Historicizing Practices

Eleven and a half hours on the redeye from Honolulu to New England and I’m stuck with the middle seat in the middle row on a 777. Still, I’ve got two laptop batteries, and my neighbors on either side are sleeping; time enough to do a little blogging, and work on photoshopping some of my Kailua and Waikiki pictures, which I’ll try to post tonight.

Steve Krause, Julia Romberger, and Stephanie Vie gave a fine panel on “Historicizing Computers and Writing: Media and Methods” with some really interesting overlaps, intersections, and complications among the individual presentations.

Steve’s presentation was titled “Writing Spaces Before Computers: How Changes and Innovations in Paper Technology Changed How We Taught Writing”. Here’s the issue at the center of his presentation: “Little attention has been paid to technology and tools in histories of writing instruction. Histories of writing technologies (papers, pens, pencils, et cetera) say little about how such devices were actually used. Such histories sometimes even deny the effects of material changes in writing technologies on writing instruction, often attributing them instead to changes in pedagogical practice.” (Apologies, Steve, if I got any of the words wrong; I hope that I at least left the substance intact.) The balance of Steve’s presentation did a wonderfully detailed and careful job of tracking the improvements in the technologies of pen and paper, and concluded by suggesting that the inauguration of the entry-level writing exam at Harvard in the 1870s may have had much to do with the coincident birth of cheap paper.

According to Steve, his presentation is a part of a larger book-length project involving the effects of pre-digital technologies of writing, which I find absolutely fascinating, and wish I’d thought of it. I immediately thought of the tabellae of the Roman grammar schools, the clay and wax tablets upon which students inscribed their imitational exercises, writing sets of nonsense syllables and copies of literary fragments, maxims, and common sayings as a mode of imitational literacy.

Julia Romberger’s presentation, “Corporate Philosophy and the Evolution of Microsoft Word: A Historical Examination of the Rhetoric of the Interface”, began by detailing the ways in which MS Word’s interface has historically emphasized efficiency, and how that emphasis serves corporate interests. Spelling and grammar checkers were originally designed in part to save book publishers the cost of hiring proofreaders and copyeditors, and also to help corporations cut the expenses associated with secretarial staff. So, too, Word’s GUI is dominated by functionality and automation; consider how Word’s current default settings have it show an easy selection of ready-made document templates when it opens. Furthermore, the Autocorrect and Autoformat functions have been around since Word 6, and these are functions that serve to flatten the writing context and process by placing correctness first. Finally, the hyper-proliferation of button bars and formatting palettes, while it serves to place every function up front and immediately accessible, results also in an interface incoherence that may considerably detract from the writer’s attention to the task at hand, as anyone who’s put off actually writing by tweaking the formatting will immediately understand. Julia concluded by suggesting that we discuss with students how critically reading the metaphors and iconography of the interface might actually consist as a literate practice in its own right.

Finally, Stephanie Vie described in her presentation on “Memetic Theory and Teacher Training in Technology” how she served as a university computer support coordinator, helping graduate teaching assistants to integrate technology into their classrooms by holding brief workshops, working as a liaison with other campus departments (the library, the multimedia lab, the computer lab, and others), and developing training materials. She uses Dawkins’ theory of the “meme” — “a unit of cultural information passed on through imitation” — to suggest that computer support coordinators can serve as memetic hosts concerning tech issues.

So my question to Stephanie would be: what makes a teacher different from a memetic host? I appreciate the attempt at justifying practice by offering it a theoretical frame, but I might ask: how does that theoretical frame help us to understand or improve our pedagogical practice by moving us beyond theory’s offer of the fancy dress of abstraction to concrete practice?