The Computer and the Page by James Kalmbach

Part III, Chapter 7 reviewed by Patricia Ericsson

Part III consists of two chapters: "Technology and Pedagogy" and "Publishing in the Classroom: From Letterpress to the Web and Beyond." I found Chapter 7, "Technology and Pedagogy" particularly interesting and will focus on two specific parts of the chapter that were important from my standpoint as a teacher and graduate student interested in teaching composition in computer-mediated environments.

Kalmbach recounts several research projects that sought to find the impact of typewriters on students writing. These projects cover a period from 1891 to 1963--over 70 years of research that is rarely mentioned when researchers write about the impact of technology on teaching writing. He focuses on one large study published in 1932 and characterizes this study as "probably the largest systematic investigation of the impact of placing writing technology in a classroom environment" (106). This research involved 2,100 typewriters, 51 schools, 419 teachers, and 14,949 students. The researchers used achievement scores and substantial qualitative assessment. In the quantitative measures, "use of a typewriter had little effect on achievement" (108).

In contrast to the quantitative measurements, the qualitative analysis showed overwhelmingly positive results (108-110). Amazingly, the qualitative results are almost identical to the results discovered by early researchers considering the effects of computer technology on student writing behaviors. The results are so similar that through the use of simple search and replace procedure, a researcher could transform the typewriter study results to a text that sounds eerily like most of the reports completed in the 1980's dealing with computer technology.

Kalmbach notes that this research has "largely disappeared from our profession's collective consciousness" and more troublingly "no evidence in the literature that this massive research resulted in any widespread effort to integrate typewriter into literacy classrooms" (110).

Kalmbach's analysis of this lacuna leads to the second insightful analysis in the chapter. He outlines four major approaches to teaching: the humanist, the child-centered, the social reconstruction, and the scientific manager. He says that the child-centered and social reconstruction positions have been the most interested in using technology in the classroom. However the scientific manager approach has been the dominant paradigm in the educational establishment. This approach values "technology only insofar as using that technology results in demonstrable gains on standardized tests (112). This approach continues to dominate assessment and thus the qualitatively measured positive gains illustrated in computer-mediated classroom research is undervalued.

Kalmbach ends Chapter 7 by noting that "One of the truisms of teaching with technology has been that pedagogy remains constant while technology changes dramatically (115).

Part III, Chapter 8 reviewed by Linda Sigel

In Part III's second chapter, "Publishing in the Classroom: From Letterpress to the Web and Beyond," Kalmbach gives several examples of how, over the past century, instructors have used the publishing of student documents to teach "writing as a social process of achieving action" (117).

He gives a brief history of various pedagogical theories and how they implemented the publishing of student works -- from the progressive education movement to the language experience approach, from the whole-language movement to the unprecedented commercial success of the Foxfire approach.

Using the above history as proof, Kalmbach suggests that while "the main argument for using real-life projects in the classroom will continue to be that students write better and with more interest when they have a real audience and real purpose for creating their texts," the reality is (and he stresses the importance of this for the rest of the chapter) "publishing pedagogies continue to be popular" because of "the ability of a shared document to create a sense of community" (122).

Kalmbach also discusses how and why not all teachers have embraced the sharing of collaborative documents in the classroom: "Humanists whose primary goal is teaching and preserving great texts will always see publishing student work as valorizing inferior texts, and the communities that develop in these traditional classrooms will likely continue to be built around texts not students" (122-123). He then goes on to describe G.P. Landow's attempts to combine the "traditional humanist concerns such as the teaching of Charles Dickens with a student-centered publishing environment" (123). This description, along with the description of what Kalmbach has attempted in his own classrooms (a poetry anthology originally based in HyperCard, then moved to the Web), really fascinated me, as a first-time instructor. How might I be able to use some of these technologies in my classrooms? (I know we've touched on this topic a bit in HU520 discussions, but reading this section of Kalmbach's really brought it home.) After reading these accounts, I could see, too, how some of my own undergraduate instructors here at MTU struggled to combine the idea of student-centered publishing with more "traditional" ways of teaching "English" courses. Much of this was done on the Web.

Kalmbach's discussion on the Web and Web-based technologies is understandably dated, as he was writing this in 1995. A substantial section was devoted to discussing the limitations of the Web and how different Web material is from printed. Browsers and HTML authoring tools have changed a bit -- becoming much more user-friendly -- since the time of his writing. He did acknowledge that the Web was (I'm curious: Is it still?) an immature technology. I am hoping, that through our Net Forum, we might find out how his views on implementing the Web as a publishing tool may have changed in the last few years.

 

The last paragraph of the chapter contains what I find to be Kalmbach's most valuable statement:

We need to remember that all new publishing technology regresses in some areas so that it can advance in others. We need to know what we value as teachers, that is, what is important to us in the classroom. When we do, we will be in a position to find ways to use the strengths of new publishing technologies ... to enhance our classroom, while at the same time find ways to limit the impact of its weaknesses. In doing so, we will be affirming the fundamentally social nature of the relationship between the computer and the page (130).