Rereading WTWS

[rereading-wtws]

It's almost here [Fred]

We have less than two weeks to go before our session.  I think there are some significant things to talk about regarding computer-assisted instruction, computer-based instruction, and the influence of writing teachers on either.  But it would be a good idea, seems to me, to set up some cohering issues or questions as we approach our discussion.  I offer some suggestions.

Paul’s book establishes the core concepts, but we will have to go beyond them, partly because of the somewhat “tragic” nature of the book that Karl mentioned in his second blog post.  There was a lot of hope in those days of a new engagement of writing instruction and the humanities with what seemed like a wide-open technology, the personal computer, networks, and — on the horizon — the Internet.  We saw written interaction moving far beyond the limitations — both material and economic — of “snail” mail and print publications and the “ shut-up-and-face-forward” classroom.  We also saw, in the promise of hypertext, a new kind of narrative that shifted -- or "seemed" to shift -- a strange new power to the reader.  My persistent call in our research lab in the late 1980s was to “blow out the walls,” both the physical walls of the classroom and the metaphorical walls of what text is and what text is “for.”  

I was convinced that it was only through computer networks that the New Rhetoric would ever be implemented -- hence Paul's mention in chapter five of the influence of Berlin on Wayne and me.  I really became a believer in a social-epistemic/collaborative instruction, but since I had just spent nine years among high school and college freshman teachers, I was convinced that writing teachers would not change, that the intellectual leadership in the field would not measurably change what went on in the classroom because the classroom itself would not change.  In my discussions with teachers I was persistently confronted by “why change what works?” when "what works" was demonstrably not working.

But the networked computer, imposed upon education not by forces within but by pressure from without, WOULD change the classroom itself, conceptually and materially "blow out the walls."  Only through networked computers would the powerful new ideas that perculated at the top of the field -- and tended to remain there -- be adopted by the rank and file.  I was often accused of being too easily fascinated by the "bright, shiny things" of computer technology, but from the very beginning I saw the computer revolution as a means to a new and better pedagogy that existed, in theory anyway, before the computer.  And Bruffee, Bizzell, and Jim Berlin especially hated computers for all the usual humanities reasons.

But, it seems to me, that didn't happen, and the promise of computers and instructional software that reflected human cognition also didn't happen.  You younger guys may disagree, and I hope you do, but to my mind Blackboard, Moodle, and Druple as "coureware" simply provide a hyped up gradebook.  There are chat rooms and wiki's and email and file uploads, but the excitement in the late 1980s was "cognitive" software that did what Hugh's programs tried to do, walk the student writer through a process that mirrored the way people thought and came up with ideas.  Most of the software in Paul's book tried to do that, provide channels of thinking that supported problem-solving in writing.  Hugh's software and PROSE and WRITER'S HELPER and a dozen others attempted to create cognitive grooves or chutes that made managing writing problems easier.

I love the social-networking stuff, and I think some people have made imaginative use of social networking, but not in ways that can be ported out to the less imaginative.  I love video and create my own classroom videos, but I have never been convinced by Daniel Anderson or others that making videos leads to better writers, although I think understand and emphathize with the theory.  The "tragedy" of WTWS lies in a hope that, as far as I can see, was never realized.  I hope this grumpy-old-man trope can be contested by the ever-hopeful Hugh Burns and Karl and Caitlan. (I have a Caitlan Hernandez in one of my classes this semester:  love it!)

How's this for some questions to prepare for?

What was Paul hoping to show in his book?

How would we characterize the people he describes?  (The people, not the software.)

How would we characterize the software he describes?

Why did the "writing teachers WRITING SOFTWARE" seem important?

What does it seem like he (and his characters) expect would happen eventually?

Has there actually been a "computer revolution" in writing instruction?  (Here I don't mean so much courseware or programware, which I take advantage of but which seem to me managerial, not pedagogical.)

Do we still have writing teachers writing software?  If not, why not?  If so, who?

What HAS happened in computer-influenced pedagogy?

What is the future of computers in our writing instruction?  Do we see coming up the kind of emergence of ideas that Paul describes?

Do these questions seem like the kind of thing that we can and should respond to?  Please critique freely.  Add or delete.  Please tell me if I've missed the road and am bouncing across the corn fields.  

Looking forward to meeting Karl and Caitlan and seeing my old friends Joyce and Hugh once again.

fred

[rereading-wtws]

Catching Up: First Three Chapters [Fred]

I'm behind, but I'm catching up.  After reading the first three chapters, I'd like to emphasize 3 things from Paul's book. 

First,whatever the mode of development (Paul lists four, I think -- individual, entrepreneurial, etc.), the development was managed in a trial and error fashion working with genuine students.  I have talked to the developers of some successful software -- but from my point of view pedagogically disappointing -- and most of their development was drawn from preconceptions of what writing is and how it should be taught.  Then, field tested in various ways and modified, but only slightly.  One of the reasons that such software (here I think of WebCT, Blackboard, Turn-it-in) is successful is because it fits the general idea of what most writing instructors themselves think writing instruction is, often reductively.

