Measuring Progress in the Technological Transformation of Writing Instruction

Measuring Progress in the Technological Transformation of Writing Instruction

The most provocative rhetorical moment for any new enterprise is the moment in which someone opines what the enterprise will do, will cause, or will enable. Inventor Dean Kamen claims that the Segway will revolutionize personal transportation. But we must wait and see, with varying degrees of anticipation, whether this comes true. In any popular cultural innovation one cares to name, there is an explicit or implicit claim about the way that the innovation will “change” or “transform” life, its quality, or its effect. And one of the most prolific generators of pronouncements of future effect has been that enterprise commonly called the “computer revolution.”

Given that the technologized nature of composition renders it just as prone to pronouncements as to how “things will be”, and given that it’s important to assess any major enterprise by comparing 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 larger 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 we'd be," and suggest some ways of overcoming the blocks to reaching these goals.

We surveyed CE, CCC, and C&C from 1992 through 2002. We looked exclusively for what we call “will” claims—that is, direct 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 strong 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 directly 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.