Charles Moran, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Let me begin with the good – positive thinking! Emerging technologies and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) have a certain synergy. If one of the goals of WAC is to improve students' print-literacy, then emerging technologies, at least for the moment, help us move toward this goal. For instance, so long as we and our students 'type' or 'write' on line, the on-line world becomes a new 'scene' for writing, and we and our students will do more writing. Assuming that an increase in the amount of writing one does increases one's fluency and confidence in working in this medium, then that's a gain for writing and for WAC.
Further, if we postulate a synergic relationship between reading and writing – that is, the more our students read the more they experience the written language and its particular conventions and so become familiar with what might be called this peculiar dialect of the English language – then as our students read more they become more comfortable and expert in using the conventions of the written language.
So to the extent that emerging technologies encourage us to read and write, and to the extent that we as teachers employ these new technologies as a 'scene' for our students' writing, these new technologies have the potential to increase the amount of reading and writing students do in their coursework. In a networked learning environment, whether classroom or campus, written discussion can replace or supplement oral discussion. I think here of chat sessions and email and list correspondence, all of which can precede, replace, or continue an oral discussion held in a conventional classroom. There's what is in my view a good use of the new technologies. In a writing course, peer review can take place outside of class in coffee-shops, in dormitories, or on-line. The convenience of email makes it likely that, given the opportunity, many students will choose to read and respond to their peers' writing on-line, as opposed to face to face. In this case again, writing has replaced speech, a gain for WAC. On the non-academic side of student life, to the extent that email replaces the telephone, that's a gain for writing over speech – even a return to the epistolary correspondences of old. I recognize that the language of email is not always, or even often, simply the written language. And, I know that voice-recognition software is coming along quickly, and that the writing that now happens on-line may soon generally become speech. But, with these qualifications, I hope the point holds.
As a writing teacher, I value the Web as a new 'scene' for students' writing. The Web becomes a place where they can publish easily and cheaply, facing squarely the interesting audience and privacy issues that come with this new writing space. As they compose Web pages, they learn to look at the appearance of their pages as well as at the print-language on the pages, a gain for the graphic elements of writing that are often submerged in our teaching by the mandatory 'typed' page w. standard margins and 12 point Courier. Outside of a writing course students publish projects on the Web – a gain for a project-based curriculum, collaborative writing, and the discovery of 'real' audiences, all, historically, components of the pedagogy I understand as WAC.
Computer technologies help us achieve WAC's goals for student literacy, but they also work against these goals. Here I'm altering/expanding Mike's question a bit – focusing not on problematic uses, but suggesting that WAC should not embrace emerging technologies without, as Cindy Selfe suggests in the subtitle of her new book, "paying attention"(Selfe 1999). For this moment, I want to pay attention to the costs of technology to colleges/universities, and consider the ways in which these institutions attempt to recover the costs. What are the costs of these new technologies? Where do colleges/universities find the money to pay for these technologies? And what are the implications for WAC of the ways in which institutions do recover the costs of technology? For the arguments that follow, I'm drawing with permission on a chapter I've written for a book edited by Jonathan Monroe – one that is based on presentations made at the WAC conference in June 1999 at Cornell.
First, the costs of technology. In an article in a recent Scientific American, W. Wayt Gibbs reports on a number of studies that converge on an estimate: it costs a corporation $13,000/year to own a PC. It is hard to imagine that it should cost an educational institution substantially less: we have the same maintenance and network-service needs as a corporation; our equipment depreciates as fast as theirs; we need to be trained on, or learn, new hardware and software, as systems evolve. I'm guessing that we do spend less, but that we get less too, in terms of down-time and system reliability. Karen Leach and David Smallen quote a 1997 study by the International Data Corporation: "When an educational PC fails, it simply gets taken out of service for several days. A business computer is usually repaired within a matter of hours."
To recover the new costs, colleges and universities have increased their tuitions – at a rate that far exceeds the rate of inflation. The link that I postulate between the costs of technology and tuition is sometimes entirely up-front, as in the case of Wake Forest University, where students are charged $3,000/year for their laptops and the service and maintenance that goes with them (McCollum A27; Young A33). A few institutions require students to bring a computer with them when they come, making the purchase of a computer a de facto entrance requirement and cost. But at most institutions the link between technology and tuition is generally masked. There is, however, a correspondence/concurrence between the introduction of computers into the academic workplace and an increase in tuitions charged by American institutions of postsecondary education. Since 1981, both tuition at, and total expenditures by, colleges/universities have risen in constant dollars, despite flat or declining enrollments (Digest, table 312, p. 326-7; Figure 13; p. 176). The juxtaposition of these data – increases in tuition and charges, and increased per-student institutional expenditures – and in a time frame that coincides with the introduction of technology onto college and university campuses – makes it seem at least likely that institutions are passing along the costs of technology to their 'consumers,' the students, in the form of higher tuition and fee charges. I note as an aside here, that faculty salaries, often blamed for the increased costs of postsecondary education, have during this same period remained flat, or even lost a bit, in constant dollars (Digest, table 234, p. 250).
