100 YEARS OF NEW MEDIA PEDAGOGY

benmccorkle: Jason! How’s it going?

JP: Hey Ben! I’m just chillin’ on my couch at home . . . basking in the excitement of reading old _EJ_ articles (as I do).

benmccorkle: I’m in my living room, listening to the new Gorillaz album on the hi-fi. You know, it’s been years since I’ve used an IRC client, but this still feels really familiar . . .

JP: Hell . . . I didn’t get into online chat until the later days of AIM . . . so this kind of stripped-down Internet Relay Chat is new to me . . .

benmccorkle: You damn dirty Luddite! :D

JP: Always and forever!! Anyway, no music on my end . . . but I can hear kids screaming at the public pool across the street from my condo . . . TEENAGERS! <shakes fist>

benmccorkle: Heh. Enough with the jibber jabber! So in this act, we’re dealing with the period from 1988–1994. What should we talk about first, do you think?

JP: Well, 1988 was a big year in computer writing pedagogy. We noticed a shift from discussions of how individual students could use various software programs to a lot of excitement about how computers could enable students to share writing with each other, with their teachers, and with the wider world. I mean, sure, rudimentary networking capabilities existed before then, but they were mostly used in classrooms just for sharing printers. But in 1988 . . . email, bulletin boards, and other networking tools really begin to take off!

benmccorkle: Yeah, there were some earlier mentions, like Cheryl Blatts talking about using the DIALOG library network service for student research projects (Bleau et al. 1986), but you’re right--1988 is when things *really* start cooking with gas.

JP: I’m thinking of that article by Dan Lake (1988) . . . he was talking to friends who did word processing in the business world and was amazed to learn how easily they could electronically transfer files between home and work. Lake marveled that “writing stored magnetically on disks could be transferred anywhere a phone line existed! If I could learn to move my students’ writing electronically, I could avoid the delays that often obscured the purpose of the writing. I believed that I could provide an environment where my students received a timely response to their ideas . . . from a variety of audiences, not just myself” (83).

benmccorkle: You know, that quote by Lake is typical of many of the articles we identified in this period, in that the focus was really on pedagogical application rather than technological efficiency. I mean, sure, he talks about avoiding delays and the power of phone lines, but the emphasis in this article is more on the idea of expanding audiences for writing.

JP: Yeah, the focus earlier in the eighties was on how word processing software influenced individual students’ writing, but after 1988 we see a new emphasis on how networked computing could enable students to reach audiences beyond the teacher and even beyond the classroom (Lake 1988; Kinkead 1988; Holvig 1989; Selfe 1988; Wresch 1991).

benmccorkle: They saw so much promise back then--I have to say I found it pretty inspiring. For instance, this trope we found where networks not only connect but collapse the vast scale of the world, making it more reachable, more knowable. In 1989, Holvig wrote how “the electronic curriculum shrinks the nation,” and that students can expand their audiences through exchanges that are “cross-cultural, cross-country, or across town” (69). Gail Hawisher (1988)  and William Wresch (1991) also expressed similar sentiments.

JP: Yeah, my favorite one of these moments was when Wresch (1991) gave the example of a teacher, Jeff Golub, who connected his class in Seattle with a class of students in Berlin right when the wall fell: “Morning after morning, the students in West Berlin reported on the destruction of the Wall. Since the news was coming from fellow teens, Golub’s students in Seattle were much more interested in the event itself than they might otherwise have been and were able to involve themselves by asking questions and giving their excited German peers information about how Americans were reacting to the news” (96)

benmccorkle: I’ll bet those students really bonded over their shared love of David Hasselhoff’s musical genius. ;)

JP: And Scorpions’ “Winds of Change” <insert inspirational whistle here>. LOL. But seriously, I think what fascinates me is how in this example email and message boards are being viewed as remediations of TV . . . with their focus on collapsing space and time in a McLuhanesque “global village.”

benmccorkle: I feel like the kinds of cultural myths that Christina Haas identifies in her 1996 book _Writing Technology_ begin to take shape here: this enthusiasm for the potential transformative power of networked computers, especially when it comes to the idea of empowering even younger students to effect real social change.

