Henry: I just wanted to say something about the first major changes that are observable in a course once you start using computers. It seems to me, the kind of course I was teaching back in the seventies would involve a lot of in-class preparation for papers, and the students would invest most of their time absorbing my directives regarding the structure and formalities of the paper. Their second major investment after that would be in typing the papers. And then I would get the papers and grade them, and that would be the end of it. There was no emphasis on revision, so we would move back to the beginning of the cycle with the next paper, starting with content, and students would cycle through beginnings and endings like that. The most observable change--the thing that really hit the course hard when I started switching to word processing was that . . . . well, first I should say the program changed theoretically to include more emphasis on revision . . . but what I found was when you combine an emphasis on revision with the equipment that makes it easy--or easier than it was--what happens is students on the grade borderlines start to move. Like a B plus student trying to get an A minus, and a C plus student trying to get a B minus, and so forth, those students will move first, and they'll start doing revisions. When they were doing papers on a typewriter they might revise once, because there was an additional large investment in typing and revising. If it's a five page paper, then it's another ten hours typing for a two-finger typist. So even if you allow unlimited revisions, the typewriter involves a huge investment of time. And you would get maybe one typewritten revision at the most, with a lot of new typos entered, new punctuation errors, the last pages would be fingers on the wrong keys from being awake at four-thirty in the morning. However, with word processing the emphasis shifted; the entire course became a course in revision. There was still a large investment in the classroom in the content, the setup, the discussions, and the subject matter, but if you offer unlimited revisions and offer the technology of the word processor, then the first typing, even though it does involve some time, is just a difficult phase one--but it might be the beginning of six phases. And each pass involves more revising strategy and less fingerwork.

I found, for instance, that while my class was still content-oriented when we met in the classroom, I was working one-on-one with some students who would do constant revisions up to portfolio time. They'd revise a paper five times, and I was putting a lot more energy into their writing. When we talked about writing we were suddenly on very refined levels. I found myself, for instance, working with style rather than having a more error-based approach. And still a great deal of my course is dedicated to that. A student on a first revision is patching and shifting, rethinking and adding text. Students on a second revision pretty much have the shape that they'll be working with. A student on a third revision is probably working on sentence variety and word order, and I've frequently had students go to four and five revisions when given the opportunity. So even if you want to envision the word processor as a fancy typewriter--which is probably the first way that you'll see it--just switching the technology from typewriter to word processor can changes the entire focus of the course from composing and getting a grade to composing, revision, editing, and stylistics.

John: I do notice the same sort of changes taking place; students tend to stick longer at a draft when working on a computer. But I also notice that a lot depends on whether or not the computer is an integral part of the classroom. I've taught the use of a word processor at the beginning of a semester, and then beyond the first two or three sessions in the cluster I haven't dedicated any class time to the use of computers and revision and drafting, and then students tend to drift away. They'll go back to their typewriters or go back to doing a lot of hand-drafting or using whatever computer happens to be available in their dorm or apartment. Which means you often have students patching all these methods together, which reflects in their draft; there's no continuous method or machine or format, therefore they don't recognize drafting as a continuous process. Whereas if you have the class time dedicated to computer time or to using the computer, students tend to stick with it and see it as a continuous activity. If you don't reflect it in the classroom, students don't tend to see it that way.

H: Then, too, there's the effect that your evaluation standards change. I found that I could get by with four to six computer sessions at the minimal beginnings of my use. I could do four to six sessions in the cluster and more or less explain to students, "Here's the machinery and here's how you use it." But in my commenting process it became clearer and clearer that there was a disparity between students using the typewriter and students word processing, because of revisions. So that became an interesting evaluative problem, because when you have really fine drafts that have been perfected through three or four revisions, then you have the problem of evaluating those students against second-drafters using typewriters. It helped to point out that I was evaluating as though you could have done four revisions, so it might be a problem if the drafts were still comparatively rough.

J: On the flip side of that, what do you do with people who continue to make minor modifications and then simply give you another printout? That's another thing with the computer is that you can go through and pull maybe an error per page, make some minor changes, say okay this is my next draft and print the whole thing out. It's sometimes too easy to print out, especially if you've let the technology dominate. The work factor for producing a second copy on a typewriter is quite a bit--if you're going to retype, why not also rewrite? It's easier to overlook the work that should be involved in drafting.

Reflections: Did either of you notice a change in commitment on your part as a teacher in between drafts? You mentioned that you're focusing more on style, for instance. Does it take more effort for you to avoid easy revisions? Do you sit down with students and say, "Look, revision means more than changes in spelling or grammar, adding commas?"

H: It's odd but these editing capabilities are embodied in keyboard functions, so that if you show students they can cut and copy text and move it from place to place that becomes built into their notion of typing and composing. It's something that's not on a typewriter keyboard. And I found that students are much more willing to completely reshape the text. With typing it's very confusing if you have seven paragraphs to radically reorder. It becomes a total mess. But students don't have any qualms when they know you can just cut it and paste it. Text is more moveable.

