I find myself getting hung up on Chapman’s closing remarks in “A Luddite in Cyberland, Or How to Avoid Being Snared by the Web”:

One often hears that the potential for the Web is great. And, I would agree. The Web has the potential to sacrifice the quality of sources used by students in research for the ready availability of Web sources. It has the potential to distract students away form the analysis and reflection at the heart of a college education as they focus on the superficial appearance of documents. It has the potential to squander the precious resource of student time by focusing on the mechanics of Web-site production instead of on the act of writing. We may be able to avoid the Siren call of the Web as we avoided the false promises of televised classes in the 1960s and computer tutorials in the 1970s. With a little luck, the Web may never be able to reach its potential. (252)

I have to say that I don’t really know how I feel about all this. On one hand, as someone who often feels like a Luddite herself, I can kind of empathize with the challenge of keeping up with technology and the feeling that “students too often settle for inferior sources” (249). But it seems that more and more “superior” sources are becoming available digitally (at least, since Chapman wrote this article), although perhaps access to and availability of such sources depends on the institution/university through which students/teachers are operating. The hope, though, that “the Web may never be able to reach its potential” seems a bit limited in its posturing as a cautionary, cynical tale—would it maybe be more helpful to critically engage, instead, with solutions for how we might make use of emerging technologies and digital media in a way that could help our students navigate these terrains more effectively?

I wonder if Aschauer’s “Tinkering with Technological Skill: An Examination of the Gendered Uses of Technological Skill: An Examination of the Gendered Uses of Technologies” might allow us to move in that direction, especially if we consider more fully her pointing out that “rather than arguing for an ahistorical, inner essence of womanhood and rejecting technology, we need to remember that femininity, masculinity, and technology are social constructs, all three of which can be resisted and reconstructed” (14). And perhaps her interrogation of femininity, masculinity, and technology as social constructs through the feminist empiricist approach that highlights the value of lived experience might complicate Chapman’s arguments, especially in that Aschauer argues, “To engage in the kind of empirical research I have suggested requires that we exchange conventional definitions of technology as a monolith for a view of it as a site for lived experience” (17). As such, I wonder if, perhaps, by further problematizing the social constructedness of gender, technology, and the intersection of both, we might continue to complicate these “conventional definitions of technology as a monolith” and unpack the manner in which all this impacts our classroom concerns.