Here is the challenge to our discipline: the society as a whole, and education in particular, have committed to a new apparatus. We look to our theories for the design of the experiments, to create practices for all the needs of storage and retrieval of an information society. The pressure to act comes from the society and is ignored at our own risk. Our choice is business as usual (the computer as an extremely efficient way to do the work of literacy, just as the alphabet was an extremely efficient way to memorize an epic). Alternatively, if poststructuralism is incapable of generating effective new practices, it will be consigned to the archives of history along with many other fads and fashions.

Gregory Ulmer, "Foreword/Forward (Into Electracy)"

It's a full time job (and more) not only to keep pace with the inevitable changes in hardware and software, but also to stay current with the exponentially increasing body of theoretical and critical literature on everything cyber, virtual, hyper, and digital, and most importantly of all, to find ways in which to implement the technology so as to make a difference in my classroom and my scholarship.

Matthew Kirschenbaum, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Ulmer and Kirschenbaum highlight one of the key problematics that changes in rhetoric/literacy foreground: that of pedagogy. Far from making teaching (or teaching writing) an easier matter, technology makes it more difficult. The more complex a context becomes, the more difficult it is to pre-figure simple teaching exercises that produce predetermined results (as if this were possible before computers were introduced into the teaching scene). Teaching with technology also becomes more complex as the audience changes. Teaching strategies that work for graduate students may not work as well for freshman, and may not work at all for high school or junior high students. Consequently, this course aims to open a space for examining some historical and theoretical background to these issues, and asks its students who are interested in pedagogical concerns to look at their own teaching contexts and methods in the light of these issues and to begin (re)constructing pedagogical strategies that might affect particular students positively—if the goal is newer literacies, newer forms of reading and writing.

Why Computers and Writing?

  Money is being poured into technology and computers at all levels of schooling: it is coming to our schools, so we need to prepare for it.

  Students will be using computers to write and do research, even if we aren't teaching in a computer classroom: therefore, we need to be prepared to help them work in these contexts.