Technology Will Affect Social and Educational Structures

 Many claims about the way that technology will inevitably change our lives a assert that human social structures will be changed by venues such as chat rooms, email, personal Websites, and other venues.  A kind of social technological literacy, it is thought, will follow the placement of technology in social, particularly classroom venues.  For example, Gail Hawisher and Charles Moran implied in 1993 that the pervasiveness of electronic mail causes its consideration in the writing classroom to be not only a school issue, but a social responsibility one as well (627-43).

   Regarding educational structures, Steve Parks and Eli Goldblatt suggested in 2001 that the centrality of technology in writing programs will give writing programs a role as technology leaders (591). Two years earlier, Chris Anson asserted that the success of distance education programs will nudge writing programs “to follow suit” (273) and offer online courses. In addition, schools themselves will collaborate and  share programs with each other across distance, with a popular program at "University A" being offered online to students at "University B" (Anson 272).  By inference, then, the structure of the university will change, decenter, and focus, not around a geographic campus, but scattered programs linked electronically, and writing programs and their administrators will have a leadership role in this kind of “divestiture.”

Not only will institutional structures change. The function and nature of what it will mean to be a “teacher” or “student” will change as well. The technologizing of college teaching has decentering effects beyond what we may have imagined or even wished, and will cause structural changes to the ways students learn and teachers earn a living.  Anson claimed in 1999 that reliance on part-time faculty will increase (272) as a result of increased online course offerings. A year earlier, Charles Moran also implied that the technologizing of English may mean the proliferation of part-time positions, and that “the days of the full-time professor may be numbered (204). Anson notes that “…our profession will feel increased pressure to offer technologically enhanced ‘independent study’ courses”; and that technological mediation may increase alienation and cause its own problems (269). Students will work in collaborative groups while located physically far from each other, interacting via computer and video camera (272).  As a result, we will change in the nature of our “attachment” to a school, perhaps working for several schools at the same time (274).   And Gail Hawisher and Moran noted as long ago as 1993 the way that students and academics with email access will use it, raise the paradoxical possibility that “we will be too well-connected, and with too many people” (236).

That these issues will cause structural changes is not surprising.   But we must pay attention to these particular claims because they affect essential notions of identity.  Parks and Goldblatt note that writing programs may become technology leaders.  In this case, one might wonder, will writing program directors or faculty need to become technology managers?  The imperative for faculty in all eras to master the presentational and other instructional technology in their respective areas is strong nationwide, from various constituencies--administrators, government, parents, students.  How much, then, should teachers prepare for this technology in, for example, their own graduate training (for example will “an MA. in English” mean something substantially different than its more traditional meaning)?  Does this significantly shift what a “teacher” will have to do—and be?

The prevalent and persistent attitude of technology as adjunct to “the real business of teaching” only feeds the idea of technology as something “the IT folks do”, and pushes teachers--and subsequently students--further from a critical understanding and, subsequently, use, of the technology.  We have seen the effects of the “fear of the new and unknown” at our own institution, and such phenomena as the “this isn’t what we want to do—it’s not the [insert name of school] way of doing things” attitude, approaches to online course policy that come from a classroom, nor cyberspace, mindset,  and which focus on “preserving quality” (as if the technology were a latent thief threatening to “take away” learning) abound not only where we work but in many different kinds of institutions.

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