The readings about technology and composition this week have been interesting, to say the least. Particularly because of the state of writing, and electronic modes of writing in last ten years. Yancey writes about how technology has allowed for a “writing public made plural” and that “no one is forcing this public to write” (300). I suspect that our writing students have much more writing experience under their belts as they enter college as compared to how much writing experience I had when I entered college. Now the quality of that writing (by which I mostly mean the genre of writing, not so much a dig on student writing) is largely suspect, but the actual experience of producing textual content is there: texting, tweeting, bloging, facebooking, etc. Yancey also mentions that students need “neither self-assessment nor our assessment: they have a rhetorical situation, a purpose, a potentially world wide audience, a choice of technology and medium—and they write” (302). Having that said, it is the composition teacher’s job to turn their writerly sledgehammer in to a writerly scalpel (or at least lead them in the direction of the scalpel).
These readings, I found, do raise more questions than they offer answers (something I think I mentioned last week; so I should probably stop expecting answers, eh?). The discussion of technology is a tricky one though, something that both concerns and excites me as an academic because technology these days shifts and develops rapidly, and that shift can be observed in these articles. Ten years is a canyon-sized gap that makes composition research seem desperately outdated. Yancey speaks to this back in 2004: “I have to wonder out loud if in some pretty important ways and within the relatively short space of not quite than ten years, we may already have become anachronistic” (302). I found Haas’s discussion on materiality interesting, but she is writing about the capital-N InterNet, which, to be fair, was twenty years ago.
I originally had more specific questions about Haas’s book on materiality and Yancy’s article on multi-modality, but as I write, more pressing questions about technology and our role as compositionists come to mind. So, because these articles seem to have quickly dated themselves, and the academic research process can be quite slow and labored, how does the development of composing technologies impact our field? Are we agile enough to keep up? And considering the research in Haas’s book, how do we bridge the gap between digital compositions and more traditional physical modes of composition (which I think might be the theme of that UNCC FYW conference)?
These readings, I found, do raise more questions than they offer answers (something I think I mentioned last week; so I should probably stop expecting answers, eh?). The discussion of technology is a tricky one though, something that both concerns and excites me as an academic because technology these days shifts and develops rapidly, and that shift can be observed in these articles. Ten years is a canyon-sized gap that makes composition research seem desperately outdated. Yancey speaks to this back in 2004: “I have to wonder out loud if in some pretty important ways and within the relatively short space of not quite than ten years, we may already have become anachronistic” (302). I found Haas’s discussion on materiality interesting, but she is writing about the capital-N InterNet, which, to be fair, was twenty years ago.
I originally had more specific questions about Haas’s book on materiality and Yancy’s article on multi-modality, but as I write, more pressing questions about technology and our role as compositionists come to mind. So, because these articles seem to have quickly dated themselves, and the academic research process can be quite slow and labored, how does the development of composing technologies impact our field? Are we agile enough to keep up? And considering the research in Haas’s book, how do we bridge the gap between digital compositions and more traditional physical modes of composition (which I think might be the theme of that UNCC FYW conference)?