Re: email-tutoring

["David J. Coogan" <coogan@charlie.cns.iit.edu>]

On Fri, 28 Feb 1997, Sara Kimball wrote:

> Anyway, given the fact that wood boards can be
> effectively sealed and clay *can* be erased, this distrust of wood seems
> to have as much to do with cultural assumptions as it does with physical
> constraints.
> 
--> This, to me, is always the most interesting, most intriguing aspect of
technorhetoric--drawing the line between the physical constraints and the
cultural assumptions.  I guess the typical thing to do is to background
the cultural assumptions, as many literacy scholars did for a long time,
attributing changes in the culture to a "revolution" of the printing
press.  To be sure, they go hand in hand.  Yet somehow we allow ourselves
to get realy excited about the technologies, themselves.  

> Don't we also accord writing online with a certain kind of differential
> prestige?  It's more exciting than writing on paper. And computers are
> exciting. My university seems
> far more willing to promote itself to students, parents, alumni, the
> legislature, public and yes, even its faculty as "wired" and to fight for
> funding for online resources than it is to fight for more mundane sorts of
> support.  I spent a chunk of time yesterday in a focus group meeting of
> English Dept. with an associate dean and people from academic computing
> that was in part designed to provide feedback for the admins about our
> departmental computing needs and in part to educate the English Dept.
> folks about the possibilities that will open up next year with funding
> from yet another student fee.  Now don't get me wrong, I think this was a
> productive meeting on all sides, but I remember the days when the Eng.
> dept would run out of funds with which to buy paper close to the
> end of the fiscal year.  Why can't I imagine someone leading a fight for fee-based
> funding for paper?  
> 

-->  Sara -- This is interesting because it points, again, to the main
problem in technology studies.  By displacing our politics and our agency
onto the technology, we allow ourselves to hide behind the innovation.
And as anyone who works in and around university life knows, there is very
little that unites us save the most banal cliches about "critical
thinking" or "excellence".  Undisputable technological progress is one of
those cliches, but it is a dangerous one for rhetoric and composition
because it has its roots in teaching machines, functional literacy, and
the remediation narrative that generally haunts our field.  We need to be
careful about our enthusiasm for technology because many folks--perhaps
even some on this list?--think its really only worth investing in if it
"improves student writing skills."

If that's how it's going to go, I'd rather lobby for more funding for
paper!

--Dave