On “Technology and the Teaching of Writing”

In the discourse on “Technology and the Teaching of Writing” Charles Moran talks about the characteristic casualness and intimacy of email. It is largely for these reasons that I would not favor using email as a discussion tool for assignments, and most certainly not for discussing student grades, which I consider to be a private matter. (I’ve known professors who won’t even accept email except from student email addresses issued by the school in order to be able to trace email for any possible legal ramifications.) Though email helps to construct listservs for class discussions, my experience as a student with listserv has not been positive nor did it enhance my learning experience. I also disagree with Steven Krause in “When Blogging Goes Bad” that “email,” over blogs, “offers a much better opportunity for collaborative writing” (332). Again, perhaps it is my old school approach in that email is good for arranging to meet with a classmate to discuss assignments over coffee. I’ve never collaborated on anything through email, which as a teacher, I would reserve for merely communicating information regarding assignments, and making arrangements, perhaps, for appointments beyond my office hours. I would only encourage listservs as a discussion space if students desired to use it as such, and as long as people are respectful. (I’ve seen listservs get really ugly, and become something other than what was intended for the purposes of the class).

I found the passage in Moran’s piece on “Race on the Superhighway” a little disturbing, in that the researchers, Teresa Redd and Victoria Massey, found that black students “used fewer features of the African American oral tradition than we expected, fewer AAE [African American English] grammatical forms and fewer ‘styling’ devices” (216). I can’t imagine why it would be assumed that black students, who are perhaps in college, and obviously computer literate, would speak any differently from any student in the same situation. Rather than being cognizant of “the watchful gaze of the teacher,” as Moran suggest, perhaps they were simply learned American students using the same language that we’ve all been taught to use.

Krause cites Bob Goodwin-Jones in asserting that blogs, as opposed to email, “foster an ownership of text, a personal responsibility for writing” (333). Although I agree that blogs are more “individualistic,” I have seen a couple of really interesting blogs where writers collaborate by each contributing posts periodically. And, while each post is as distinctive as each of its writers, it seems to work nicely, and offers writers the opportunity to be part of a writing team focusing around a specific subject. As far as using blogs to teach writing, I think it would be a good space for freewritng and journaling, but only if it’s possible to blog without publishing on the worldwide web, (and I think there is); I would rather that in order to protect student’s privacy. While I do blog on my own, I frankly don’t like the possibility of work I’m doing for a class, as a student, to be on display for the whole world, at a time when I am only just forming my knowledge, ideas and opinions about a given subject.