Outside of jesting, however, Weiser makes a good point (544). The easiest way to make something "ubiquitous" and indispensable is to be useful, but to stay in the background, like a secretary who anticipates all needs before her boss asks for anything. But what if, one day, the boss needs something that the secretary can't anticipate, or she mixes up his requests in her head and gives him regular milk in his coffee rather than soy. That could be potentially "dangerous" (though I laughed when McGee/Ericksson made the comment that the "problems of the MGSC are numerous and often dangerous" (459)). It's not the same as a snake bite or sticking your finger into a piranha's tank to play a little coochie-coo. It is, I suppose, dangerous to a student's grade if she doesn't use her own reasoning and if the teacher does not allow first drafts for correction purposes.
I think that the one major assumption of this article is that teachers are going to be completely outside of the writing process, and that all that matters to these teachers is grammar. First off, if teachers only care about grammar, they are probably more likely to allow first drafts so that they can mark up the pages and hand them back for correction (it's almost addictive to use that little red pen for nit-picking). Secondly, teachers are not going anywhere. Until we all become cyborgs, like Sidler suggests could happen only to those able to afford it, teachers will not become obsolete. They need us. So, if we are conscious and we teach our students to be conscious and to think and edit for themselves, then everything should be just peachy.
This article spends a great deal of time going over all of the problems with MS Word, and I am not even certain that they are problems so much, anymore. It has been ages since I have had a squiggly green line that was not helpful, but I use Office 2007 or there 'bouts. I have not really tried to do anything out of the ordinary in Word in a while, but I have a feeling that the problems with Word that were expressed in this article might be outdated. So, the lesson here, as far as I can tell, is: Don't let your students swim alone, even if they're wearing those little orange floaties, not until they are confident swimmers.
Hmmmm. I'm not sure I completely agree that Mcgee and Ericson are channeling Chicken Little so completely.
ReplyDeleteTo me, the overall theme of this article was more in the line of: technology is here to stay; it's getting more powerful, and, maybe we should be paying attention to it's consequences within our own field.
I also didn't really get that they were saying teachers were necessarily becoming obsolete; what I heard them say is that MS Word "gets more 'teachable moments' than the English teachers do" (455) - a point that might be hard to argue.
Obviously, teachers should pay attention and teach their students to pay attention (the real point of teaching?) - but it couldn't hurt for us to pay a little more attention to the software our students are using.
I am glad that someone else thinks that perhaps McGee and Ericsson were a little over critical of Microsoft’s helpful tool. The implication, the very same example that you point out, is that teachers are somehow outside of the classroom, that they are just sitting at their desks mindlessly waiting to be given papers to mark upon. I know that in my own classroom, if a student isn’t sure what a suggestion on the computer means, I am immediately informed, sometimes to my annoyance. To counter, someone might say, “What about at home; the teachers can’t be everywhere!” I think your response also does a fine job on this point: the students are not morons (well…all students are not morons). The purpose of going to school is partially to learn what to do when faced with a question they don’t know the answer to. I hope and pray that my students will, God forbid, go look up the answer to a question they have, or even worse, email me a question; my job doesn’t end when the bell rings.
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