J: As a teacher you have to be a better respondent, or correspondent would be more accurate. You have to be willing to sit down with a student or draw arrows and say, "This paragraph belongs here or this belongs there." If you're going to raise your expectations of the sort of revisions they're going to make, you have to raise expectations of yourself as a co-reviser. If you're going to expect them to make major changes, you're going to have to offer possibilities for major changes, and in that way I think it's made me a much better reader. I spend a lot more time with students' drafts. I really look at them, saying what I would do here. What are the possible choices? By the time you get to that fourth draft and you've really worked with a student who's allowed you to interact and help shape the document, you have a sense of what the student is trying to accomplish. You begin to develop real nuances of each student's particular needs and capabilities. For instance, you might say, "She tends to use these kinds of sentences, so how can she say what she wants to say within this sort of voice or tone she's established in this essay?" It becomes a matter of really close reading. You become quite intimate with a student's work, especially after you've seen it a fifth time. The computer really encourages close cooperation and continuity.

I would like to go ahead and talk about the changes in classroom environment. One thing that physically changes is that the students don't come to you when you're in the cluster. They're arranged in a circle around the room with their backs to you. They 're at a workstation, they're working on a document. You come to them. You lean over their shoulder or sit down beside them or kneel down beside them, and you begin a dialogue with the student. So you really are like a resource person.

R: They're not approaching the desk anymore.

J: You have no desk.

H: You're present at a completely new part of the process. You're actually there while the material is forming. You're able to be present and involved as the stuff goes on the screen. In that sense, you really do think of the computer classroom as truly a studio, because the text itself is up as though it's on an easel. It's vertical. And you can't avoid going around and reading over the students' shoulders. Students got used to that in our classroom; even to visitors. And you inevitably look to see what people are doing and ask them, "Well, what do we have going here? How's it going?" And students involve you right then as they're thinking it up, and they involve each other too.

J: Sometimes things even go one step beyond that. Students begin to ask you to "come see." As an example, we had a student, Mia, who had a fairly complex sequence of events going on and she didn't know how to establish that in a paragraph. It really depended upon these things happening in a proper sequence, and some events were parallel with each other or simultaneous. And she couldn't figure out how to do it; she played with two or three drafts of this particular paragraph, and finally said, "Can you come help me?"

Together we sat down, and using cut and paste started taking the paragraph apart and reassembling it. We reassembled it and said "Nah, that doesn't really work, does it? It doesn't really capture what you're trying to say." She looked at it. The ultimate thing is that the students look at it and decide. Mia said, "No, that doesn't really capture what I want to say. I want to say this is happening, too." And I said, "Okay let's try this." So we both took it apart and she suddenly saw--hey!--in the dialogue that had been established between us, suddenly she saw something, put it back together and got exactly what she wanted.

Students really have a sense of control. They really will say: "No, that's not what I want. I've had enough of your advice. Please go away." I know that seems paradoxical but that's the nature of it. When they're less possessive of it, less protective of it, they're more open to suggestions for change. Whether the suggestions come from the instructor or from themselves, they're just less likely to leave it at that.

H: I think that's an important thing too. I constantly offer students things, but there's a point where you're forcing your own knowledge of the technology on students. If students aren't ready for something, and they're telling you they're not ready for it, you have to be sensitive to whether they're shy or resistant, or whether they're being direct with you--I don't want to know this now. I try to be careful and not force stylistic decisions on students, or force a much more advanced knowledge of the machinery. Like Michelle. We had a student who was making a book, and she was strong-minded, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do, and she was very outspoken. I would say, "Let's put a chapter heading here," and she would say, "Nope, go away, I'm not ready for this." I've learned to honor students when it seems like they're sincere about certain decisions in their development.

R: Anything else?

J: It lowers your status as a teacher. Cluster days were days that students were assured of not getting a lecture or of having a very organized activity going on in the classroom--structured, as in structured by somebody else. In group work, there'll be group work but it's still being established by the teacher. Here's what we're going to do today. Here's how we're going to go about doing it. You get in that group. You get in that group. Now get to work. The cluster day for the students became a time ofŠ I'm going to establish what I need to do that day. The chairs in the cluster have wheels and the middle of the room is empty. There's an infinite number of possible combinations and movements.

H: Part of the effect that we observed, too, was a function of the fact that the students projects were so self-directed. It could conceivably have been different if the content were more locked to a common course content.

J: We had no overarching topic of inquiry. Students picked their own topics. Then through a process of proposals, brainstorming, and drafting--all of which were passed back and forth among students and us--we arrived at a topic and parameters for that inquiry that we felt suited the framework of a 305 and that we thought would be challenging enough to work on for a semester.

