Current mood:	jazzy
Current music:	Stan Getz/Joao Gilberto

Week Four (a day late): Historia Technologica

Break on Through

A general comment on the Hawisher et al text: while it appears the authors have taken great pains to be inclusive with the structure of the book, i.e. including interviews and adding sidebars along each page to bring in other voices, I find there’s a very important voice being silenced—mine! With all the text crowding in the margins, the physical layout of the book makes it very difficult for me to add my own reading notes. As a result, I don’t feel encouraged to write much of my own commentary.  As I read, I also found myself skipping a lot of the “margin narratives,” because it was just too much for me to take those and the “central” narrative in at once. Nice try gals and guys, but it was a bit of a mess for this reader.

OurStory/TheirStory

After reading the Hawisher and Inman texts, I was struck by how much I learned about the history of composition in general, and not just of computers and composition. Of course, this feeling is probably unique to me because I keep identifying myself as “not (yet) a rhet/comp person.” For example, I didn’t realize that the paradigm shift from current-traditional, product-emphasis pedagogy to process emphasis pedagogy was so late—1979 to 1982 is what Hawisher records in the book. I guess I was under the impression that this emphasis began in the late 60’s, early 70’s, to follow the civil rights movement and the general progressive trends of the 60’s (process seems to equate to progress, for me). Because the process paradigm is still so well-established today, and because it seems to have been in place since I began writing, I can’t imagine a world without it. I guess I am a “process native,” similar to those “technology natives” that Dr. Blair mentioned in a reply to my last post.

Anyway, when I consider the cultural narratives surrounding technology use, the first thing that comes to mind is the relationship between class and access. If you couldn’t afford to purchase the growing technology, you simply were shut out from using it, and completely out of the dialogue surrounding the development and use of technology, from education to work to play. Similarly, if your community was not privileged enough to have access to technology—say, you didn’t have up-to-date or even working computers at your local library or in your school—you were shut out. One personal class/access narrative: I recall the “Soup Labels for Computers” campaign that was pushed on all the students at my (mostly white) Catholic elementary school. Though we were a private school, our student body was composed of children from middle to low-middle class families, and we couldn’t afford to allocate much money to “luxuries” such as computers seemed to be back then. I remember my mother saving every soup label from every can of Campbell’s soup we purchased between the years of 1985-2000 (and scolding me when I forgot to save the labels) so that all the parents working together could buy a few Apple computers for our school.

Perhaps for some of us the “class gap” has narrowed in recent years, as technologies become less expensive and computers in the classroom are recognized as necessities, not luxuries, and thus more public funding goes to bringing up-to-date technology to more schools. However, that doesn’t mean that the gap has narrowed for everyone. As narratives of race are often connected to narratives of class, I suspect that people of color have experienced little change in their public educational access to technology, simply because resources in their districts remain scarce compared to white districts (whose constituents have more income, better access to talented grant writers, more influence in federal, state and local governments, etc.).

I hope to read more about class and race narratives in technology.

Hey, Julie, Where’s Your Podcast?

Yeah, that. Good podcasting takes a lot of time and effort. My computer is not the newest, I’m running a PC (a Mac might be more helpful), I don’t have a stellar microphone, I’m still learning this stuff, and I’m in grad school—that means I’m poor and busy. So maybe the Study Hall will be a monthly podcast. Don’t worry, fans (all 3 of you)—just like the Highlander, there will be another.