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Consider the Baggage What are we willing to abandon? We imagine that all of us teach differently in our second or fourth years than we did in our first years. One of the markers of such evolution can be found in “things we used to do,” whether they be assignments, sequences, or any imaginable component of our pedagogies. Presumably, we strive for “improvement”—to replace less effective choices with more effective choices. We may cringe at the things that we used to do, or we may have come to a peace with them as necessary steps toward our own betterment. We suggest that we need to take a similar inventory, but to have our relation to available technologies as the central criterion. In other words, we ask what we have abandoned--or might consider abandoning--as a result of the difference between an analog and a digital world. We might, for example, reexamine the concept of a "paper". Cellulose-based linearity is like the 5-paragraph theme. It has its uses, but it's no longer universally applicable. If we want to be transformative, we need to realize the potentialities of every writing technology. The very existence of rhetorics of multimediation themselves argue for the consideration of the explosion of the “paper” concept. Consider, as well, the idea of a "classroom." Irrespective of physical places, students and people who want to learn using the mediation of technology do so. The concept of physical presence is no longer an essential prerequisite for teaching in any case, and neither so for the teaching of writing. Early experiments in the mid-1990s by many teachers, among them Fred Kemp's "interclass" and Creighton University's ongoing online composition, pharmacy, and theology classes have demonstrated that physical proximity is not necessarily necessary. Extending, then, the venue of "learning space" into the digital everyplace. the production of rhetoric therein, is, at its most complex, is still an extension of the growth/flux/change/ reconsideration of composing, from religiously based scribal production for religious-social elites to the mass literacies of the 21st century, from the religious focus of the 1450s to the unlimited thematics of today, from the organic quill-pen and ink technologies of the Middle ages-or the stylus and wax technologies of the classical era-to the digital global reproducibility of today. Consider, finally, our attitudes as teachers. How do we look at the technology itself--as assistive or integral? If we claim the assistive model of academic technology, we claim a model that assumed that papers are what they always have been and always will be, with technology and digitality as “helpful adjuncts” to the things we have always done. If we claim the integral model, then the technology must be considered from the first moment of course generation (by teachers) and from the first moment of text generation (by students). We must, in short, consider the implications and ramifications--critically, thoughtfully, and reflectively--of the technologies available. That textual technologies change--from Trithemius’s scribes to Aldus Manutius’s press, from the Mergenthaler linotype to Macs and Windows--is a constant. Technologies change, and in doing so change the nature of writing and literacy. Ultimately, the question of what we are willing to abandon is a biased one, focusing on what we leave behind rather than on what we embrace in addition to what we already know. We are, though, convinced by the revolutionary “what will happen” of the claims examined in this hypertext, even if we have not, to our satisfaction, sufficiently moved in their directions. And we imagine that the “leaving behind” may still be our greatest obstacle. |
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