I will agree that we haven’t developed many good tools for helping students re-enter their word-processed drafts. Or, perhaps more accurately, Microsoft has not incorporated the kinds of tools that writing teachers might recommend. There’s an interesting question: why hasn’t our profession (and groups like CCCC and WPA) found a way to challenge Microsoft to incorporate useful teaching tools into Word?
To which I want to say: I like the sentiment, but no, no, no, no, no. Don’t teachers who employ digital technologies in the classroom already do enough unpaid sales and marketing work for Microsoft? Aren’t we already doing more than enough to lock ourselves into using the tools of big corporations so that they can wring ever-increasing amounts of cash from our educational institutions?
Charlie Lowe is doing really good and important work with the open source community on developing digital tools for writing teachers, and the open source community is likely to be much more responsive (or at least responsive for the right reasons) in terms of developing those digital tools than Microsoft. Please, let’s get away from this logic that favors the relentless increase of privatization.
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