JP: Oh yeah totally! I keep thinking of how in 1988 Dan Lake argued that email could allow students “write directly to state legislators and receive immediate feedback” (84).

benmccorkle: I’m guessing that those legislators may have been a little more responsive back then than they are today--I’m still waiting on a reply from my state rep, and it’s been weeks!

JP: Yeah, we are lucky if we eventually get a form email back from a politician these days. Anyway, I think it’s important that we be critical of how new technologies are not always as democratizing as they seem, but I also think these exaggerated hopes are part of a broader and important shift to a more social and rhetorical view of writing.

benmccorkle: Absolutely. Process-based writing instruction rarely left the isolated computer lab in the early eighties. When you think about the move to networked writing in its historical context, this is a pretty monumental shift.

JP: For sure. I’m reminded of  the 1988 article by Cindy Selfe in which she critiqued computer classrooms where students worked alone in rows, arguing that our labs and our pedagogies should be designed to “use computers to tie people together, not to separate them” (Selfe 1988). This remains as true now as it was back then.

benmccorkle: I agree, but of course, as inspiring as this message is (and believe me, it is), we occasionally noticed some problematic ways of framing this emerging “global village.” While it is exciting that some students in the United States were able to talk to some students in Berlin during the fall of the wall, such stories of global connection efface the reality that only a very narrow privileged group of students had access to the net in this time period (and internet access remains unequally distributed along lines of race, class, and nation even today).

JP: Agreed. And I was happy to see that Selfe brought up the perennial problem of access inequality in her 1988 article--and Moran did too, way back in 1983. And then there’s an article by Emily Nye (1991) that also raised important questions about how computers were marketed in sexist ways. It was exciting to see how _English Journal_ was not just a space of technological boosterism, but also a space for some nascent but much needed critique of some of the dominant technological progress narratives of the time.

benmccorkle: You know, this seems like part of a larger shift I start to notice during this period: the move from praxis-oriented articles in the early PC era to those that placed greater emphasis on theorizing, critiquing, and relying on evidence-based research. In fact, Gail Hawisher issued this call explicitly in her 1989 article “Computers and Writing: Where’s the Research?”

JP: Yeah, Hawisher was kind of a “downer” in that one. She did a comprehensive review of research on word processing and showed that claims that word processing spurred deep revision were not that well supported empirically, though there was more evidence that word processing helped students reduce the number of “errors” in their papers.

benmccorkle: Yeah, that finding was a bit of a bummer . . . but remember, Hawisher wasn’t in any way suggesting that word processors *should* be used mostly for error correction. Rather, she was pointing out that word processing pedagogies were perhaps not as transformative as they could be, and that we needed more and better research to really figure out how computers could most meaningfully contribute to writing instruction.

JP: Exactly! I love how Hawisher argued that researchers needed to move beyond studying word processing to considering other networked uses of computers. I also liked how she argued that the point of conducting research was ultimately to help teachers reflect about our practice and “take risks in our teaching” (91). Hawisher’s concluding call for research as the path to risk-taking innovation was not really a downer at all . . . it still inspires me today.

benmccorkle: Me too. Of course, Hawisher wasn’t the only one at that time sounding the clarion call to pay more critical attention to how we’re using computers in the classroom. William Costanzo (1988) argued that we weren’t doing enough at that time to think about the computer’s impact on how students acquire, process, and synthesize information. Drawing on research outside of English studies, he wrote, “I venture this far into the language of computer science and cognition because, I think, our profession has not gone far enough to understand the new technology and what it’s doing to our language” (32).

JP: So it seems like there was a definite transition in this period away from anecdotal descriptions of technology pedagogies and towards more deliberate, conscious research on the effects of technologies on student learning.

benmccorkle: That’s a good way to put it. You know, another thing we haven’t talked about yet is the discussions of **desktop publishing** that we saw popping up. Do you see that as in any way connected to the networking conversation or the broader social turn in English pedagogy?

JP: Yeah, definitely . . . I mean the articles about desktop publishing were all about students using computers to reach new audiences beyond the classroom (Gorrell 1993; Irby 1993; Monahan 1989). So, in some ways, the desktop publishing program and the printer were devices that enabled the broader circulation of print texts (not unlike email enabled the circulation of digital texts). 

benmccorkle: Makes sense.

