benmccorkle: Jason! How's it going?
JP: Hey Ben! I'm just chillin on my couch at home...basking in the excitement of reading old EJ articles (as I do).
benmccorkle: I'm in my living room, listening to the new Gorillaz album on the hi-fi. You know, it’s been years since I’ve used an IRC client, but this still feels really familiar...
JP: Hell...I didn’t get into online chat until the later days of AIM...so this kind of stripped-down Internet-Relay-Chat is new to me…
benmccorkle: You damn dirty Luddite! :D
JP: Always and forever!!
Anyway, no music on my end...but I can hear kids screaming at the
public pool across the street from my condo...TEENAGERS! (Shakes fist)
benmccorkle: Heh. Enough with the jibber
jabber! So in this act, we’re dealing with the period from 1988 -
1994. What should we talk about first, do you think?
JP: Well, 1988 was a big year in computer
writing pedagogy. We noticed a shift from discussions of how
individual students could use various software programs to a lot of
excitement about how computers could enable students to share writing
with each other, with their teachers, and with the wider world. I
mean, sure, rudimentary networking capabilities existed before then,
but they were mostly used in classrooms just for sharing printers. But
in 1988...email, bulletin boards, and other networking tools really
begin to take off!
benmccorkle: Yeah, there were some earlier
mentions, like Cheryl Blatts talking about using the DIALOG library
network service for student research projects (Bleau at al., 1986),
but you're right--1988 is when things *really* start cooking with gas.
JP: I'm thinking of that article by Dan Lake
(1988)...he was talking to friends who did word processing in the
business world and was amazed to learn how easily they could
electronically transfer files between home and work. Lake marvelled
that “writing stored magnetically on disks could be transferred
anywhere a phone line existed! If I could learn to move my students'
writing electronically, I could avoid the delays that often obscured
the purpose of the writing. I believed that I could provide an
environment where my students received a timely response to their
ideas... from a variety of audiences, not just myself" (p. 83).
benmccorkle: You know, that quote by Lake
is typical of many of the articles we identified in this period, in
that the focus was really on pedagogical application rather than
technological efficiency. I mean, sure, he talks about avoiding delays
and the power of phone lines, but the emphasis in this article is more
on the idea of expanding audiences for writing.
JP: Yeah, the focus earlier in the 80s was
on how word processing software influenced individual students’
writing, but after 1988 we see a new emphasis on how networked
computing could enable students to reach audiences beyond the teacher
and even beyond the classroom (Lake, 1988; Kinkead, 1988; Holvig,
1989; Selfe, 1988; Wresch, 1991).
benmccorkle: They saw so much promise back
then--I have to say I found it pretty inspiring. For instance, this
trope we found where networks not only connect but collapse the vast
scale of the world, making it more reachable, more knowable. In 1989
Holvig wrote how "the electronic curriculum shrinks the nation," and
that students can expand their audiences through exchanges that are
"cross-cultural, cross-country, or across town" (p. 69). Gail Hawisher
(1988) and William Wresch (1991) also expressed similar
sentiments.
JP: Yeah, my favorite one of these moments
was when Wresch (1991) gave the example of a teacher, Jeff Golub, who
connected his class in Seattle with a class of students in Berlin
right when the wall fell: “Morning after morning, the students in West
Berlin reported on the destruction of the Wall. Since the news was
coming from fellow teens, Golub's students in Seattle were much more
interested in the event itself than they might otherwise have been and
were able to involve themselves by asking questions and giving their
excited German peers information about how Americans were reacting to
the news” (p. 96)
benmccorkle: I'll bet those students really
bonded over their shared love of David Hasselhoff's musical genius. ;)
JP: And Scorpions’ "Winds of Change"
<insert meaningful whistle here>. LOL. But seriously, I think
what fascinates me is how in this example email and message boards are
being viewed as remediations of TV...with their focus on collapsing
space and time in a McLuhanesque "global village."
benmccorkle: I feel like the kinds of
cultural myths that Christina Haas identifies in her 1996 book
_Writing Technology_ begin to take shape here: this enthusiasm for the
potential transformative power of networked computers, especially when
it comes to the idea of empowering even younger students to effect
real social change.
JP: Oh yeah totally! I keep thinking of how
in 1988 Dan Lake argued that email could allow students "write
directly to state legislators and receive immediate feedback" (84).
benmccorkle: I'm guessing that those
legislators may have been a little more responsive back then than they
are today--I'm still waiting on a reply from my state rep, and it's
been weeks!
