On Readings for 040810

This week’s readings on computers and writing proved interesting. Patricia Sullivan’s “Taking Control of the Page: Electronic Writing and Word Publishing” verged on the anachronistic—even though it was published only twenty years ago—yet some of the points Sullivan raises are still valid in the composition classroom of the 21st century. It was great to be informed about how, historically, and since the invention of the printing press, the writing of a text was separate from said text’s composition (in terms of layout, design, typeface, etc.) and physical publication. Writers, in other words, did not have to be concerned with how their texts looked, that was someone else’s job to worry about. With the advent of desktop publishing in the 1990s and even more sophisticated means of text preparation and presentation to an audience, more and more writers (or authors) could take control of the final product that results from their original written text. Here at UNLV, the only aspect of composition I am aware of we use to teach or to familiarize students with the possibility of using something other than basic text in their essays is in ENG 102. In that class, one of the requirements for successful completion of students’ 7-10 page researched argumentative essays is the inclusion of some kind of a graphic. This graphic can be a picture, a chart, a graph, etc. Of course, the picture, chart, graph or whatever that students choose to incorporate into their essays must make sense within the context of the essay itself and it must work aesthetically. For me, since I am only reasonably familiar with MSWord and, to a far lesser extent, MSExcel, I find it difficult as the professor to teach students how to bring in such elements as pictures, charts, graphs and so on so that they end up being effective and enhancing components of their essays. Also, having been schooled for more years than I’d like to remember in English studies as a text-based discipline, I am far more used to creating essays that are textual only and sans anything like pictures, charts, graphs, etc. Granted, I still want those texts to be pleasing to the eye of my readers and to be easily comprehensible (for the most part), but moving too far away from strictly textual boundaries puts me in something of an uncomfortable position.

In “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy,” Harris and Wambeam discuss their 1994 experiments with creating a truly Internet-based pedagogy in the composition classroom. As someone who is considering using blogs as the medium my students will complete and submit their response papers for the next incarnation of my ENG 231 class, I found Harris and Wambeam’s experiments with listserves and email communications to be intriguing. It was heartening to see that students in the Internet-based classroom (as opposed to those in the control, or traditional, classroom) responded enthusiastically to performing to classroom assignments—and their peers—in the online environment. Of course, someone like Mueller, in “Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom,” comes along later (at least in the sequence that I read this week’s essays) and offers, via a citation, a more cautionary tale of blogging in the classroom; here, one teacher recounts how her students felt blogging was just another required activity—another hoop they had to jump through—just to get a grade. It wasn’t, in other words, an activity they engaged with.

Setting aside one teacher’s less than great experience using blogging in the Internet-Based Composition Classroom, I think teaching in a wired classroom offers, or can offer, more benefits than problematics. I suppose I qualify as one of those instructors who has “given in” to the fact that technology is ubiquitous and that no matter what proscriptions I may put in place “against” technology in the classroom, my students are going to find ways to circumvent those proscriptions. So, I tell them up front as class is starting at the beginning of the semester that they are free to use their laptops or Ipads or cell phones for whatever, as long as they are respectful of me and their colleagues—meaning, I do not allow them to take and receive calls in class, but they are free to text as much as they want as long as they realize that they still need to be paying attention to the lecture and to their peers in class discussions. I liked Mueller’s use of the phrase “economies of attention” because it seems so apropos to today’s students; they really do need to pay attention to a lot of different competing things. I haven’t heard the phrase in some time, but one mark of a good employee in the regular working world is someone who could multitask; in order to multitask, one needs to be able to fragment one’s attention to various things effectively. So, why not use the classroom to allow students to develop their abilities to do multiple things at once?

Having used some kind of a word processing program since PCs entered the working and the university worlds 30 some odd years ago (give or take), I have been suspicious of the grammar and spell-checkers embedded within such programs as MSWord. So I really enjoyed reading McGee and Ericsson’s “The politics of the program: MSWORD as the invisible grammarian.” As a writer, I don’t often use the grammar function in MSWord, meaning I don’t put much stock in the grammar suggestions MSWord presents to me as I am writing. SpellCheck has become something that happens pretty much automatically these days, so that I do use, if more by default than anything else. As far as my students are concerned, I find myself having to remind them that, at least when it comes to spelling, they still need to double check and proofread their essays before they turn them in to me—particularly as regards homonyms and so forth. Also, in my general experience, it seems to me that if MSWord’s grammar checker were truly effective, I wouldn’t see so many comma splices, misplaced modifiers, and subject-verb agreement problems as I do in my students’ essays.

And, finally, in “Understanding ‘Internet Plagiarism’,” Rebecca Moore Howard reminds us that it only seems like plagiarism cases have risen to intolerable levels because of the ubiquitousness of the Internet. She goes on, rightly, in my opinion, to charge us as composition professors, to be vigilant about teaching our students how to cite source usage properly. And that is just plain common sense.