But the teachers who wrote or directly oversaw development in an academic situation tended to assume a rhetorical approach, working closely with students themselves as the utility increased in sophistication.  Wayne accurately describes how we wrote this or that, cranked it into the classroom, saw where it worked or failed, and practically overnight rewrote parts.  We were intimately involved with our audience, and I think a number of those writing-teacher developers Paul describes were doing something similar.

Second, there was a genuine sense of doing something significant, possibly very significant.  The personal computer and especially the local-area network were brand new and mostly reviled in literature departments, but their appeal was undeniable.  When I went to campuses to speak I always described the futility of the lecturer trying to compete with the computers in a computer-based classroom.  The only way I could hold the class was to make everybody turn off his or her monitor, and then check periodically to make sure they did (in those days the monitors faced away from the front of the room, imitating the usual classroom rows of desks).  Otherwise, sure enough, I would start hearing keyboard clicks in the midst of whatever I was trying to do at the front of the room, and I could see the somewhat tortured expressions of students as they tried to seem that they were listening to me but were also trying to look at the screen.  We see the same thing today with cell phones.

Most of the people that Paul describes really, truly believed that we were encouraging a writing-theory sound use of an amazing new tool, one that could NOT be denied in spite of the usual English-department affection for the printed artifact.  I myself argued over and over that networked computers would turn out to be the ONLY way the New Rhetoric (the social-epistemic/collaborative model)  would ever overcome current-traditionalism and individual expressivism.  We would be the ones, through this new technology, to capably pursue the Berlin/Bizzell/Bruffee mission to get students writing to each other.

Third, as Paul Taylor says in the book, it was fun.  It was so out-of-school that I had to force myself off the computer to do the research and homework and writing that I needed to finish my degree.  I could write code for five hours and think I had been doing it for ten minutes.  All the frustrations of the code not working for hours -- and I was never a good programmer -- would disappear the second the damn thing worked!  My wife was worried in the early days that I was retreating into some keyboard-induced neurosis, really.  She actually talked about this coding thing being an unhealthy obsession.  But it wasn't!  It was what a third grader once told Seymour Papert when asked if his "Logo" was fun:  "yes, but it's hard fun."  

And I could aad a fourth:  they people I worked with, Hugh, Paul Taylor, Joyce Carter, Wayne Butler, Valerie Balester, Kay Halasek, and Nancy Peterson, were the best and most productive people I have ever worked with.  We got mad at each other and negotiated in difficult ways sometime, but was only hard fun.

[rereading-wtws]

Word Processing and Coding

Following upon Karl's first post, I think that the age when when we might presume that coding "could" be somehow integrated into the "natural" activity of an English department or writing-instruction scholar has most likely passed.  And the reason is the persistent presence of social networking in its many forms.

To my mind, the more interesting possibilities that the people of that generation that Hugh mentioned brought to computer interaction, managing hypertextual and networked back and forth in newly configured ways has sunk beneath the vast influence of simply "communicating," all day, all week.  What we tried to do back in the 1980s, to my mind, was figure out instructionally valuable ways of developing interactive paths tied to kinds of content.  So our chat space had a window that displayed (among other things) parts of poems or stories (James Joyce's "The Dead," for one thing).  The Invent series attempted to guide students through an "interactive questionnaire" that I tried, at several times and in several ways, to "share" and make collaborative.

My presumption was that the person-to-person aspects of networked computing provided the possibility of channeling interaction laced with content in intriguing ways.  It's like when you go into Facebook or Tumblr and are assaulted with Miley Cirus or Lady Gaga, except that I envisioned something integral to the interaction, not in a sidebar simply grabbing for the eyeballs.

But the incredible (not seen by me at the time) ubiquity of the Web and it's immediacy (thanks iPhones, tablets) have made a MANAGED interaction -- managed for an instructional purpose -- now almost inconceivable.  Social networking has gobbled up such possibilities from serious programmers.  Everybody now wants a universal tool, a big new thing, and the kinds of careful, locally handled software, now seems impossible.

But I continue to program in PHP and mysql trying, for my own few sections, to creates a kind of interactive space that guides student interaction to serve the purposes of the class.  There is no possibility of this in Blackboard or in Facebook or in Tumblr, or Droople or Moodle either, not really.  The seduction of universality and commercial markets (even with Droople and Moodle) makes the directing of interaction with content, as far as I can tell, unlikely.  The MOOC's are simply tying together video lectures and chat rooms, I think, as does the Ed2Go courses I've taken.  At one time, we academics thought we might be able to develop a variety of subtly guides online interactions linked, boutique-like, to specific learning purposes...through coding.

[rereading-wtws]

Software Design as a Mainstream Activity

Aside from a few minor vocabulary things, like the word microcomputer, the first chapter of WTWS could’ve been written yesterday. I remember thinking the same thing in around 2003, when I read WTWS the first time after stumbling upon it while working on my PhD prelim exam.

Paul’s opening to the chapter strikes me as still true: writing is a “natural” activity that is served, polluted, or even destroyed (or however one prefers to see it) by technology. Writing in a natural language, such as English, and writing in or with a computer language are treated as distinct and even oppositional activities, in both the popular imagination and in the lore of rhetoric and composition. Over twenty years beyond the publication of WTWS, the word processor reigns supreme as the de facto program for writing.