JP: Yeah, we are lucky if we eventually get
a form email back from a politician these days. Anyway, I think it's
important that we be critical of how new technologies are not always
as democratizing as they seem, but I also think these exaggerated
hopes are part of a broader and important shift to a more social and
rhetorical view of writing
benmccorkle: Absolutely. Process-based
writing instruction rarely left the isolated computer lab in the early
80s. When you think about the move to networked writing in its
historical context, this is a pretty monumental shift.
JP: For sure. I’m reminded of the 1988
article by Cindy Selfe in which she critiqued computer classrooms
where students worked alone in rows, arguing that our labs and our
pedagogies should be designed to "use computers to tie people
together, not to separate them" (Selfe, 1988). This remains as true
now as it was back then.
benmccorkle: I agree, but of course, as
inspiring as this message is (and believe me, it is), we occasionally
noticed some problematic ways of framing this emerging ‘global
village.’ While it is exciting that some students in the USA were able
to talk to some students in Berlin during the fall of the wall, such
stories of global connection efface the reality that only a very
narrow privileged group of students had access to the net in this time
period (and internet access remains unequally distributed along lines
of race, class, and nation even today).
JP: Agreed. And I was happy to see that
Selfe brought up the perennial problem of access inequality in her
1988 article, and Moran did too, way back in 1983. And, then, there's
an article by Emily Nye (1991) that also raised important questions
about how computers were marketed in sexist ways. It was exciting to
see how *English Journal* was not just a space of technological
boosterism, but also a space for some nascent but much needed critique
of some of the dominant technological progress narratives of the time.
benmccorkle: You know, this seems like part
of a larger shift I start to notice during this period: the move from
praxis-oriented articles in the early PC era to those that placed
greater emphasis on theorizing, critiquing, and relying on
evidence-based research. In fact, Gail Hawisher issued this call
explicitly in her 1989 article "Computers and Writing: Where's the
Research?"
JP: Yeah, Hawisher was kind of a "downer" in
that one. She did a comprehensive review of research on word
processing and showed that claims that word processing spurred deep
revision were not that well supported empirically, though there was
more evidence that word processing helped students reduce the number
of “errors” in their papers.
benmccorkle: Yeah, that one was a bit of a
downer...but remember, Hawisher wasn’t in any way suggesting that word
processors *should* be used mostly for error correction. Rather, she
was pointing out that word processing pedagogies were perhaps not as
transformative as they could be, and that we needed more and better
research to really figure out how computers could most meaningfully
contribute to writing instruction.
JP: Exactly! I love how Hawisher argued that
researchers needed to move beyond studying word processing to
considering other networked uses of computers. I also liked how she
argued that the point of conducting research was ultimately to help
teachers reflect about our practice and “take risks in our teaching”
(p. 91). Hawisher’s concluding call for research as the path to
risk-taking innovation was not really a downer at all...it still
inspires me today.
benmccorkle: Me too. Of course, Hawisher
wasn’t the only one at that time sounding the clarion call to pay more
critical attention to how we’re using computers in the classroom.
William Costanzo (1988) argued that we weren’t doing enough at that
time to think about the computer’s impact on how students acquire,
process, and synthesize information. Drawing on research outside of
English studies, he wrote, “I venture this far into the language of
computer science and cognition because, I think, our profession has
not gone far enough to understand the new technology and what it's
doing to our language” (p. 32).
JP: So it seems like there was a definite
transition in this period away from anecdotal descriptions of
technology pedagogies and towards more deliberate, conscious research
on the effects of technologies on student learning.
benmccorkle: That’s a good way to put it.
You know, another thing we haven’t talked about yet is the discussions
of **desktop publishing** that we saw popping up. Do you see
that as in any way connected to the networking conversation or the
broader social turn in English pedagogy?
JP: Yeah, definitely...I mean the articles
about desktop publishing were all about students using computers to
reach new audiences beyond the classroom (Gorrell, 1993; Irby, 1993;
Monahan, 1989). So, in some ways, the desktop publishing program and
the printer were devices that enabled the broader circulation of print
texts (not unlike email enabled the circulation of digital
texts).
benmccorkle: Makes sense.
