Donna – and Mike – and Tharon – Chris – Michael – you've helped me here by pushing me to the wall. Yes, the costs of tech are huge, and yes, we have to pay these costs. Period. The ante is up; we, and our students, have to pay to play. A tech-free university is not imaginable, though I predict that expensive, private colleges will before long begin advertising themselves as places where F2F is the norm – where there are lots of real teachers in real classrooms.
You-all help me see that what I say about tech and its costs is colored by my situation: a prof. in public post-secondary education in Massachusetts. At our University, we are in something worse than a zero-sum game – hard to believe, with all this alleged prosperity, but given our present trickle-up economics, public education has been losing support, and budget, for the past ten years, a time-frame that coincides with the expansion of academic computing.
Donna – and Chris – you make me wish that our WAC program had jumped into technology-training. That would have been a smart thing to do. We did not do it, and WAC has certainly lost profile here as a result. If WAC is essentially a faculty-development program, then technology-training would have been the new 'hook,' as 'improving writing skills' was the old. Donna, I love your suggestions for tech-WAC workshops. We'll try to emulate – I have a plan! and will give credit to you and yours. There's enough work there to carry me for the next five years – should I need more on my plate. Your work, and Chris' too, make me think of evolution as a metaphor. Evolve or die. The humanist in me, and maybe the latent old man in me, wants to hold on to the best of the past, but that's permitted by the metaphor too, unless the rate of change is so rapid that it approaches the catastrophic, which some of our academic administrators would like to have us believe. I think here of your world, Chris, and the WGU initiatives.
And Tharon – yes, writing is too limited a term for us. CAC is more true than WAC – the stimulus for WAC, as well as for the National Writing Project, was a perception of a "literacy crisis." Berliner & Biddle's The Manufactured Crisis lays out the extent to which our present felt need for education reform is a construction that bears scant relationship to the actual achievement of our educational institutions. I expect that, like our present education crisis, the literacy crisis of the '80's was much less than it seemed in the popular press. So a move from writing to communication makes great sense – given its origins in inaccurate perceptions of widespread illiteracy in America, the sooner we leave "writing" behind the better. Except for the metaphor that communication carries for me: point-to-point transmission, perhaps along a wire, of a "message" – of pre-cast thought. No room in this metaphor for the composing, the imagining, the generating, the re-thinking-the aspects of mind that drew me, at least, into the teaching of writing. So yes to CAC, and let's somehow dodge the potential ill-effects of the communications metaphor.
Berliner, D. & Biddle, B. (1995). The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on America's public schools. New York: Longman.
– Charles Moran
cmoran@english.umass.edu