More troubling is that these problems have been well documented from the earliest days of computer use in composition, and the profession has all but ignored them – opting, instead, to keep the technology juggernaut ever moving forward.īecause of the vast changes to the communication landscape over the last two decades, along with the influence of emerging technologies on students’ writing practices, empirical studies that describe students’ experiences in multimodal composing are required to determine how the goals and practices of composition teaching might be better supported and reimagined. Meanwhile, a review of the history of computers in composition shows a succession of problems that have continuously worked as roadblocks impeding student success in learning to write. (1996) assert that research “to discover whether computers made writing better or not has proved to be a dead end” (50). The one thing that computer technology seems not to have affected, at least in a positive way, is the quality of writing as a whole. It has affected schools, households, businesses – even the values that Americans hold as a nation (Selfe 123). As a transforming cultural phenomenon, computer technology’s influence has been compared to Gutenberg’s printing press and the Industrial Revolution. Fueled initially by the fervor of composition teachers, joined soon thereafter by publishing and computer companies, the zeal to put students in front of monitors and keyboards has had profound effects on education and its myriad stakeholders.
By the early 1980s, however, “the computer was seen as a potential cure-all for cross-curricular ills in student writing. Computers began to appear on college campuses in the 1960s primarily in administrative buildings – used for things like bookkeeping and payroll – but it wasn’t until the following decade that English teachers began to see possibilities in the machines for writing and related studies (Hawisher et al.
0 kommentar(er)