JP: My favorite of these desktop publishing
articles was one by Janet Irby (1993) about a summer school class who
became more engaged in writing when they all worked together to make a
magazine called "Tearing Down the Walls," which was addressed to an
audience of the school board.
benmccorkle: Yeah, that's a great example of
how the computer could be used not only to reach, but to persuade an
authentic audience. The exercise of civic power really energized the
students because they could experience the actual results of their
efforts: "We wanted the Mukilteo School Board to see a different
opinion, one voiced by students on real issues" (Irby, 1993, p.53).
JP: And I love the graphic where the title
of the magazine busted through a crumbling wall. It’s Pink Floyd
reloaded on a computer screen….Hey, teachers leave them kids alone!!!
benmccorkle: Shine on, you crazy diamond!
:) With the Nancy Gorrell piece (1993), it's a similar
motivation, only instead of civic engagement, it's the promise of
being an actual, dyed-in-the-wool poet--this class was producing
poetry chapbooks on the laser printer. Here, she writes about how all
of the design options (font, layout, etc.) actually motivated the
students to participate in the project, even if they didn't envision
themselves as computer savvy.
JP: Yeah, I think in Gorell's essay (1993)
we really start to see a multimodal turn happening as she discussed
teaching students to consider choices of typography and layout as
rhetorical. And I loved that students had the option to leave a copy
of their chapbook in the school library.
benmccorkle: Speaking of software more
generally, we should probably chat at least a little bit about
"electronic mail"--after the boom of word processor talk in the
earlier part of the decade, this seems like the next major application
that really captured English teachers’ attention...
JP: Yeah, I remember being delighted by how
Joyce Kinkead (1988) was so enthusiastic about the possibility of
email providing real audiences for student writing. I also was charmed
by how much she loved getting email from her students: "Although I
thought I might resent students' intruding into my own time after
school hours, I find instead that I enjoy our correspondences--that I
get to know students better and they know me better, too, a benefit
that transfers to our classroom” (Kinkead 41).
benmccorkle: Making human connections...
that is salve for the soul, to be sure. The Lake (1989) article also
reflected that sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm students had for the
glorious new technology of email: “Jenny would log on and look for the
message, 'You Have Mail Waiting,' hoping that she has a response" from
her teacher (p. 74).
JP: Ha! Today, in teaching first-year
composition, we often have to explain the importance of checking email
to students since it's now mostly a technology for old people.
benmccorkle: True. I’m also noticing how
email was imagined more as a kind of remediation of the telephone (in
addition to postal mail of course). Here’s Holvig in 1989, explaining
the value of email writing exchanges: “Kids are used to having it
‘now.’ With our online classroom, my kids get it as quickly as a phone
call and a conversation. Instead of ‘talking,’ we write and read. We
hear the ‘voices’ in the words coming across our screen from one
classroom somewhere else into our own” (p. 70).
JP: Yeah, that’s another commonplace we keep
tracking from radio to TV and now to computer...the kids have been
impatient with the *speed* of print media for quite a long time it
seems. And, today, the youth are impatient with email since it’s so
much slower than texting. TEENAGERS!
benmccorkle: <Shakes fist in
solidarity> But, seriously...I think it's important that we
remember how much networked forms of writing (email, bulletin boards,
and all the rest) differed in their affordances from stand alone word
processing programs. Teachers in this time period were right that we
need to focus first and foremost on how computers can help us build
and strengthen human connections.
JP: Indeed. But, of course, we also
need to think critically about the labor politics of teachers being
expected to always be online--maintaining some work-life balance is
crucial for teachers to sustain innovative pedagogies.
benmccorkle: Yep, the deluge of email is
still a concern for us today. Email definitely takes up a different
cognitive load than other forms of CMC. I know, for example, chatting
in IRC like this carries with it an interesting set of affordances and
constraints. The rapid pace of the chat, the pressure to come up with
witty or poignant observations, figuring out how to properly cut and
paste quotations, etc.
JP: Yeah, it's freaking me way out that I
can't see what you are writing as you are writing it...it's such a
different form of collaborative writing than our usual mixing it up in
Google Docs. I’m enjoying chatting with you this way (nostalgia FTW!),
but I’d be lying if I said I’m not totally looking forward to the
moment when we put this transcript in Google Drive and edit the hell
out of it.
benmccorkle: Yeah, the thing about IRC is
that you can't ever look back--it's always moving forward. Inexorably.
Linearly...
