Technology surrounds us, even in university English departments, organizations not always known for innovation. More and more English departments are going on-line, constructing World Wide Web pages, serving as host sites for listserv discussion groups, and equipping and staffing electronic or networked classrooms. It only takes a quick look at the advertisements for composition positions in the MLA Joblist or the Chronicle of Higher Education to confirm this inexorable movement towards electronic learning and teaching in our field. Many job advertisements for composition list a requirement for such areas of expertise as computer-assisted writing, classroom technology, CAI (Computer-Aided Instruction), instructional technology, computer-mediated learning and other designations of technological proficiency. In order to compete on the job market, new graduates feel pressure to learn computer-assisted instructional methods and to be able to talk about them with regard to the teaching of writing. Such pressure is symptomatic of what we all feel as teachers of writing and administrators of writing programs. This essay is an attempt to survey these pressures to technologize and a call for some much needed critical thinking about what we are doing when we implement technological changes to our teaching and our writing programs.

As I survey the increasingly technological landscape in English and composition studies, I am both excited and nervous about the prospects. I am no Luddite and there is a side of me that is enamored of what technology can do. I understand the drive towards technology, with departments feeling behind the curve if they are not at least making initial forays into computerized teaching. After all, the reasoning goes, the technology exists so we are remiss if we are not using it. Therefore, as teachers and administrators, we often participate, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the forces that shape departments' and individuals' efforts to implement instructional technologies. We become convinced by what Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe have called the rhetoric of technology that computers will be the technological savior of writing instruction, alleviating all the problems that now exist in the writing classroom.

Moreover, it seems that English departments, marginalized as they are within many institutions, attempt to gain legitimacy through the use of instructional technology by placing themselves at the center of (or at least not outside) the information/computer revolution. Pressure to technologize instruction may be both internal and external; departments perceive the respect afforded to other departments within their own university and to English departments elsewhere that are already online, while upper level university administrators expect to see full use of the latest technology. Either way, the pressure is put on the English department and, in turn, on its composition faculty to incorporate technological advances into the classroom.

Several years ago, as a graduate student in composition, I felt this pressure, both in terms of the coming networked classroom at my institution and in terms of the job market I was soon to face. Technology seemed to be a means for individuals to gain power, especially graduate students and instructors, who are even further marginalized within university culture. Knowledge of technology and its instructional uses thus becomes a kind of intellectual currency, even, or perhaps even especially, within the humanities; that currency translates into respect and, ultimately, jobs. Such thinking is understandable within a cultural climate in which technological advances are seemingly the central concern. Universities are increasingly geared towards the sciences, both because of the research dollars that they bring in and because of the media attention they are able to generate for their institutions. More insidious is J. Hillis Miller's suggestion in the 1996 issue of Profession that "the shift from state and federal funding to transnational corporate funding is altering the research university and governance more radically than people yet realize," leaving the humanities little choice but to comply with the new technological order (7). In order to regain or maintain legitimacy, respect, and power within institutional contexts, then, it is not surprising that English departments are focusing on instructional technologies in much the same way that composition has often focused on scientific research methodologies. Part of what is happening, then, might be called science envy-- English departments and their individual members see the relative positions of science departments within the university and attempt to co-opt technological instructional methods in order to effect an increase in status. Technology is thus seductive in what it promises, both to departments and to individuals.

In the rush to equip computer classrooms and implement the latest technological advances in instruction, there is sometimes little thought to the pedagogical theory that underpins these classrooms and teaching practices. Both departments and individual teachers are guilty of such lack of planning and theorizing. Sound pedagogy, after all, must involve theory and practice that work in dialectic, continually questioning and informing one another in a critical praxis. It is no less important that such a relationship between theory and practice inform teaching with technology. Carolyn Handa writes, in "Politics, Ideology, and the Strange, Slow Death of the Isolated Composer or Why We Need Community in the Writing Classroom,"

We must remember, then, that in the excitement of setting up computer labs and classrooms, we could become mesmerized by the technology to the point where we forget our pedagogical goals, forget that theory applies in our computer classrooms just as much if not more than in a standard classroom; and even more crucial, that we fail to consider the politics and social webs surrounding our situations as we use the technology and adapt software. (174)

Handa explicitly calls for theorizing a pedagogy of computers and composition within particular institutional contexts. The use of technology, however, does not produce any specific or attendant pedagogy. Rather, as Mary J. Flores notes in another article in the same 1990 collection, "It is possible to use computers to preserve and strengthen the institutional status quo, or to use the technology as a means of change -- in our approaches to teaching, learning, authority, power, and knowledge" (107).

The use of technology is thus a product of context and within specific contexts, its use is never neutral. As Freire writes, "science and technology cannot escape the political and ideological implications with which they are conceived and with which they are used" (113). There must therefore be a theory underpinning the connection between technology and pedagogy and that theory must take into account the circumstances of each institution, as well as the ongoing dynamics of each class as it evolves throughout the semester.

