Re: email-tutoring

[Sara Kimball <skimball@uts.cc.utexas.edu>]

On Sun, 2 Mar 1997, Eric Crump wrote:

> On Sun, 2 Mar 1997, David J. Coogan wrote:
> -->What I enjoy most about technology studies is that it seems to force us,
> -->sometimes unwillingly, into conclusions like that.  Do we really want a
> -->dictionary that includes my thoughts and your thoughts?  
> 
> Yes!
> 
> -->What value is there in that? 
> 
> It's a chance to let the people who make language describe language.
> That's not to say dictionary-makers will go outta business, but they can
> share some space with the rest of us. 


I'm with Dave in finding the implications of computer tech fascinating,
because they present such delicious questions and paradoxes.  But I'm also
with Dave in saying we've got to keep questioning assumptions.  I'm
skeptical of the notion that *tech* is always best or that the *highest*
tech is always the best tech. I wouldn't want to rush into situations
where we'd lose the best of the old ways or find myself enacting the worst
of the old ways but with computers.  All those questions about "fixing"
grammar that come to OWLs bother me, just as the questions we often get on
our "grammar hotline" bother me, because we're put in the position of
providing simple answers to complicated questions, and because often
enough we're being asked to settle bets or confirm people's linguistic
prejudices. Doing this over the Internet doesn't exactly quiet my
professional doubts.

I'm concerned that as the Web gets more glitzed up with technogizmos and
elaborate images etc. it's going to lose what I think has been one of its
advantages: the ability to distribute ideas widely and cheaply to a vaste
audience who are using a wide range of equipment.  I use Lynx at home
myself, being a word person and not much of a picture person, and because
I'm collecting text for a dictionary, but over the past year I've come
across more and more sites that just deliver [LINK], [LINK], [LINK]. 
We're all getting wired at different rates, and frankly, I don't see it
happening quickly.  One of the high schools we're working with just has
dialup access and Lynx, the other has the classic "last-mile" problem: the
wires stop at the curbside, so we're doing a paper exchange.  There's a
massive effort on to wire Texas high schools, but the documents are
viewable only through an Acrobat reader (and I went through so much
time-consuming rigoramarole trying to download it and get the thing to
work I just gave
up).  Doesn't that cut off many of the people who will be most affected by
these plans from direct access to the planning process?  Why do it that
way when it's so easy to slap up an HTML version?  

And people should actively try to find new, creative uses, or at least
remember what they've got, and apply it creatively . Our provost's office,
for example, maintains an extensive Web site with provost stuff, things
like the instructions for departments and promotion committees in
preparing promotion documents.  ok, this isn't just convenient if you're a
member of a tenure committee, it has the virture of opening the process to
public view.  But we've been in the midst of a public "debate" over post
tenure review (things are *sooo* exciting when the legislature is in
town), and I don't think anyone has remembered to direct the lege. or the
general public to this site or the online version of the Regent's rules,
so the debate can be guided by information about what tenure is *supposed*
to be.

That interactive dictionary would be a cool way to teach people about how
dictionaries are constructed, something that as a lexicographer who wants
neither to be a usage goddess nor a public punching bag, I'd welcome.  But
to do it and make it useful, somebody's got to take the responsibility of
organizing and linking information, an act of interpretation that takes it
a step away from being an anarchic melange of your thoughts and my
thoughts, so it wouldn't be entirely accurate to present it that way.

Sara Kimball