The Writing of Business Starting with Ourselves: Encouraging Our Students to Become Reflective Technology Users

As we've argued in The Writing of Business, technology will play an increasingly important role in day-to-day workplace communication. Students in our classrooms are likely to enter environments in which they not only write with word processing software, but use sophisticated programs to crunch data and to display it in graphic form as well as networks to access distant information sources and communicate with people across the world. As we've suggested in Chapter 3, e-mail will be a part of their daily writing, and they'll use it to manage their own work and projects they complete with others. In addition, collaborative software will affect the way they write with others, and MOOs, MUDs, or chat rooms will enable them to communicate in real time with other members of work teams, clients, and customers in distant locations. All of this technology involves writing and affects the ways in which it's produced; and this technology is changing the ways in which business writing is being taught, too. Many teachers are beginning to teach in networked environments or smart classrooms; and they're requiring students to use the technology for their individual and group assignments.

Yet all of this technology can be intimidating for those of us who learned to write with pen and paper--or perhaps on a typewriter. It helps to remember, I think, that we're teaching writing, not technology. And as Patricia Sullivan discovered when she studied students' evaluations of TAs teaching technical writing at Purdue, students did not expect their teachers to be experts in the technology even though they were teaching in a computer classroom; however, students did expect them to know what was on their syllabi. In other words, students were able to distinguish a course in technical writing on computers from the computers and their management. And given the speed at which technology is being developed, certainly no one can be expected to know the ins and outs of every computer platform, every word processing program, or every e-mail program. But being a user of computers, word processing, and e-mail should give you enough familiarity to talk with some authority about how such technology affects writing. So if you're intimidated by the technology, we suggest that you aim for facility with any word processing program and any e-mail program on any computer. Most schools offer faculty free introductory training sessions on word processing and e-mail that can help you get started. And we encourage you to work with colleagues in your department who are more advanced users and are willing to help when you're stuck. In addition, we suggest that you set up a collaborative classroom in which experienced technology users help those who are less experienced. Finally, we suggest that you avail yourself of opportunities to talk and write about using technology in the classroom with other teachers of business writing as well as those in the workplace. Conferences and workshops are certainly possibilities. So are electronic forums. We've included a list of possible resources for such discussion later in this Instructor's Manual: this list includes electronic journals, listservs, and organizational web sites that focus on computers and writing or workplace writing.

It helps to remember, too, that we're not really going to help students very much in the long term by teaching them how to use one word processor or one e-mail program on one computer platform. The minute we teach that, the program or platform will be upgraded. What does help in the long term is enabling students to be more reflective users of the technology. Being a reflective technology user for a writer is more than knowing how to turn the machine on and find the word processing program. It's being able to imagine the entire document even though one can see through only a small window. It's being able to think structurally enough to be able to move sections around. It's having a skepticism about the spell or grammar checker. And it's knowing when the technology should and should not be used and what it can and cannot do to manage work on a day-to-day basis. In this context, we are reminded of a colleague's remarks about a coworker who is alienating his peers because he chooses to communicate through e-mail even though his coworkers' desks are in adjoining cubicles. In other words, we can encourage our students to think about when they should use technology as well as how they can use features of technology and the technology itself in appropriate and helpful ways. And teaching students to reflect upon their use of technology will continue to serve them well as they leave our classrooms and enter a workplace which continues to become more technologically sophisticated.