JP: I find myself longing for the recursive
affordances of the word processor! Of course, IRC was probably the
most linear form of networked writing in this time period. We can't
forget that 1988 is also when highly nonlinear Interactive Fictions
start to make their way into EJ.
benmccorkle: That's right. We found a
handful of articles that touched on interactive fiction during this
period... Aside from the focus on the genre itself, one thing that
jumps out at me is that this is a moment when the computer is promoted
as a *reading* device. That's kinda new.
JP: Yeah, I'm thinking of that study by
Lancy & Hayes (1998) that showed that students who had little
interest in traditional print literacy would enthusiastically spend
hours playing through interactive fictions that required a ton of
reading!
benmccorkle: Yep. That article talked about
an interactive novel called _Seastalker_, and students seemed highly
engaged, up until they hit impasses that kept them from moving the
narrative forward (which the instructors then helped them surmount).
In the end, Lancy and Hayes concluded, "It appears from our
exploratory study that students with no more than average interest in
reading will spend a great amount of time engaged in interactive
fiction that requires quite a lot of reading if they are successful at
the quest. We view this as having important implications for
encouraging students to read independently" (p. 45).
JP: Yes, I remember how Lancy & Hayes
talked so extensively about the importance of helping students learn
to navigate the interactive fictions...usability was a huge issue with
these programs since students had to play through them by using a
limited vocabulary of text commands. So in that sense, we can see how
teaching interactive fiction moved beyond reading instruction to also
teaching students how to *write* in a procedural way.
benmccorkle: That's a crucial point. We've
already talked about Costanzo, but he was interested in interactive
fiction and gaming as well (he specifically mentions interactive
versions of _Fahrenheit 451_, _Treasure Island_, and _Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy_). He made this very point himself: "Written
language was becoming an instrument for exploration, a tool for
manipulating what was on the screen. The television tube was no longer
just a one-way street" (p. 29).
JP: It's so cool here to see how interactive
fiction was imagined as a kind of remediation of television over which
the viewer now had more control. But, I'm also starting to wonder
about how this interactive fiction turn was really a kind of
continuation of the instructional software movement? In both cases, we
saw the solitary student on a stand-alone computer interacting with a
program in a highly structured, if complexly branching, way.
benmccorkle: I was thinking earlier about
what makes this era--which stretches from the late 80s until just
before the WWW really took off in the mid-90s--unique. I think it has
to do with the "big pieces" of computer technology that have yet to
join together. One one hand, you have this interest in networking, and
along with that very text-heavy applications like email, BBSs, IRC
clients, and so on. On the other hand, you get applications that
promote interactivity, disrupt textual linearity, and combine media
elements. It takes a few years before we start to bring those elements
together in the same space, and where multiple people could experience
it together...
JP: Dude, that's profound! And I can't wait
until we get to write about the time period when networked multimedia
really gets going. But, I'm also struck by how much EJ authors were
looking forward to that future already. Here's Gary Greist in 1992:
"Our role as English teachers seems to have been expanded and
‘decentered’ at the same time, a situation that is quite similar to
the postmodern fate of the author. Because of this, we need to base
our practices not only on the book of traditional literacy but also on
the one that we hardly recognize because its capabilities are combined
with video, audio, and graphics and its text is linked by multiple
paths" (p. 18).
benmccorkle: Griest seems influenced by many
of the hypertextual theorists and authors of that time--people like
Jay Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop, and George Landow, among others. They
tied the underlying philosophy of hypertextual writing to the central
tenets of postmodern theory, invoking figures like Barthes, Foucault,
Jameson, etc. This is perhaps one of those moments where there was a
cultural desire for new forms of communication to emerge-- and folks
like Griest, Costanzo, and others helped push it along from within the
English classroom.
JP: Yes! Another example of why EJ deserves
a place in histories of digital humanities! Teachers in the journal
were asking deep questions about how digital media were challenging
our notions of reading and writing and teaching. And some, like Lancy
& Hanley (1988), were even starting to imagine how students might
work to compose their own interactive fictions!
benmccorkle: They were certainly promoting
new ways of thinking about reading, writing, textuality, and even the
inner workings of the mind itself. The work being done with
interactive fiction, along with Griest's interest in HyperCard,
certainly fostered hypertextual ways of thinking among the students.
But speaking of digital humanities (particularly the field's penchant
for data-wrangling), we also have the interesting case of Mary Deming
and Marie Valeri-Gold (1990), who were busy fostering *database*
thinking in their students.