The increased cost of postsecondary education has reduced access to postsecondary education. I need to note that we are not alone here – that the costs of other tech-heavy services have increased as well: medicine, banking. But WAC programs have been, according to David Russell, "a response to a perceived need for greater access, greater equity"(271). Here at my institution – a state, public university! – students are graduating with increasing debt, now at an average of $15,278. At UMass/Amherst, apparently, the wealthy are encouraged to apply.
And that brings me to my second point: that the costs of technology may have effects on the University which will make it more difficult for WAC programs to prosper. Given steady or declining state support for post-secondary education, computer technology replaces other items in our institutions' budgets. Given that the largest piece of the academic budget is faculty salaries, the costs of technology will most likely be found by squeezing the budget for instructional personnel, either by reducing faculty or by replacing full-time faculty with part-time and adjunct faculty. Since budget-dollars can't be dyed and traced, I can't say absolutely that when you bring in ten computers you cut a faculty line. That is the mantra in corporations: bring in two computers and fire a worker. But in my world, which is that of an English Department in a land-grant state university, technology costs are increasing, and full-time tenured faculties are decreasing. The Final Report of the MLA Committee on Professional Employment suggests that this situation is national. As the Committee notes, "So long as the growth of the full-time professoriat at colleges and universities fails to keep pace with the growth of the student population…the temptation to assign major pedagogical tasks to part-time and adjunct faculty members will remain strong"(Gilbert 5). Since our WAC program depends upon faculty teaching their departmental junior-level writing courses, the success of our WAC program depends on faculty availability to do this teaching. To a greater and greater extent, this WAC teaching is being delegated to TA's, part-timers, and adjuncts.
There is no survey that I know of that would tell us whether the decrease in faculty 'readers' for students' writing is local or whether it is more general. Nor is there a clear, provable connection between reductions in faculty/increases in class size and institutions' expenditures on technology. But another case similar to ours is reported by Gary and Virginia Hardcastle in a book chapter titled "Electronic Communities in Philosophy Classrooms." In this chapter, the authors tell us how at Virginia Tech state-mandated budget-cuts increased the size of their Philosophy courses from 20-30 to 200, changing the format from small-group discussion to lecture. Yet somehow, at the same time, the institution was spending heavily on technology. The institution's Office of Educational Technologies supplied faculty with fast PC's connected to an ethernet backbone; and other campus initiatives "quickly made our students and faculty among the best-wired university populations in the world" (283). The authors do not see a connection between these events – how it has come to pass that the University can't hire teachers (283) but can supply expensive technology. Worse still, in my view, but understandable and predictable, the authors see emerging technologies not as the source of the problem, but as the cure. The problem is the sudden, eight-fold increase in class size. The Hardcastles write, "Our approach to the problem was, and continues to be, extensive use of computer-supported communication (CSC) in our philosophy classes" (283). Even more chilling is the way in which the authors accept and justify the eight-fold increase in student/faculty ratio: "The technological turn fit well with a pedagogical outlook which aimed to free students and faculty from a 'credit for contact' model of instruction, which prizes the raw time teachers and students spend together in the same room"(283). If we eliminate the pejorative raw from their sentence, we have something that is pretty frightening, or should be, to the WAC community: increased student load for faculty, less teacher-time available for each student – and lots of technology and support for that technology.
And today, in our own Campus Chronicle, it seems that our Board of Higher Education thinks it a good idea to provide some 250,000 laptops to our systems' students. I agree---great idea. And I know, too, that for budget-reasons next year Peter Elbow, who has just this month retired from our department, will be replaced for the coming academic year by a one-year lecturer. I'm postulating a cause-effect relationship between these two events which, in my view, add up to a net loss for WAC on our campus. And now I've reached Mike's 2,000 word limit. Looking forward to responses!
Gibbs, W. Wayt. "Taking Computers to Task." Scientific American 276.2 (1997): 82-89.
Gilbert, Sandra M. Final Report of the MLA Committee on Professional Employment. New York: MLA, 1997.
Gilbert, Sandra M. Final Report of the MLA Committee on Professional Employment. New York: MLA, 1997.
Hardcastle, Gary L. and Valerie Gray Hardcastle, "Electronic Communities in Philosophy Classrooms." In Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. Ed. Donna, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young. Urbana IL: NCTE, 1998. 282-295.
Leach, Karen, and David Smallen. "What do Information Technology Support Services Really Cost?" Cause/Effect 21, 2 (1998), 38-45. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/cem9829.html
McCollum, Kelly. "'Ramping Up' to Support 42,000 Student Computers on a Single Campus." Chronicle of Higher Education 20 Mar. 1998: A27
Russell, David. Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1970-1990: A Curricular History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
Selfe, Cynthia L. Technology and literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. Carbondale IL: SIU P. 1999.
Young, Jeffrey E. "Invasion of the Laptops: More Colleges Adopt Mandatory Computing Programs." Chronicle of Higher Education 5 Dec. 1997: A33
– Charles Moran
cmoran@english.umass.edu