Loyola's Progress Report - Monday, April 7, 2008

Loyola Bird/English 538 Progress Report

Question: How does having computers in the classroom help students develop writing skills?

Pandey, Iswari P. "Literate lives across the digital divide." Computers and Composition. Vol. 23 (2006): 246-257.

Context: Pandey presents a literacy narrative which reflect his home country of Nepal’s political, cultural, and linguistic "milieus" which contributed to his own literacy (to include digital literacy) acquisition. Pandey explains how crucial factors such as social status, dollars, state polity, and opposition initially inhibited this same acquisition.

Summary: Pandey argues that it is important for teachers to consider the "politics of culture" (247) in order to better understand a student’s writing practices, acquired literacies (linguistic and technological). Pandey describes Nepal’s important political history beginning in the early 1900's, when the country was ruled by Rana oligarchs. He intertwines the sensitive political climate into the telling of his own family’s literacy acquisition. His first language was Sanskrit. Pandey provides statistics of 1971 census which reports that his father was one of 23.6% adult male literates out of 11.5 million people. In 1978, he transferred to a public school to learn English. Pandey states that entering public school to learn "this foreign language would lay the foundation for my digital literacy and global citizenship" (249). Heading toward the 80's, Nepal is still facing heavy state control which includes the implementation of a "centralized curriculum" meant to continue a status quo ideology. The opposition included protest literature which was being promoted outside of the classroom. Pandey’s initial digital literacy learning consisted of basic skills such as "running spell checkers; moving, replacing, or deleting words and blocks of text on the screen; and slowly typing up short texts and page-making" (250). The 1990's brings a new democratic movement which requires the need for computer use, but "cultural capital" played a big part in purchasing computers and finding people who could properly operate them. Pandey expresses that digital literacy share similar features of "conventional literacy learning: It is highly contextualized, develops in nonacademic settings and is often reappropriated for divergent uses and like technological literacy, is often misconceived as a set of discrete, functional skills separate from the social contexts and cultures in which they are embedded" (253). This further leads to the idea of "cultural ecology" in which electronic technology gets embedded in "many layers of socio-cultural, economic, and similar aspects of local and global politics" (253). This leads us to Pandey’s important point: as individuals struggle to acquire various literacies taking into account the "milieus" and factors that contribute to this, social and cultural practices affect future literacy acquisition and practice in digital technology.

Evaluation: I think it is a given for any person in the world that the consideration of social, political, and cultural practices will affect one’s acquisition of literacy. Pandey’s experience consists of a dramatic version as his home country ideologies affect much in its people’s lives to include what is learned and how it is learned. Sharing this experience is crucial to understanding how the use of computers provides a country’s opposition to modernity, with many of its inhabitants struggling to overcome the illiteracy which is a result of this opposition. Understanding Pandey’s uses of the computer helps to gain a better understanding of how computers can work for or against us. In addition, Pandey is able to incorporate the sensitive, yet rigid nature of his country’s political structure into a narrative which presents his family’s literacy backgrounds, while still incorporating contributions of well-known scholars such as Deborah Brandt and Cynthia Selfe, into his work.


Loyola Bird/English 538 Progress Report

Question: How does having computers in the classroom help students develop writing skills?

Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe. "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class." College Composition and Communication. Vol. 42 No. 1 (1991): 55-65.

Context: Through Hawisher’s and Selfe’s roles as editors for the journal, Computers and Composition, they decide to study computer based classes to find out why when teachers were asked the questions, "Do you prefer teaching with traditional methods or with computers? Why?", how most teachers don’t stop to consider the negative aspects of using computers in the classroom.

Summary: Hawisher and Selfe argue that teachers must critically examine not only the positive benefits associated with using computers in the classroom, but also address the negatives in order to avoid "rigid authority structures." After receiving thousands of potential submissions on computer use in the classroom for the journal they edit, they became tired of hearing the same old stories of how computers help students and teachers in the classroom. For further study, they examined the use of electronic bulletin boards/conferences. Teacher claims presented focused on how using computers improved writing skills for students. For example, one teacher claimed that first year students (randomly thrown together) for a pilot project in using an electronic conference for writing instruction, brought instructors and students closer together. Students scheduled meetings in the library, came early, stayed late, made plans for the following semester, and exchanged addresses. All of this brought about a closer community in a very large university. More interestingly, another teacher claimed that once people have computer access, status and power/prestige are "communicated neither contextually...nor dynamically..." (57). Thus, these types of people have less influence, allowing group members to participate more freely. Hawisher and Selfe do admit their studies were limited, but felt that their observations concluded that in most cases, using computers in the classroom brought about "sharing" in the classroom, but the effects of this sharing resulted in a more teacher-centered, teacher dominated environment. So, instead of just talking about how computers work for our classrooms, we "must begin to identify the ways in which technology can fail us, by acknowledging high costs of software/hardware, recognizing that computers can "support instruction that is repressive, and "computers can be used to "dampen creativity, writing, intellectual exchanges, rather than to encourage them" (61). Lastly, the authors stress becoming and staying aware of the discrepancies in constructing a "complete image" of how computers can be used positively and negatively.

Evaluation: I think in regard to my own research it was necessary to explore what these authors had to say about the "negatives" associated with computer use and our students. Becoming more aware of these negatives, will help to critically discern what positives will work for our students. I think that this article could have been more extensive, and the authors’ do admit that their studies were limited. I agree. Providing more results and information on this subject would help establish their observations and suggestions.