Terms of Uncertainty: Technological Change and Writing in the Digital Age.

This dissertation explains how the proliferation of digital and Internet technology generates uncertainty around the teaching of writing and, in an effort to clarify the terms of this uncertainty, develops concepts for analyzing the relationship between writing instruction and technological change. The concepts developed here are applied to theoretical, historical, and classroom-based sites of inquiry to highlight the complex and plural influences coming to bear on writing instruction in the digital age. The result is a multidirectional view of the interlocked relationship between writing pedagogy and technological innovation. This interlocked relationship is articulated concretely in an ethnographic account of two college English courses, which require students to compose multimedia and Internet texts. Two findings emerge from this ethnographic strand of the dissertation. The first is that students in both classes tended to associate the relevance of their projects with interests and objectives that hailed them from outside of classrooms and coursework. The second notable finding pertains to students’ and teachers’ interactions with Adobe Flash, a popular website design and development program. A representational hierarchy developed around students’ Flash-based projects whereby alphabetic writing was configured as less potent than the program’s visual and interactive affordances. Drawing upon a networked conception of pedagogical phenomena as well as conceptions of style, potency, distributedness developed in previous chapters, the dissertation concludes by putting classroom-based concerns arising from the ethnographic account into conversation with broader controversies shaping conceptions of literacy in the digital age. This multidirectional approach to inquiry exemplifies a network vision of pedagogical processes and illustrates the degree to which theory, history, and teaching practice are mutually enrolled in, and thus integral to, the study of writing pedagogy and technological change.PHDEnglish and EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93974/1/beg_1.pd