically help students garner access to such tools and how the idea of access informs the way we think about computers and composition.

It’s difficult to imagine the classrooms that inspired these articles, not only because I embraced technology from an early age (considering my now-advanced age, anyway), but because I never experienced a class like this, either. By the time I was in a class that leaned heavily on computers, and in a school with the money to do so, most students were past these challenges, and instructors, too. So what I fix on instead is Christine Hult’s description of the “inexperienced” writer versus a more professional writer, and the differences in processed described. In this, it seems, little has changed for student writers, who too often see “revision” as a mere rewording exercise.

This is something I spend a lot of time working on in my classes, and yet it remains one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced, even with trying multiple methods (some similar to those discussed here; Moran’s, for example, looks different today but similar exercises are possible with content management systems like blogs and Blackboard, or with collaborative apps). In creative writing classes past, we tried multiple methods for getting ourselves out of this, too, down to rewriting drafts by hand, from scratch (looking at the pre-typed manuscript was cheating!), and in the classrooms today, I work through all manner of exercises and prewrites and look for other ways to help students develop their own processes, the ideas that work best for them, and yet so often, they struggle to actually revise their thoughts and connections. I don’t know how I feel about the relation between screens and thinking in pieces, since we’re also likely to look at units of writing in pages, but something certainly causes students to think more often than not that each paragraph is a discrete unit, and that proofreading is the sum of editing, and it’s a trend that continues.

These readings made me think about how I learned to write on a computer when I was a kid, and how I taught non-traditional students to use a computer for writing during my time in Florida. On the one hand, I sympathized with the students who envisioned good writing as error free or “clean.” I remember thinking, hoping, as a kid that as long as I got the spelling and grammar correct, my writing would be “good.” I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that was a “bad writer” as a kid, but I can’t recall when the changeover happened and I became interested in conveying ideas and thought process. I know that, by then. I’d learned to compose with a computer almost exclusively, so I also count myself in the camp of writers who benefitted from computer writing in that I didn’t have to make copies. Even at a young age, I hated copying things by hand–although I do acknowledge that it made me slow down and consider my writing more. Perhaps that’s why I hated it.

I say this reminded me of teaching non-traditional students to use a computer, doing things  like double-clicking and moving the cursor with the mouse to avoid wiping out whole lines of text to fix one typo, because it highlighted for me how much of a burden using the computer was on their writing, and how inextricable from the act of writing that computers have become. It made me sad, but more than that, it showed me that teaching how to use a computer is no longer the job of the “tech” in the writing class, but that computer use is a domain of writing instruction. Keyboards and user interface as just as much an extension of writing as pencils and pens, if not even more so.