JP: My favorite of these desktop publishing articles was one by Janet Irby (1993) about a summer school class who became more engaged in writing when they all worked together to make a magazine called “Tearing Down the Walls,” which was addressed to an audience of the school board.

benmccorkle: Yeah, that’s a great example of how the computer could be used not only to reach, but to persuade an authentic audience. The exercise of civic power really energized the students because they could experience the actual results of their efforts: “We wanted the Mukilteo School Board to see a different opinion, one voiced by students on real issues” (Irby 1993, 53).

JP: And I love the graphic where the title of the magazine busted through a crumbling wall. It’s Pink Floyd reloaded on a computer screen--Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone!!!

benmccorkle: Shine on, you crazy diamond! :)  With the Nancy Gorrell piece (1993), it’s a similar motivation, only instead of civic engagement, it’s the promise of being an actual, dyed-in-the-wool poet--this class was producing poetry chapbooks on the laser printer. Here, she writes about how all of the design options (font, layout, etc.) actually motivated the students to participate in the project, even if they didn’t envision themselves as computer savvy.

JP: Yeah, I think in Gorell’s essay (1993) we really start to see a multimodal turn happening as she discussed teaching students to consider choices of typography and layout as rhetorical. And I loved that students had the option to leave a copy of their chapbook in the school library.

benmccorkle: Speaking of software more generally, we should probably chat at least a little bit about “electronic mail”--after the boom of word processor talk in the earlier part of the decade, this seems like the next major application that really captured English teachers’ attention . . .

JP: Yeah, I remember being delighted by how Joyce Kinkead (1988) was so enthusiastic about the possibility of email providing real audiences for student writing. I also was charmed by how much she loved getting email from her students: “Although I thought I might resent students’ intruding into my own time after school hours, I find instead that I enjoy our correspondences--that I get to know students better and they know me better, too, a benefit that transfers to our classroom” (Kinkead, 41).

benmccorkle: Making human connections . . . that is salve for the soul, to be sure. The Lake (1989) article also reflected that sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm students had for the glorious new technology of email: “Jenny would log on and look for the message, ‘You Have Mail Waiting,’ hoping that she has a response” from her teacher (74).

JP: Ha! Today, in teaching first-year composition, we often have to explain the importance of checking email to students since it’s now mostly a technology for old people.

benmccorkle: True. I’m also noticing how email was imagined more as a kind of remediation of the telephone (in addition to postal mail of course). Here’s Holvig in 1989, explaining the value of email writing exchanges: “Kids are used to having it ‘now.’ With our online classroom, my kids get it as quickly as a phone call and a conversation. Instead of ‘talking,’ we write and read. We hear the ‘voices’ in the words coming across our screen from one classroom somewhere else into our own” (70).

JP: Yeah, that’s another commonplace we keep tracking from radio to TV and now to computer . . . the kids have been impatient with the *speed* of print media for quite a long time it seems. And today, the youth are impatient with email since it’s so much slower than texting. TEENAGERS!

benmccorkle: <Shakes fist in solidarity> But, seriously . . . I think it’s important that we remember how much networked forms of writing (email, bulletin boards, and all the rest) differed in their affordances from stand-alone word processing programs. Teachers during this time period were right that we need to focus first and foremost on how computers can help us build and strengthen human connections.

JP: Indeed. But, of course, we also need to think critically about the labor politics of teachers being expected to always be online--maintaining some work-life balance is crucial for teachers to sustain innovative pedagogies.

benmccorkle: Yep, the deluge of email is still a concern for us today. Email definitely takes up a different cognitive load than other forms of CMC. I know, for example, chatting in IRC like this carries with it an interesting set of affordances and constraints. The rapid pace of the chat, the pressure to come up with witty or poignant observations, figuring out how to properly cut and paste quotations, etc.

JP: Yeah, it’s freaking me way out that I can’t see what you are writing as you are writing it . . . it’s such a different form of collaborative writing than our usual mixing it up in Google Docs. I’m enjoying chatting with you this way, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not totally looking forward to the moment when we put this transcript in Google Drive and edit the hell out of it.

benmccorkle: Yeah, the thing about IRC is that you can’t ever look back--is always moving forward. Linearly. Inexorably . . .

