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.