Subtitle: How does the university study technology?

These 3 readings all seemed to intersect on the way we study technology and writing. All seem unified in their belief that we need to approach this as an interdisciplinary effort if we are to avoid the pitfalls of creating a utopian (and – implied – a false) understanding of technology and literacy.

Further, all of these scholars cover a lot of ground, so for this week’s entry, I’ve opted to do a bit of synthesis, rather than separate summaries. First, their arguments:

1) Selfe & Selfe argue that teachers / writing scholars need to be more than just “users” of technology; we need to become critical scholars and designers as well. Both articles (Selfe x2 and Haas) are cautionary ones, an apparent balance to those who promote technology in a more utopian light (a tone which seems to characterize the New Learning book, I think). Selfe x2 describes this approach as an “overly positive ‘rhetoric of technology’” (483). Further, they point out that the attempts to make technology a minimizer of borders and divides actually exacerbates them … for example, they point out circumstances when lower income or minority schools utilize technology more for “skill and drill” use, while the “majority” tend to apply these tools in more higher order ways (484). However, after readings from last week, I found myself wondering whether Selfe x2 were too intent on an anti-capitalistic critique of technology, especially when they charged that “the architecture of computer interfaces” promote business and capitalism. When when one considers that these computers were originally designed for business use (not education), this criticism seems a bit of an oversimplification. However, that’s a minor, minor nit picking observation.

Interestingly, I noted that they critique the commodification of knowledge, which the Kalantzis and Cope book refers to as the “knowledge economy” as something to be touted and promoted. These attempts to borrow rhetorical language from the realm of economics seems to be persistent, yet serving cross purposes.

I think the most impressive (i.e., made a lasting impression on me) is their statement that maps are NEVER “innocent” (485). (This made me think of our efforts to map networks – are these also non-innocent gestures reflective of a field of view / bias?) Also of interest was their observation that the scholarship of the 1990s tended to be couched in overly optimistic tones; that continues to be a persistent in some ways, just recalling the company-sponsored web sites we skimmed last week (and perhaps more subtly in sites like Edutopia).

2)  Haas argues that we need to we need to approach literacy through a lens of “materiality” that addresses technology in the context of the interrelatedness of “cultural tools and cognitive activity” (44). She further argues that technology, as an object of study, has become the focus of two key “myths”:

• technology is transparent, like a window, and therefore “latent” and not something that requires closer, critical scrutiny; and

• that technology is “all powerful” and, in turn, always positive, determining “its own shape and use” (35).

She suggests that we as scholars and teachers of writing must work to ground ourselves in “the histories of other technologies” in order to avoid seeing changes in technology as some sort of separate revolution, a “unitary object” (36). In other words, contexts are important to this discussion and to our efforts to maintain a critical awareness of technologies. She also suggests, as a “corrective,” that we need to “acknowledge that techologies’ effects depend on how they are culturally represented and how people reason about them” (36).  She notes that we do not have sufficient theoretical groundings to really, effectively grapple with “the relationship between technology and literacy,” and as a result we cannot adequately address the question of “how do we move from discussions of technology’s role in thinking to discussions of its role in culture, and back again?” (37). She points to three theories that have fallen particularly short of productively framing this technology / literacy issue: cognitive, classical rhetoric, and postmodern. They all fall prey to the two myths, according to Haas. She therefore suggests a multi-pronged approach to address this, some theoretical, some institutional. Like Boyer, she promotes an institutionally interdisciplinary “fix” whereby we might counter the “instrumental view” of writing and technology by promoting scholarly training in which “diverse disciplines…work together” (26). For Haas, culture, and technology, and literacy / writing are part and parcel of the same “scholarly enterprise” (33).

Her argument parallels Selfes’ in many ways, especially in their call for teachers to become more of the Critical Strategist when working with technology. Selfe and Selfe assert that we need to “look at” not “look through” technology (Haas’ window analogy) and see technology as a border imbued with all sorts of political and cultural power differentials.

3) Boyer’s chapters 4-7 take an institutional perspective, looking at the role of scholars within the university. He points out several “flaws” in a university system (the scholars who work there and the students who learn there) that are based on what he asserts is an erroneously universalized model of the “research institution = college education & teaching.” In fact, he asserts we need to completely redefine the mission of the university itself. He outlines several approaches to accomplish this, including reinterpreting what counts as valued scholarship and exploring what he calls the “richness of faculty talent” without confining it to a narrow disciplinary scope based on what he appears to believe is an outdated model of education that more or less extinguishes creativity (37). Part of the reason for this is the cross purposes of the perceived mission. On the one hand, the university claims the mission is about the students’ learning, but subverts that by the way faculty are walled into research-model performance.

A few asides: as he promoted the more experimental or creative approaches to university mission, I thought he pursued a rather utopian and one-sided approach. What if the future employer of a student expects university-trained potential employees to be grounded in “traditional knowledge” like business ethics or communication rhetorics. The potential for wide scale employment in our current business climate might be negatively impacted.

Another aside, I found most interesting his observation about the height of creative productivity coming at different ages depending on the scholar’s field. For science, it’s much younger, but for fields such as ours, the depth of understanding is at its apex when we’re older. (So maybe being the older grad student isn’t such a bad thing after all.)

Finally, his proposal that we encourage institutions to promote, produce, and value “teacher-researchers” to be the next best hope for our universities (61). He lauds community colleges for successfully fostering this mindset… I found myself thinking how unfortunate it is that the mentality of so many four-year institutions consider these student-centered mission-oriented institutions (CCs) to be second tier.

Of course, all of these texts were published in the 1990s, and I take heart in looking at some of the scholarship being produced today that illustrates some of the changes called for by these authors. On the one hand, we continue to discuss the computer interface as a boundary to be critically pressed and assessed, and programs like ODU offer theorized technology as a mainstay of its course offerings. So, it may have taken 20 years, but there’s progress!

Works Cited

Boyer, Ernest L. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. The Carnegie Foundation, 1990.

Haas, Christina. Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1996: 3-47.