Tales of an Emergent Academic Technologist

In college, I somehow came to distrust technology. This was around the time of the Unabomber, in the early to mid-1990s, and I remember reading one of his manifestos in the newspaper and thinking--"This guy is crazy, but he's sure getting a few things right."

I'm not sure I would have seen it that way prior to my becoming an English major at the University of New Hampshire, but I think that studying English can cause you to distrust a lot of things, among them: organized religion, corporations, politicians, the military, and maybe, if you're like me (and the Unabomber), technology. These things somehow all get lumped into one wonderfully irrational religio-corporate-politico-military-techno complex and what your coursework all seems to add up to is a kind of Eisenhowerian warning: beware...the world. To be sure, being an English major gave me skepticism, distrust, and cynicism about the world in which I was living.

For some, a Thoreauian vision emerges as a kind of solution to a dim world-view. Get off the grid. Go out into nature. Bring a paper and some pencil. Write. Grow your own food. Whatever. I imagine I am not the first or the only English major to have lived some version of this dream--to have had his coursework seem to point him in this direction. 

But while I was holed up in Hamilton Smith Hall in Durham, New Hampshire, reading and discussing Raymond Carver and James Baldwin and Joan Didion, there was a whole other group of guys on the other side of campus, in Kingsbury Hall, tinkering around with this new thing called the internet and for them, the world must have been really opening up. Here was this relatively new invention that allowed you to talk to other people in sometimes distant places and share ideas and information across time and space. I didn't know those guys and I don't really know what that moment in history was like for them, but it had to be exhilarating--a whole new world of possibility emerging before their eyes. 

Despite the fact that I now teach English majors, I have only a slight sense of how such students view the world today. When I hear a student say, as one did in my rhetoric course the other day, that he would prefer to talk less about politics because he "fucking hates politics and all politicians," I begin to think that being an English major may not have changed a great deal. On the technological front, things are a bit more complicated. On the one hand, many of the English majors I teach embrace their smart-phones and their facebook pages with great vigor. On the other hand, I had a student last year who confessed her adoration and preference for the pencil. Another questioned why so much of what we were reading was posted online (she wanted to read more books). Each semester, a consistent minority of the English majors I teach seem to struggle with very basic technological operations and some, I think, take pride in this. I look around and see the obvious adoration of certain of our creative writing faculty and the popularity of certain literature courses and I think that things have, perhaps, not changed that much from the days when I was an English major. A certain kind of person is still attracted to the work--drawn, as I was, to the often romantic vision of the world and self that is sometimes still encouraged by the study of writing and literature. They sit on benches reading hard-cover books in the bright autumn sun on warm September afternoons. They carry journals in which they scribble quotes from their reading and questions about--well, everything. I was one of them. 

When it comes to issues of technology, English professors, not surprisingly, are sometimes like their students. We are forever forgetting (or refusing to remember) how to work the hardware in our classrooms. We carry around stacks of our students' papers and write comments assiduously in the margins with our favorite pens. We queue up at the photocopy machine, printing out, for example, massive packets of MLA guidelines that could just as easily be linked to online. Mention of the campus learning management system (LMS) elicits eye-rolling or nervous laughter in the hallways where I work. Complaints about students' texting behaviors never cease (in the 60s and 70s, when these professors were students, this same ire was directed at television). During the first week or so of classes each semester, an older colleague across the hall calls me over to his office to help him add the Discussion Board tool to his LMS site. He confesses that he can't remember how we did it last time and sheepishly asks if I can show him again. The first few times he asked, as I added the tool I pointed out that our campus IT support unit holds regular seminars and workshops on how to use the LMS. But since he's still asking for my help at the start of each term, it's hard not to conclude that not only hasn't he sought out help--he doesn't really even want to learn. Like our students, we English professors have always been and may always be conflicted about the machines in our garden. 

There is a passage in the book 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition that has been following me around since I first encountered it a year or so ago. I'm using this passage in conversation with a research project about the history of composition teaching at the University of New Hampshire, but I'm finding all sorts of other uses for it and now, I think, I've found another one. Here it is:

Why do people teach composition as they do at any given moment? What determines their choices of textbooks, assignments, and daily classroom activities? Of all the possible approaches to the teaching of writing, why do teachers settle on particular ones? What accounts for the shape of composition programs--sequences of courses, testing and placement procedures, staffing and administrative practices? Individual preferences and personal styles are certainly involved; so, of course, are institutional values and constraints. But even more certainly, the teaching of composition is shaped by the available means of persuasion that are presented to us by intellectual and professional communities (broadly considered)--communities shaped, inevitably, by culture, circumstance, and history. (3)

In this first blog post, I've been trying to think about the communities and culture, circumstances and histories that have shaped my own orientation towards the use of technology in the classroom. My point, I think, is that for many who teach writing, the available means of (pedagogical) persuasion probably included some variation on this theme of skepticism/suspicion of the machine in the garden. We were not born with the impulse to roll our eyes, laugh nervously, or intentionally forget when issues related to technology come up--we were enculturated into these ways of knowing, we learned them while playing in the garden. 

I've managed to unlearn them. 

Today, in most of my classes, I strive to create the paperless classroom. I joke with my students that the paperless classroom is the penance I am doing for all the forests I killed in South America during my early teaching days. "You're papering them over," an older colleague and former professor once said as he stood in line, waiting for me to finish making copies. 

But the paperless classroom is more an ethos than it is a penance. I hope, through this blog, to share this ethos with you. Like those computer scientists discovering the internet back in the 1990s, my orientation towards technology in the writing classroom is one of possibility and opportunity. But as I say, it hasn't always been so. And that's why I decided to start this blog by looking back. To know where you're going, you've got to know where you've been. This is an important lesson I learned from being an English major, too.