Personalizing Technology

The human touch, the personal, the interaction between teacher and student, these are all challenged when we use technology in the classroom setting.  We have come to see the interfaces between ourselves and our machines, and our writing and our reader, as potential barriers to communication; they are membranes obscuring understanding with rising levels of complexity.  Just the act of writing is so much more difficult than speech.  Walter Ong, in The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction, explains how difficult transacting communication we normally do with ease, "Except for a small corps of highly trained writers, most persons could get into written form few if any of the complicated and nuanced meanings they regularly convey orally."  Spoken to written word is just one obscuring membrane, familiarity and comfort level with technology, structural limitations for each medium, habits of use, and personal detachment in the writing lab are others.  I've taken several classes in computer labs, composition and other.  Sitting behind the monitor, I often felt a sense of distance from the teacher and from the other students.   It reminded me of courses I have taken in sculpture where we worked alone and the professor moved from station to station.  Had I been uncomfortable or unfamiliar with computers I might feel even more lost, especially if the teacher is a slave to his own work station.  The separation between student and teacher, student and student, student and technology hinders learning, at least my conception of it.   I see the ability to bridge that divide as a strength of the technology autobiography.

The TA (technology autobiography) has the potential to put computer in a subordinate role to both the teacher and the student because of many characteristics.  The TA is diagnostic, giving the teacher an idea of the familiarity, comfort level, and proficiency of each student.  This allows the teacher to take steps that ensure the student disadvantaged by inexperience, or a lack of opportunity to use computers receives the technical remediation needed.  Sharing personal stories might also make students aware of their own level of technological "privilege." The TA is constructive because the writing process helps the student gain perspective into the subject and teaching environment by using thinking both critical and personal.  The TA is flexible, it can be used for beginning students and all along the educational path to Ph.D. and beyond.  Many of our readings include personal anecdotes involving technology. Importantly, the TA reasserts the human primacy over technology.  Computers are employed for the student's benefit, not the other way around.  Finally, computers being such a large part of our culture, we have an unique opportunity to both critique and use them within our humanistic, rather than scientific, approach to learning, an viewpoint they may not get elsewhere.