In quoting Flores, I do not want to appear to support the binaristic argument that computers will be used either as tools for domination or as tools for liberation. Such an argument is simply a version of the computers-as-savior versus computers-as-slaver debate in which computers are either a panacea for all of society's ills or a force that undermines social relationships. The effects occur as a result of their use, which may have positive, negative, or mixed results for those involved. In other words, within any given situation, the results of using computers in teaching will probably yield mixed outcomes, resulting in complex power relations, questions of authority, and knowledge acquisition which cannot be classified as simply good or bad, positive or negative. It is necessary to interrogate our use of computers by continually questioning what we are doing as we implement technological innovations into our pedagogy.

But let me step back a moment. My decision to incorporate technology into the classroom was not simply a result of pressures I felt within the academy. It was also a result of societal pressure because technology surrounds us, enveloping our everyday lives in an omnipresent sense of progress. Our lives, we are told, are better because of technology, especially because of computer technology; it's simple to assume, then, that my teaching life would also be easier because computers would allow me to more easily reach my pedagogical goals. But the rhetoric of technology can create expectations about outcomes that cannot possibly be fulfilled. Further, an atheoretical focus on the practical benefits of technology obscures our vision of the larger picture. As Cynthia Selfe argued in 1990,

[an] atheoretical perspective . . . not only constrains our current educational uses of computers, but also seriously limits our vision of what might be accomplished with computer technology in a broader social, cultural, or educational context. Until we examine the impact of computer technology on language and society from a theoretical perspective, we will continue, myopically and unsystematically, to define the isolated pieces of the puzzle in our separate classrooms and discrete research studies. Until we share some theoretical vision of this topic, we will never glimpse the larger social or educational picture that could give our everyday classroom efforts direction and meaning. (119)

Clearly, Selfe saw the consequences of ignoring a theoretical perspective in favor of a purely practical orientation, a concern that is just as relevant some ten years later. On the other hand, she is not arguing for theory divorced of context. Instead, Selfe argues that theory and practice must inform one another and that the use of existing theoretical frameworks will help compositionists to understand technology's potential in literacy education.

Selfe begins to articulate her own response to this important challenge by using the lens of feminist theory to examine computers and writing instruction. She chooses feminist theory because it "allows us to look critically at the context of what we now know, of how we currently use and see computers, in order to rethink the relationship between techno/power and literacy and then reconstruct the role computers could play in our literacy efforts" (121). She thus turns her attention from explicit attention to hardware, software, and descriptive analysis to a larger theoretical discussion which attempts to place computers within a larger social, educational, and cultural context, while at the same time acknowledging and examining local contexts.

Theorizing and problematizing technology at all stages of its implementation and use are necessary and essential activities to the continued vitality of computers and writing pedagogy. Questioning and theorizing in relation to practice guard against complacency and ensure opinions and interpretations, whether about pedagogy or about technology, do not become orthodoxy. Here I want to draw on Lisa Gerrard's words in "Computers and Composition: Rethinking Our Values." She writes,

Theory helps us understand what we're doing. It provides us with questions, goals, a vocabulary for talking about our work, strategies for revising it, and a common frame of reference for sharing it with one another. But theory has a reciprocal relationship with practice and should be valued alongside it, not above it. Theory grows out of what we do in the classroom and conditions what we bring back to the classroom. Without practice, it wouldn't exist. (31)

To put it simply, Gerrard was calling for praxis, for a dialogically informing relationship between theory and practice in which each is indispensable to the other.

As writing teachers, we have to pay critical and self-reflective attention to technology because it provides one of the de facto contexts of our professional lives. As Stanley Aronowitz writes, ". . . just as it is futile to mourn the passing of the horse and carriage, there are really no alternatives to computer and electronic mediations of everyday life. Technology has become the new form of life; the only issue is how to harness it . . ." (121). Though technology sets many of the boundaries for our pedagogical work within institutions of higher education, it is nonetheless both possible and necessary for us to theorize how best to operate within those boundaries. This knowledge, coupled with an awareness of technology's seductive power and tendency to obscure one's pedagogical vision, is essential as we think about the place of technology within the teaching of writing.