H: It was pretty astounding that some of the first problems that emerged, emerged at such high levels because students chose things that they might have already had some kind of intellectual command over--command over the vocabulary and a glossary of ways of thinking about it. Some of the early problems that emerged in the course completely threw me.

Like one of Julie's first problems. She was working on a book about the developing image of women in comic strips. The first major problem she came across was how should she sample the strips? She had already done all the groundwork, but wasn't sure how to sift through all her research. Should she take strips that were translated into the most languages? She knew which ones they were and how many languages they had been translated into. Should she go by the number of major newspapers that they had been syndicated in? She already had that information, too. She had a couple other organizing principles. She was so deep into the research already that I had a few feeble suggestions to offer, like following the topics that emerged from the material which she thought important, but basically to use her own judgment in deciding. And that was her first writing problem in the course--really a research problem. A lot of the self-directive aspects boosted the level of involvement and knowledge beyond our ken. We were not the content experts in most of these projects.

J: Isn't that the truth? We established a rigor, so we had to try to come up with ideas on how to approach these things. Our student, Michelle, wrote her book on comedy as the rock and roll of the 80s. She already had a metaphor, drawing a connection between two things, which I thought was an excellent place to start. There was definitely a critical activity right there, trying to work out the analogy. But what do I know? I have no information on Jay Leno or Eddie Murphy, or what it is to go on a comedy concert tour.

H: But she had all the press kits already. She had visited the Letterman studios and said, "Do you have a lot of press kits from comics?" And they said, "We have tons of them." So she came away with a couple dozen press kits. The problems were so diverse and so complex, and they came from every conceivable direction. A lot of them were research problems; some of them were writing problems; some were machine problems. We were constantly dancing.

J: We sometimes worried about our course not having a defined topic of inquiry. Maybe we weren't asking questions of a rhetorical-enough nature or a radical nature, like trying to establish what frameworks we were working within. But our students were always one step ahead of us. They went out and found frameworks, so they could get on with what they wanted to do. Sometimes I felt we weren't covering those things you're supposed toŠ

But their own curiosity and sense of friendly competition did more for them than what we could have done. Students would glimpse each other's work or draft or whatever caught their eye and say, "Look what they're doing. I wish I had chosen that. And why doesn't my page look as good as hers? I would never have thought to set up charts." In that way, they began to pick up on a lot of what is rhetorical in nature. As they worked, they developed very clear senses of who is speaking, to whom, and what's being spoken. Precisely how do you present this information? They had to ask questions about this information. "What do I want it to do? What do I expect my reader to take away from this? How does the information already structure what its presentation might be, and how can the presentation also structure the information?"

H: It does open up the whole complicated problem of putting yourself in terrain where you're not selling an ideology, where my ideology and John's ideology is hidden, and you're trying to open up a, quote, neutral space. It's not a neutral space. It's a space of a higher logical typing that can accommodate conflicts. It can accommodate much more happening than a bilateral clash of perspectives. And to some that's objectionable. The temptation is to say that it's neutralized.

J: Neutralized or neutral or neutered is exactly what we don't intend to mean. It's not like Boyle's law where if you increase the space then you lose the pressure. It's like unlocking a crystal, turning ice into steam. We don't just sit there and vibrate in a comfortable pattern. We're vectored, impossible to determine both location and velocity at the same time. What all this does accommodate is simply being able to say, "I don't know." If a student came to us with a content question, sometimes we just had to say, I don't know. I can help you try to find out, but you're involved with an area of knowledge that I know little aboutŠ " We are, Henry and I, both experienced as learners, so we can both say this is how he or I might approach it, or this is where I might start looking. Sometimes there are simply machine problems. There are times when the student got stuck and we simply would have to say I don't know. Students really began to appreciate that.

H: It seems like a strange reversal to get more intellectual rigor out of students by saying, "Choose something you're already expert in or you can be expert in." You instantly get back more from students, but in many cases you're out in the cold. You can't adjust to all levels with all students because they're in so many different domains.

The technology is absorbing sometimes. I try to be wary. We should say that, despite all this technology, we were demanding that students have reading lists, and we were demanding that students face some kind of critical challenge, even though they may have selected the area, even if their project seemed neutral. For example, Chris was working on a book that explained how to use small claims court in the county. He was describing procedures. He couldn't come in at a critical angle on a text like that. But we wanted the students to be engaged in some kind of intellectual/critical stance, so we had a reflection afterward where they could be critical about the kinds of projects they had worked on. We asked for their judgments on the content they had worked with, and we asked for a discussion and evaluation of their own projects --what they would have done differently or what they would have kept the same. What crucial decisions had they made that had shaped their project.

I was going to say before that the machines can become a fascination. I'm wary of places where the machine is absorbing more energy than the language. I still like the center of gravity to be in the language and the use of language. I don't want to get so involved in the machinery and what it can do that other things get overlooked. The machine can do a lot of fine things that students don't need to know when you could be developing their thinking and language skills.