Tag Archives: C+C

How Far Students Have Come?

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Charles Moran offers a sequence of in-class assignments that are generally not replicable in our 2015 classrooms. Christine Hult provides a look into how students revise their papers on the surface because the functions are easier in the word processor than revising with block moves, which, for the most part, still remains true. Ilene Kantrov suggests bringing technology assistants into the classroom so as not to distract students with computer troubles from the writing instruction–a request that is completely unrealistic in our classrooms.

Unlike last Thursday’s readings that really resonated with me I found most of this week’s “pedagogy in practice” texts downright laughable. Although the articles are written several years after the ones last week, the evolution of technological understanding hadn’t moved beyond “word processors cannot teach students how to write” (Kantrov 68) and super typewriters work best when students frequently print their drafts to measure their progress. However, I will admit that Sommer’s comments about revision and responding to student writing are important to note (as Hult argues), even 35 years later since much of what she noticed about student revision is still applicable.

Frankly, I am unsure what these articles provide other than a laughable look at our field’s inability to imagine innovation and change.

How Far We’ve Come?

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The readings this week were refreshing and terrifying. Refreshing in the sense that they reinforced the general fears of technology that are still rampant throughout writing studies; terrifying because I had to relive learning how to type papers in my FYC class. I will explain those two statements a bit more.

Recently, 4C15 addressed issues of risk and reward. My presentation discussed the risk of using new media and Web 2.0 (specifically Tumblr) in FYC as a way to re-envision the way we understand visual rhetoric, social media, and peer review. The presentation was successful, but during Q&A, I got an interesting shock–almost half my audience (10 people) had never heard of Tumblr and seriously doubted the success of the project. Despite showing two student samples, one woman was doubtful that students were able to produce the work they did in the small time frame I provided. After a bit of discussion after the panel ended, I learned that her institution did not have computer labs for their FYC courses and, much like the Dinan piece affirms, she worried about the technology instruction distracting her students from the overall goals of the writing course. Having access to a class set of computers in the mid/late 1980s when these articles were written (and published in the fledgling C+C Journal) was pretty impressive for Texas Southmost College and Central Michigan University. However, the focus of writing and the lack of access to computers remained even for a large high school in the early 2000s.

Although I am young enough to grow up in an age of computers, my family did not own one. The high school I attended (population of around 1k kids) in a poor Phoenix neighborhood, also did not have computers in the library and the local public library had a computer use time of 15 minutes a day. WIth all of these access problems, all of our writing at TGBHS were hand written. There was an elective typing class reserved for the students in the co-op business program, but overall, I didn’t use a computer for anything until college. As Moore reports, novice students writing a “computer-assisted essay” (57) spend a lot of time focused on the typing skill while handwriting before, during, and after the process. His students got better at drafting on the computers, and so did I.

Computers in the FYC classroom is an advantage that we take for granted at Purdue. There are many other institutions that do not have the budget or the resources to incorporate technology into the curriculum in productive ways. The fear of technology remains for experienced and new instructors. If we can reflect on our past then we are better suited to see how far we’ve come. Or not.