JP: I find myself longing for the recursive affordances of the word processor! Of course, IRC was probably the most linear form of networked writing in this time period. We can’t forget that 1988 is also when highly nonlinear interactive fictions start to make their way into _EJ_.

benmccorkle: That’s right. We found a handful of articles that touched on interactive fiction during this period . . . Aside from the focus on the genre itself, one thing that jumps out at me is that this is a moment when the computer is promoted as a *reading* device. That’s kinda new.

JP: Yeah, I’m thinking of that study by Lancy and Hayes (1998) that showed that students who had little interest in traditional print literacy would enthusiastically spend hours playing through interactive fictions that required a ton of reading!

benmccorkle: Yep. That article talked about an interactive novel called _Seastalker_, and students seemed highly engaged, up until they hit impasses that kept them from moving the narrative forward (which the instructors then helped them surmount). In the end, Lancy and Hayes concluded, “It appears from our exploratory study that students with no more than average interest in reading will spend a great amount of time engaged in interactive fiction that requires quite a lot of reading if they are successful at the quest. We view this as having important implications for encouraging students to read independently” (45).

JP: Yes, I remember how Lancy and Hayes talked so extensively about the importance of helping students learn to navigate the interactive fictions . . . usability was a huge issue with these programs since students had to play through them by using a limited vocabulary of text commands. So, in that sense, we can see how teaching interactive fiction moved beyond reading instruction to also teaching students how to *write* in a procedural way.

benmccorkle: That’s a crucial point. We’ve already talked about Costanzo, but he was interested in interactive fiction and gaming as well (he specifically mentions interactive versions of _Fahrenheit 451_, _Treasure Island_, and _Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_). He made this very point himself: “Written language was becoming an instrument for exploration, a tool for manipulating what was on the screen. The television tube was no longer just a one-way street” (29).

JP: It’s so cool here to see how interactive fiction was imagined as a kind of remediation of television over which the viewer now had more control. But, I’m also starting to wonder about how this interactive fiction turn was really a kind of continuation of the instructional software movement? In both cases, we saw the solitary student on a stand-alone computer interacting with a program in a highly structured, if complexly branching, way.

benmccorkle: I was thinking earlier about what makes this era--which stretches from the late eighties until just before the World Wide Web really took off in the mid-nineties--unique. I think it has to do with the “big pieces” of computer technology that have yet to join together. On the one hand, you have this interest in networking, and along with that very text-heavy applications like email, BBSs, IRC clients, and so on. On the other hand, you get applications that promote interactivity, disrupt textual linearity, and combine media elements. It takes a few years before we start to bring those elements together in the same space, and where multiple people could experience it together . . .

JP: Dude, that’s profound! And I can’t wait until we get to write about the time period when networked multimedia really gets going. But, I’m also struck by how much _EJ_ authors were looking forward to that future already. Here’s Gary Greist in 1992: “Our role as English teachers seems to have been expanded and ‘decentered’ at the same time, a situation that is quite similar to the postmodern fate of the author. Because of this, we need to base our practices not only on the book of traditional literacy but also on the one that we hardly recognize because its capabilities are combined with video, audio, and graphics and its text is linked by multiple paths” (18).

benmccorkle: Griest seems influenced by many of the hypertextual theorists and authors of that time--people like Jay Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop, and George Landow, among others. They tied the underlying philosophy of hypertextual writing to the central tenets of postmodern theory, invoking figures like Barthes, Foucault, Jameson, etc. This is perhaps one of those moments where there was a cultural desire for new forms of communication to emerge--and folks like Griest, Costanzo, and others helped push it along from within the English classroom.

JP: Yes! Another example of why _EJ_ deserves a place in histories of digital humanities! Teachers in the journal were asking deep questions about how digital media were challenging our notions of reading and writing and teaching. And some, like Lancy and Hanley (1988), were even starting to imagine how students might work to compose their own interactive fictions!

benmccorkle: They were certainly promoting new ways of thinking about reading, writing, textuality, and even the inner workings of the mind itself. The work being done with interactive fiction, along with Griest’s interest in HyperCard, certainly fostered hypertextual ways of thinking among the students. But speaking of digital humanities (particularly the field’s penchant for data-wrangling), we also have the interesting case of Mary Deming and Marie Valeri-Gold (1990), who were busy fostering *database* thinking in their students.

