Text as electronic traffic

3. Text as electronic traffic

This section concerns how writers’ involvement with ICT can impart a more fluid quality to their texts. Usually this point would preface a dis- cussion of word processors and the manner in which they allow writers to cut, shape, paste or otherwise manipulate text. Here, however, we consider how text becoming ‘fluid’ involves manipulations that have a more social focus. Early on in the development of computers for education, researchers noticed how this technology could potentially ‘socialise the writing process’ (Daiute 1983). One way this may be achieved is by recruiting text into practices of interpersonal communication. Evidently, such practices have been cultivated by the popularity of email, instant messaging, chatrooms, and asynchronous discussion forums. Texts composed in such ICT contexts come to acquire distinctive registers (Ferrara, Brunner and Whittemore 1991). However, there are other ways in which computers mediate by entering situations in which learners (or writers) are interacting. That is, computers are a technology for collaboration. Joint activity may occur ‘at’ them, ‘around’ them and ‘through’ them (Crook 1994). Accordingly, student writing might become

ICT AND THE LITERACY PRACTICES OF STUDENT WRITING 107

one such species of activity incorporated into any or all those collaborative arrangements.

Undergraduates can be reluctant collaborators in relation to the familiar task of producing essays (Hounsell 1987). Our interviews and diaries suggest that it remains relatively unusual for students to work together ‘at’ computers in the interests of shared writing. What our interviews do reveal is that student collaboration over study does occur, but with

a somewhat improvised or serendipitous quality. This includes unannounced visits to friends’ rooms, some developing into work-related exchanges. On such occasions, the desktop computer offers a particularly visible surface for supporting joint composition. It might at the very least precipitate a critical discussion of someone’s writing-in-progress. In this sense, the potential for ICT to enter such casual exchanges may implicate the technology in supporting more social forms of writing among students.

However, there is a further sense in which writing is socialized by ICT. This is captured in the idea that computers provide a technology for student peers to interact ‘through’. Text can become more fluid by the ease with which it can be passed among computer users populating a common network. Our system logs of networked computers in student study bedrooms revealed that local file transfer via email and instant messaging was very common. Much of the transferred material was not related to the curriculum. Again the computer has emerged as an intriguing technology through the way in which it resources both playful and academic concerns at a single site. Our expectation is that practices of electronic communica- tion that evolve to serve playful interests will be gradually appropriated into study demands. Similarly, undergraduate texts will move more freely among peers thanks to the transporting infrastructure supplied by ICT networking. In this sense literacy will become more social.

What students told us about their shared use of lecture notes reinforced the idea that such trends could be active. Most students reported exchanging notes from lectures. Most students with computers in their private rooms reported doing this via electronic mail. It must be admitted that coursework writing seemed more protected in this sense. Coursework, unlike lectures, was more likely to be a topic of conversation – something the student sought benchmarking reassurances about in relation to per- sonal progress. Being more possessive about coursework than lecture notes is perhaps not surprising. Yet some sorts of coursework traffic still should be innocently attractive to students: for instance, passing across material to members of the next class to take the course. In such circum- stances it may be lack of everyday contact with this parallel peer cohort that constrains such activity. If so, email may play an increasing role in coursework exchange, as well as lecture note material.

CHARLES CROOK AND ROY DYMOTT