Distant (and not so distant) Voices: Assessing Anson 10 years later

Anson, Chris. "Distant Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology." College English 61.3 (1999): 261-280. JSTOR. Web. 1 March 2010.

"Distant Voices" was written ten years ago by an established composition scholar who was quickly carving a new niche in English and composition studies--that of technology and writing. Because I sat in on a lecture given by Anson this past fall, I thought his article would provide a rich opportunity to look back at our recent past as a way to assess the current state of technology in writing courses and to speculate where we might be heading. This project in looking back attests to just how far we've come in the use of technology. We (academia and, in particular, the discipline of writing) have moved in directions that apparently even a leader in the field could not predict. Moreover, a revisiting of Anson's piece allows us to understand just how wrong many of the "doom and gloom" images of technology invading our classrooms were.

Anson spends quite a bit of time describing at length how a student of the future might engage with technology. His hypothetical scenario features a student who takes a laptop to class to inscribe notes, who uses the laptop to conduct research without ever stepping foot in a library, and who also uses it to access and watch a video lecture of a professor she's never met. The same student sheds the laptop only to go to another lab, located in a satellite campus of a corporate business that specializes in the delivery of online instruction, to submit an essay. The student is a drone to an education, one sponsored by corporate America, that is rather disconnected from the University awarding credit for such courses. The student is alone, isolated, vacant. The description is presented as a "worst case scenario" of sorts and offers a strong warning: "we [academics] must take control of these technologies, using them in effective ways and not . . . substituting them for those contextws and methods that we hold to be essential for learning to write" (263).

Anson gets a lot right with this hypothetical scenario--the reliance on laptops, the use of databases to access scholarly research, the implementation of online instruction. But we haven't witnessed (yet) a corporate takeover of academic campuses and we don't have to go to separate labs to submit work. We can do it from the comfort of our dorm rooms with, yes, that wonderfully mobile laptop.

But Anson gets something else wrong. While I think his skepticism of technology was/is rather healthy, it seems precipitated on an overall distrust of the relationships upon which an education is founded, that among colleagues and between teachers and students. He sees the allure of technology for both faculty and students in its promise to make our jobs and lives easier. He doesn't (and perhaps couldn't) anticipate just how effectively both students and teachers could collaborate online, for instance. Whereas he warns that universities will soon need to establish policies banning online office hours and limiting online instruction delivery, we've seen such technological advancements yield numerous benefits for the academy and the students it serves. Anson suggests that technology has the potential to greaten the divide between the privileged and underprivileged. Ironically, the technologies he warns about, including online instruction, have actually brought once marginalized and disengaged students into the fold. Over the last several years, I have enjoyed the opportunity to teach courses online during the summer. I've had students enrolled in my classes who were working full-time (either because they were paying their tuition without assistance from parents or because they were older students who were going back to earn a degree in later adulthood), students who were out of the country doing missionary work, and students who simply didn't have a car and were unable to make it to campus because of reduced bus schedules. These are all students who would not be taking a summer course had it been offered in a traditional format.

It is also important to note the model of online instruction Anson paints is more akin to correspondence courses in which students work at their own pace, never having contact with a faculty member or peer. Grading is done not by teachers, but by evaluators responsible for evaluating hundreds of papers at a time. Thankfully, such a model is rather removed from the direction "distance" education has actually moved in. In my online classes, for example, students worked in groups on projects, they had weekly deadlines to meet and they all had individual contact with me. And, importantly, I graded their work. That said, in reading some of my students' posts, Anson's model of distance education poses a greater risk in the public schools. I wonder what an equivalent article might look like if written now for high school teachers and administrators.

The final warning offered by Anson involves the danger technology poses to the disciplinary status of composition. Writing from within an English Department (in an English journal, nonetheless), Anson fears his hypothesized model for distance education could further disenfranchise composition studies, relegating it even further to a status as a service unit for the University. That hasn't happened (or not to any great extent than it already was a service unit), but that may have far more to do with the fracturing of English departments we saw in the late 1990s and which continues today. Anson could not have predicted that composition programs would become independent departments, creating PhD programs in writing and rhetoric, and, rather successfully, filling a gap in undergraduate offerings and majors. It cannot be denied, however, that technology has facilitated such momentum. As technology evolved, so did the need to create courses that could both theorize such advancement and give students opportunities to practice its applications in a critical manner. Who better to fill this need than compositionists?

As much as I can sit here at my computer and point out where Anson plain got it wrong, I have to admit that even today I have colleagues who shun electronic media, online instruction, and digital writing in their classes because they possess fears similar to those Anson projects. I haven't any answers, but I do wonder what becomes of education if and when teachers stop educating themselves. We--teachers--will not survive if we resist technology. That is a point Anson makes clear.