Measuring Progress in the Technological Transformation of Writing Instruction :: Technology

Measuring Progress in the Technological Transformation of committal to writing InstructionThe most provocative rhetorical moment for any tender enterprise is the moment in which someone opines what the enterprise leave alone do, will cause, or will enable. Inventor Dean Kamen claims that the Segway will revolutionize in the flesh(predicate) transportation. But we must wait and see, with varying degrees of anticipation, whether this comes true. In any fashionable cultural innovation one cares to name, there is an explicit or implicit claim close to the way that the innovation will change or transform life, its quality, or its military issue. And one of the most prolific generators of pronouncements of future tense effect has been that enterprise commonly called the computer revolution.Given that the technologized nature of composition renders it nevertheless as prone to pronouncements as to how things will be, and given that its important to assess any major enterprise b y equivalence outcomes to original claims, it makes sense that techno-compositionists have been making reflective and summative assertions about the state of technological writing instruction. Cynthia Selfe, Christina Haas, Barbara Blakely Duffelmeyer, and others have recently and specifically called us to look carefully and critically at the implications of what we are doing as teachers of technologized literacy. On a bigger scale, It makes sense to look at the claims made in and by the profession of writing teachers about what will happen to the future of writing in a technological age. Here, we review claims made over the last ten years about the transformation of literacy, writing, and its instruction in the pages of College Composition and Communication, College English, and Computers and Composition. We then assert how far the profession has really come, as opposed to how far we thought wed be, and suggest some ways of overcoming the blocks to arrival these goals. We surveyed CE, CCC, and C&C from 1992 through 2002. We looked exclusively for what we call will claimsthat is, count on or obviously implied specific predictive claims of what technology will do to teaching, writing, and literacy, or what will happen in these environments. We focused on these laborious statements, not on statements of what ought to happen, what we need or will need to do or must or should do. We focused on statements made flat by the authors of the articles or reviews, rather than recapitulation of other authors unless the author or reviewer used it as part of her or his own larger assertion about what will be.