JP: Yeah, that was a fascinating one. At
first, I kind of giggled when they wrote about having students
construct their own "databases" out of index cards. But, then I
realized how cool it actually was. Instead of just teaching students
how to use electronic databases, they were trying to teach students
how to construct them--how to compose a rudimentary nonlinear database
that made an argument based on what was included and how it was
organized.
benmccorkle: They were definitely thinking
critically about the assignment design, and the student outcomes they
were aiming for, which tied into complex, iterative ways of processing
and classifying information. They claimed, "As students are compiling
these lists [of different ways to access the cards], they are
gradually being introduced to a hierarchy of thinking skills. Students
not only list items but also synthesize, analyze, and apply the data
they are manipulating. Students, too, create questions and hypotheses
about their data and check their lists to confirm their predictions"
(Deming and Valeri-Gold, 1990, p. 70).
JP: Yeah, I like how Deming and Valeri-Gold
recognized that students might better be able to understand the
complex workings of emerging electronic databases if they had some
experience making a database themselves. And, instead of giving up on
the “making” part of the project due to lack of tech access, they
hacked the index card to turn it into something much cooler than I
ever thought it could be!
benmccorkle: It sure beats writing out your
five-paragraph essay outline on index cards like I had to do in
seventh grade! But that hacker ethos reminds me that English teachers
have been doing this sort of thing--repurposing "craft" materials in
order to replicate the effects of specialized, and sometimes expensive
technology--throughout our EJ corpus. I mean, does the name ***Roy
McCullogh*** ring a bell?!
JP: HA! Of course! How could I forget
Mildred Campbell's broomstick microphone, and all the care she took
"that the gongster's hands be hygienically protected" (Campbell, 1937,
p. 754) ....LOL. But seriously, I love how we have found this theme of
English teachers hacking everyday objects to enable media production
pedagogy recurring in the computer era. I'd note too that this hacking
of index cards was occurring relatively early in the development of
electronic databases...what most of us are doing with databases now in
writing classes these days is actually a lot more boring.
benmccorkle: True dat(a)...
JP: <groan>
benmccorkle: This is part of the consistent
ebb and flow we notice: new tech = excitement and innovation. Old tech
= genres and forms ossify, excitement dies down, and innovation tends
to fade as we go back to teaching good ol' skills.
JP: It's sad to watch...especially since we
need more innovative ways of teaching information literacy more than
ever!
benmccorkle: Agreed. Do you think this trend
of media ossifying as they get older helps explain why we didn't find
a *single* computer-based article in the year 1994?
JP: Yeah...1994 was a kind of weird outlier
year (though it had some articles about non-computer media). My sense
is that interest in computers was starting to wane as they began to
feel less new and revolutionary. But, the thing with computers is that
every few years some new computing development happens and people get
all jazzed again. We'll see that happen in 1995...but that's a topic
for another day.
benmccorkle: Definitely…. So, I have a
chicken-egg question incubating. Do you think during this period that
pedagogy is more the driving force behind technology adoption, or is
technology instead giving shape to how we're thinking about teaching?
JP: Oh that's always the question, isn't it?
It's really quite fascinating that the rise of computer networking
technologies coincided with a social / critical turn in composition
and K-12 literacy studies. In these articles, we saw teachers pointing
to how new technologies make writing more social, but we also saw them
citing theorists who were making similar points about writing beyond
the computer as well.
benmccorkle: Like Nancy Gorrell (1993)
turning to Susan Miller and Patricia Bizzell to talk about the social
value of her poetry publication project, for instance...
JP: Exactly...I think what we keep finding
is that technologies and pedagogical theories are mutually
constitutive...there are so many different kinds of chickens laying so
many different kinds of eggs that you can never pinpoint a single
origin for any particular shift. You've been to the massive chicken
show at the Ohio State Fair. You know what I'm talking about!
benmccorkle: Indeed I do! Let’s leave it at
that for this segment, Jason. What do you think we should chat about
next time, though?
JP: Well, I guess we need to start talking
about the next act and what we’re gonna do with it. And start playing
in the Wayback Machine. And start remembering the wonder of Geocities!
:-)
benmccorkle: Okay, sounds like a plan! I'll
do that too. Let's chat again soon, k?
JP: ttyl
benmccorkle: :P