JP: Yeah, that was a fascinating one. At first, I kind of giggled when they wrote about having students construct their own “databases” out of index cards. But, then I realized how cool it actually was. Instead of just teaching students how to use electronic databases, they were trying to teach students how to construct them--how to compose a rudimentary nonlinear database that made an argument based on what was included and how it was organized.

benmccorkle: They were definitely thinking critically about the assignment design, and the student outcomes they were aiming for, which tied into complex, iterative ways of processing and classifying information. They claimed, “As students are compiling these lists [of different ways to access the cards], they are gradually being introduced to a hierarchy of thinking skills. Students not only list items but also synthesize, analyze, and apply the data they are manipulating. Students, too, create questions and hypotheses about their data and check their lists to confirm their predictions” (Deming and Valeri-Gold 1990, 70).

JP: Yeah, I like how Deming and Valeri-Gold recognized that students might better be able to understand the complex workings of emerging electronic databases if they had some experience making a database themselves. And, instead of giving up on the “making” part of the project due to lack of tech access, they hacked the index card to turn it into something much cooler than I ever thought it could be!

benmccorkle: It sure beats writing out your five-paragraph essay outline on index cards like I had to do in seventh grade! But that hacker ethos reminds me that English teachers have been doing this sort of thing--repurposing “craft” materials in order to replicate the effects of specialized, and sometimes expensive technology--throughout our _EJ_ corpus. I mean, does the name ***Roy McCullogh*** ring a bell?!

JP: HA! Of course! How could I forget Mildred Campbell’s broomstick microphone, and all the care she took “that the gongster’s hands be hygienically protected” (Campbell 1937, 754). . . . LOL! But seriously, I love how we have found this theme of English teachers hacking everyday objects to enable media production pedagogy recurring in the computer era. I’d note too that this hacking of index cards was occurring relatively early in the development of electronic databases . . . what most of us are doing with databases now in writing classes these days is actually a lot more boring.

benmccorkle: True dat(a) . . .

JP: <groans>

benmccorkle: This is part of the consistent ebb and flow we notice: new tech = excitement and innovation. Old tech = genres and forms ossify, excitement dies down, and innovation tends to fade as we go back to teaching good ol’ skills.

JP: It’s sad to watch . . . especially since we need more innovative ways of teaching information literacy now more than ever!

benmccorkle: Agreed. Do you think this trend of media ossifying as they get older helps explain why we didn’t find a *single* computer-based article in the year 1994?

JP: Yeah . . . 1994 was a kind of weird outlier year (though it had some articles about non-computer media). My sense is that interest in computers was starting to wane as they began to feel less new and revolutionary. But, the thing with computers is that every few years some new computing development happens and people get all jazzed again. We’ll see that happen in 1995 . . . but that’s a topic for another day.

benmccorkle: Definitely. . . . So, I have a chicken-egg question incubating. Do you think during this period that pedagogy is more the driving force behind technology adoption, or is technology instead giving shape to how we’re thinking about teaching?

JP: Oh that’s always the question, isn’t it? It’s really quite fascinating that the rise of computer networking technologies coincided with a social/critical turn in composition and K-12 literacy studies. In these articles, we saw teachers pointing to how new technologies make writing more social, but we also saw them citing theorists who were making similar points about writing beyond the computer as well.

benmccorkle: Like Nancy Gorrell (1993) turning to Susan Miller and Patricia Bizzell to talk about the social value of her poetry publication project, for instance . . .

JP: Exactly . . . I think what we keep finding is that technologies and pedagogical theories are mutually constitutive . . . there are so many different kinds of chickens laying so many different kinds of eggs that you can never pinpoint a single origin for any particular shift. You’ve been to the massive chicken show at the Ohio State Fair. You know what I’m talking about!

benmccorkle: Indeed, I do! Let’s leave it at that for this segment, Jason. What do you think we should chat about next time, though?

JP: Well, I guess we need to start talking about the next act and what we’re gonna do with it. And start playing in the Wayback Machine. And start remembering the wonder of GeoCities! :-)

benmccorkle: Okay, sounds like a plan! I’ll do that too. Let’s chat again soon, k?

JP: ttyl

benmccorkle: :P