Rhetoric and Technology – ENC 6421

Here’s some thoughts to guide our discussion on Monday evening:

1. As we consider questions about the usefulness of technology in the classroom, how much should we plan activities that (we think) students will enjoy?  Boyle paints technology-driven teachers as if they’re watering down the true values of education by pandering to the masses; he writes, “The message was never really intended to be that these were better ways to educate; the message was that students would prefer to be educated this way” (624).  (As an aside, I think it’s interesting that churches often engage in essentially the same argument.)  Moxley, though, expressly values students’ comfort-zones, and the ways educational tools parallel popular social networking sites (4).  Also, I think one thing we need to consider is to what extent we can even predict student responses; after all, Mauriello, Pagnucci, and Winner describe ways that students often found different things troublesome or worthwhile than their instructors (414).
2. I think when we’re talking about the economics of time in composition classes (i.e. what we should spend time on and what we shouldn’t), there’s an unavoidable aspect of other departments’ expectations that hover over our classrooms–however just or unjust that is.  Among our thousands of goals is the hope that students will head to other classes, and eventually to careers, better prepared to engage in the kinds of writing asked of them.  To what extent, then, do you think that teaching students how to use technology will or won’t help them in these other environments?  (Let’s be specific.  Will blog-writing help them elsewhere?  Wikis?  Blackboard?  HTML? WYSIWYG software?  PowerPoint?  Word?  Chatting?  Forum posting?)  How does Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s article fit into this?  In other words, in what ways can you imagine that their suggestion that we “[s]top encouraging students to produce ‘original’ texts all the time” (400) will help prepare students for other environments?
3. The three Computers and Composition pieces (if you count Moxley’s) all rely extensively on sources.  Moxley cites 30 references, Mauriello, Pagnucci, and Winner 18, and Johnson-Eilola and Selber a whopping 52.  But I notice that only rarely do these authors quote from these sources conversationally, engaging and grappling and disagreeing with their points.  Instead, they tend to quickly refer to references to buttress their points with the validity of established, existing arguments, as if to say, “See?  Others have written about this too.  You saw?  Okay; let’s move on.”  It’s the “standing on the shoulders of giants” approach, as opposed to the “I’m in a smoky room with Kenneth Burke and other scholars arguing about things” approach.  If we have time after we discuss questions 1 and 2 to pieces, I’m curious what everyone thinks about this model of citation, how it informs our teaching, and how technology does or does not affect the core ways we think about and teach citation standards.  I guess what I mean is that these essays’ citation style got me thinking about what’s expected of source-usage in a discourse community, and how revolutionary we ought to be, especially in light of the final article’s enjoinder that we teach students to create an “effect in context,” an “action,” not merely a “performance” (375).

-Kyle