The explosion of technological innovations poses a number of questions involving the ways in which we, both as departments and as individual teachers, conceive our uses of the World Wide Web, Internet, Usenet, and electronic mail, as well as networked classrooms equipped with interactive software such as Daedalus. Such critical questioning is an attempt to locate our actions and relationship to technology within specific institutional contexts by projecting the possible future outcomes of our actions, examining what has structured our current situations, and re-examining what actually happened as a result of our technological actions. I have attempted to show some of the pressures and movements within English and Composition studies that have combined to locate the current and ongoing implementation of computer technology within the field of writing pedagogy. Of course these are not the only factors and each institution, each department, and each teacher will need to perform a more specific archaeology of location, taking into account both the national trends I have outlined and the specific contexts within which each resides. Having done so, we need to problematize our uses of technology, asking ourselves specific, contextual questions within a theorized pedagogical framework that informs and is informed by practice. Why do we want to implement this specific technology within our teaching? What outcomes do we expect? Who is being served by this technology? Who is authorized to speak? How is information exchanged? What are the power relations that are constituted by this technology? In what ways does this technology reproduce and/or resist existing conditions of oppression, hegemony, and silence? In what ways does it open up or close off the possibility for dialogue? Is there a space for critical thinking about the technology itself? Is there a space for students to position themselves in relation to this technology? In what ways does the technology help students to become reflective language practitioners? In what ways can we as teachers be self-reflective about uses of technology in the classroom? In essence, then, it is necessary to ask questions that are both critical and pragmatic.

By pragmatic, I refer not to the bottom line, but to "a triadic conception of the way beliefs and actions connect; action based on belief continuously tested by experience and in a spirit of readiness and perpetual inquiry" (Roskelly and Ronald 87). Being critical and pragmatic means becoming self-reflective about our histories, locations, and discourse practices, including the discourse of technology; it means critically questioning our circumstances and the ways in which we are situated in and by discourse. It means attending to specific contexts, whether in individual institutions or in individual classes, and being willing to engage in departmental or university-wide dialogue about the use of computers in the teaching of writing. It means continually questioning the reasons for our actions, the possible outcomes that might result from them, and the actual results as they happen. It means attending to both theory and practice, combining them into a mutually informing praxis that is always self-reflective and always questioning of itself.

The pressure to technologize has put English departments in general and compositionists in particular under a great deal of pressure to integrate these new instructional technologies into their writing curricula. Unfortunately, there is seldom the time or the expertise available to plan for the ways in which computer technology will fit into the pedagogical structure of the curriculum as a whole. Instead, what often happens is that computers are purchased and installed prior to any departmental conversation about how they will be used in the classroom and what pedagogical goals and outcomes they will support. Or worse, there is no departmental dialogue of any kind about the new equipment and each individual teacher is left to grapple with the technology on his or her own. Given the sheer amount of technical information that needs to be learned about any new technology and the incredible rate of innovation in both hardware and software design, it is almost overwhelming just to keep abreast of its possible classroom uses, let alone to theorize those uses. It's easy, then, for the individual teacher to feel lost in a sea of technology--the head is just enough above water not to drown, but never enough to think about how to build a boat. Still, a pragmatic and critical approach to the questioning of technology is absolutely essential if one is not eventually to succumb to the waters, either letting one's teaching fall into the service of technology or abandoning technology completely. As individual teachers, it is necessary to cast a critical eye to what we are doing when we use computers and other technology in the writing classroom. Departments, however, can facilitate such individual theorizing by doing some initial planning before the implementation of technology, asking, at the curricular level, some of the same questions that individual teachers need to ask about the pedagogical reasons for the introduction of computer technology into the classroom.

There is no easy solution to uncovering and understanding the multilayered grammar of technology and schooling. It is therefore important that teachers and administrators theorize and question the pedagogical uses of technology at all stages of the process. As Chris Anson writes, "Our key roles--as those who create opportunities and contexts for students to write and who provide expert, principled responses to that writing must change in the present communications and information revolution. But we cannot let the revolution sweep over us. We need to guide it, resisting its economic allure in cases where is weakens the principles of our teaching" (275). Theorizing the use of instructional technology, therefore, is an instrumental and ongoing process in which the end of one class becomes the starting point for another round of questioning and thinking. Questioning technology involves not only the how, but, more importantly, the why.?

Anson, Chris. "Distant Voices: Teaching Writing in a Culture of Technology." College English 61.3 (January 1999): 261-80.

Aronowitz, Stanley. "Looking Out: The Impact of Computers on the Lives of Professionals." Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers. Ed. Myron C. Tuman. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. 119-37.

Flores, Mary J. "Computer Conferencing: Composing a Feminist Community of Writers." Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. 106-17.

Freire, Paulo. Letters to Cristina. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Gerrard, Lisa. "Computers and Composition: Rethinking Our Values." Computers and Composition 10.2 (April 1993): 23-34.

Handa, Carolyn. "Politics, Ideology, and the Strange, Slow Death of the Isolated Composer or Why We Need Community in the Writing Classroom." Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. 160-84.

Hawisher, Gail and Cynthia Selfe. "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class." College Composition and Communication 42 (1991): 55-65.

Miller, J. Hillis. "Literary Study in the Transnational Uni- versity." Profession 1996: 6-14.

Roskelly, Hephzibah and Kate Ronald. Reason to Believe: Romanticism, Pragmatism, and the Teaching of Writing. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1998.

Selfe, Cynthia. "Technology in the English Classroom: Computers Through the Lens of Feminist Pedagogy." Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. 118-39.