Uncovering History in the Interface: Fostering Student Engagement with Writing Technologies through Historically-Situated Writing Practices

Emily LeggPurdue UniversityTwitter: @emleggEmail: legge@purdue.edu

Present

Future

Past

We want students to think about the mediums they are writing in and how the rhetorical situations shift and their writing changes as they are asked both investigate and write in multiple mediums whether it is your traditional paper, video, podcast, brochure, infograph, website, etc.

My goal is to help students see the tools they are using and understand how these tools become an inherent part of their composition process especially since most of the time, when I ask, students describe writing as typing on the computer and yet the computer remains the invisible interface they rely upon.

Producers & Participants

Scholars & Pedagogues

By having students create multimodal assignments that ask them to research older writing technologies (including the invention of writing itself), to practice using these historical writing tools, and to explore how that technology is both situated in history and still impacts and influences the ways we compose, I have found that students learn to engage critically with their own technologies and see these tools as mediums and interfaces rather than viewing them as impersonal and invisible forces on their own composition.

HAPPY THEORY LAND

CONCRETE EXAMPLES

Andrea Lunsford:

Writing: A technology for creating conceptual frameworks and creating, sustaining, and performing lines of thought within those frameworks, drawing from and expanding on existing conventions and genres, utilizing signs and symbols, incorporating materials drawn from multiple sources, and taking advantage of the resources of a full range of media. (Lunsford, Writing, Technologies, and the Fifth Canon”)

Walter Ong:

“Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind. Writing is simply a thing, something to be manipulated, something inhuman, artificial, a manufactured product” (Ong, “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought”)

Andrew Feenberg:

Instrumental View: Technologies as neutral tools

Substantive View: Technology restructures and controls the entire world

Critical Theory View: Acknowledge the effects of technologies without complete surrender to technologies (Feenberg, Transforming Technology)

tl;drWriting is more than just writing and the tools we write with are more than just tools.

Excerpt: “Writing causes the voice of the author to always be heard. Even after the author’s death, people will continue to read the words in books and scriptures. The invention of cuneiform and writing enabled humanity to create a force greater than life.

[…] 

All things in the modern world are written. Without the invention of writing by the Mesopotamians, the system of writing used today may not exist at all. Although oral means of information transportation is adequate for certain circumstances, writing is the root of all information. Information that is written down cannot be forgotten or skewed by the poor memory of the human mind. History is written by those of the past. The legacy of a generation can be found in writing mediums of all kinds: journals, newspapers, memoirs, books, or magazines. Writing makes the modern world what it was, what it is being, and what it will become.”

Reflection:

“From there I became so easily involved in my paper that even the time passing by was expressed in shorthand. Once the material was gathered and gathered into a paper, the assignment reached its pinnacle of fun, my favorite part of the entire process. We were given the task of presenting the information in the smallest, most compressed format we possibly could and we were to put that information into an eye-catching poster that could be used to define the entire project. I build graphical displays every day and I'm a Computer Graphics Technology major for a reason: I simply love it. I can sit there and create all day and if the assignment has the freedom of x, y, and maybe even z coordinates that I define myself then I can go to town like a stenographer in a frenzied courtroom. The words on paper became liberated points of data that I could turn into a flow of information more comprehensive than a full page of text; all that was required was time.”

Thank you!

Emily LeggPurdue UniversityTwitter: @emleggEmail: legge@purdue.edu