The document discusses how having students research and practice using historical writing tools can help them engage critically with modern writing technologies. It notes that writing is more than just the act of writing, and that the tools we use shape our composition process. By exploring how past writing technologies were situated within their historical contexts and influenced composition, students learn to see their current tools as mediums rather than neutral objects, and better understand how technologies impact the ways we write and think. A few scholars on this topic are briefly summarized.

1. Uncovering
History in the
Interface:
Fostering Student Engagement
with Writing Technologies
through Historically-Situated
Writing Practices
Emily Legg
Purdue University
Twitter: @emlegg
Email: legge@purdue.edu

2. Present
Future
Past

3. We want students to think about the
mediums they are writing in and how the
rhetorical situations shift and their writing
changes as they are asked both investigate
and write in multiple mediums whether it is
your traditional paper, video, podcast,
brochure, infograph, website, etc.
My goal is to help students see the tools they are
using and understand how these tools become
an inherent part of their composition process
especially since most of the time, when I ask,
students describe writing as typing on the
computer and yet the computer remains the
invisible interface they rely upon.

4. Producers &
Participants
Scholars &
Pedagogues

5. By having students create multimodal
assignments that ask them to research
older writing technologies (including the
invention of writing itself), to practice
using these historical writing tools, and to
explore how that technology is both
situated in history and still impacts and
influences the ways we compose, I have
found that students learn to engage
critically with their own technologies and
see these tools as mediums and
interfaces rather than viewing them as
impersonal and invisible forces on their
own composition.

6. HAPPY THEORY LAND CONCRETE EXAMPLES

7. Andrea Lunsford:
 Writing: A technology for creating conceptual
frameworks and creating, sustaining, and
performing lines of thought within those
frameworks, drawing from and expanding on
existing conventions and genres, utilizing signs
and symbols, incorporating materials drawn from
multiple sources, and taking advantage of the
resources of a full range of media. (Lunsford,
Writing, Technologies, and the Fifth Canon”)

8. Walter Ong:
 “Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus,
is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the
mind what in reality can only be in the mind.
Writing is simply a thing, something to be
manipulated, something inhuman, artificial, a
manufactured product” (Ong, “Writing is a
Technology that Restructures Thought”)

9. Andrew Feenberg:
 Instrumental View: Technologies as neutral tools
 Substantive View: Technology restructures and
controls the entire world
 Critical Theory View: Acknowledge the effects of
technologies without complete surrender to
technologies (Feenberg, Transforming
Technology)

10. Really Old Not Old
Wonderful
and New!!
PROGRESS!!

11. tl;dr
Writing is more than just writing and the
tools we write with are more than just
tools.

14. Excerpt:
“Writing causes the voice of the author to always be heard.
Even after the author’s death, people will continue to read the
words in books and scriptures. The invention of cuneiform and
writing enabled humanity to create a force greater than life.
[…]
All things in the modern world are written. Without the invention
of writing by the Mesopotamians, the system of writing used
today may not exist at all. Although oral means of information
transportation is adequate for certain circumstances, writing is
the root of all information. Information that is written down
cannot be forgotten or skewed by the poor memory of the
human mind. History is written by those of the past. The legacy
of a generation can be found in writing mediums of all kinds:
journals, newspapers, memoirs, books, or magazines. Writing
makes the modern world what it was, what it is being, and
what it will become.”

15. Reflection:
“From there I became so easily involved in my paper that even
the time passing by was expressed in shorthand. Once the
material was gathered and gathered into a paper, the
assignment reached its pinnacle of fun, my favorite part of the
entire process. We were given the task of presenting the
information in the smallest, most compressed format we
possibly could and we were to put that information into an
eye-catching poster that could be used to define the entire
project. I build graphical displays every day and I'm a
Computer Graphics Technology major for a reason: I simply
love it. I can sit there and create all day and if the assignment
has the freedom of x, y, and maybe even z coordinates that I
define myself then I can go to town like a stenographer in a
frenzied courtroom. The words on paper became liberated
points of data that I could turn into a flow of information more
comprehensive than a full page of text; all that was required
was time.”

16. Thank you!
Emily Legg
Purdue University
Twitter: @emlegg
Email: legge@purdue.edu