It’s worth noting that the publication of WTWS in 1993 occurred amidst two events that have shaped the state of writing and writing instruction with computers, on the one hand, and software development on the other:

Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Word take over the world: WTWS came out at a pivotal moment in the history of personal computing: specifically the release of Microsoft Windows 3.1, released in April 1992, and Microsoft Word 6.0, released in 1993, which unified both the version numbers and the UI, to the extent possible, across MS-DOS (Word 6 would be the last version to run in DOS), Windows, and Mac OS. WTWS was itself released in 1993, just as Windows and Word 6.0 came on the scene to expand and, I believe, homogenize the experience of computer-based composition in ways that are today still firmly entrenched. "Windows" is mentioned just two places in WTWS, and only in passing.

Linux, BSD Unix, and the free-/open-source software movements: Version .95 of the Linux kernel was released in March of 1992, which featured a port of the X Windows System, giving the Unix-derived Linux its first GUI environment. But more importantly, the free-software movement would also give birth to new languages as well as new tools and methods for doing the work of software development: tools that would have enriched the sense of community struggling to emerge from the disparate, relatively isolated people that Paul chronicles in WTWS.

Eric S. Raymond, chronicling the development of Unix hacker culture in The Cathedral and the Bazaar notes that

The MS-DOS world remained blissfully ignorant of [the development of BSD Unix and its culture of hackers]. Though those early microcomputer enthusiasts quickly expanded to constitute a population of DOS and Mac hackers orders of magnitude larger than that of the network nation culture, they never became self-aware.... The absence of a really pervasive network comparable to UUCP or Internet prevented them from becoming a network nation themselves.

In WTWS, word processors appear on pages 3-4 as just one type of software among many other, mostly hypertextual (what is now often called 'multimodal') composing approaches. And yet, the word processor document continues to dominate: if no longer in composition (which is debatable), than certainly elsewhere in the university, not to mention in the private sector.

Those of us who integrate software development to any significant degree in our instruction and research into writing can still see ourselves in Paul’s summary assessment of the people he interviewed for WTWS. He observed that their work, though largely “unnoticed by their institutions,” nevertheless “pointed to the one area where the field can actively shape the tools it uses, and thus shape the conception of writing implicit in those tools—the design of software” (6-7).

And that, to me, is why WTWS is both such an important and somehow tragic book. Its exigency, presented in part through a number of quotes from Andrea Lunsford's 1991 address to the MLA, is undeniably mainstream. But because of the pace and brand of software adotopion in the mid-1990s, so many of WTWS's core arguments became very easy to ignore. Once every writing teacher and every student was equipped with a copy of Windows and Word, store-bought software became the mainstream, exactly and ironically as Lunsford at the time warned.

I have tried and mostly failed in my own work to argue by demonstration for what Paul put much more succinctly and directly: “software design should be as mainstream an activity for composition professionals as teaching a writing class, conducting a research study, or writing an article” (10). There is no equivocation in that statement. Software design should be a mainstream activity, on par with teaching and research.

I believe that that vision is still important, and even more readily realized than it would have been in the mid-1990s. The microcomputer (aka, the PC) was the development that served as the technological side of WTWS's exigency. In 2015, it is the mobile device, seen on a continuum of larger, more establisehd devices. Stitching together all of those contemporary devices and, more importantly, their users: the data application programming interface (API). Passing around word documents or PDFs is no longer a tenable way to write effectively (ever read a PDF on an iPhone? I don't recommend it).

The proliferation of devices will do to digital writing what the proliferation of screen sizes did to web design. Through the mid-2000s, screen resolutions were basically limited to three sizes: 640×480, 800×600, or 1024×768. Software like Dreamweaver could pretty ably design the web within that range, no programming skills required. But as screen resolutions fragmented, and wildly so in size as well as orientation, so too did network-access conditions and modes of input (clumsy fingertips rather than the pixel-perfect precision of the mouse pointer).

Programming, writing: those are the activities suited to meet the rhetorical challenges presented by a landscape that is, and indeed should be, teeming with all sorts of different devices and differently abled users. Programming, like writing, belongs to no one other than those who choose to engage it. By rereading WTWS still another time, I plan to listen closely again to the stories of the writer-programmer pioneers that Paul interviewed at the time, and think about how those stories transform and transpose to the present time.

[rereading-wtws]

Kickoff & Reading Schedule

For the next five weeks, leading up to the CCCC Convention, my co-conspirators and I speaking at the Dialog on Writing Teachers Writing Software will be blogging as we reread Paul LeBlanc's 1993 book, Writing Teachers Writing Software: Creating Our Place in the Electronic Age.

The schedule of reading/blogging looks like this:

Week of February 9: Chapter 1, plus personal introductions for those who wish to add them

Week of February 16: Chapter 2

Week of February 23: Chapter 3

Week of March 2: Chapter 4

Week of March 9: Chapter 5 + Appendix and Hugh's Foreword

And then of course we'll be at our actual Dialog on Thursday, March 19 at 4:45pm in Ballroom A on the first floor of the convention center.