Last week on CBC’s “Spark”, they had a very interesting segment on the switch to digital technology and its effect on the creative process of authors. The guest expert was Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor from Maryland, who is currently researching and writing a book titled “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing”. It’s due out next year, and I’ll definitely be interested in reading about his discoveries and conclusions.
We’ve long heard stories about authors who feel they can only write with a particular brand of pen, or on a particular type of paper. My guess is that proficient writers can probably produce decent work using a variety of media (although if they can’t type it would be a decided handicap), but likely do create their best work using their preferred tools.
I’ve been interested in this field for years, but from the perspective of students learning to write, rather than that of professional authors. Most kids are striving for basic competency, not a Pulitzer Prize, so it would be interesting to see research on whether or not technology enhances their abilities. After observing kids using technology for twenty years, I would say yes for the majority ... although not to an earth-shattering degree.
For the most part, it takes a little of the pain out of a task that is a real challenge for kids. It takes away a lot of the worry over messy handwriting or crossing out mistakes or stressing over spelling. It’s comforting to know you can easily go back and change a word or rearrange sentences and paragraphs without having to start over, and to have a spellchecker and a thesaurus so immediately available. It’s particularly nice for editing – no more having to rewrite a rough draft entirely. And it’s also fun for them to enhance their work with different fonts and colours and images and to see it come out of the printer looking almost professional. It does inspire a little more effort and generate a little more pride in the finished product.
There are always a few kids, though, for whom being told they have to hand in a printed copy is cruel and unusual punishment. For a variety of reasons, they just don’t get along too well with technology. Instead of being relieved they will panic if a word or sentence gets underlined (oh no, what did I do wrong?) or they’ll worry if the font or margins or line spacing aren’t just right. And these are always the kids who somehow lose their work – the power goes off, the program crashes, or they swear they saved it but just can’t find where – and now they’re whining they’ve lost the best work they ever did in their entire lives and have to start over and they just wasted the whole period and they HATE COMPUTERS!!!!! If they must, they will painstakingly recopy their handwritten work, but they accomplish most with good old-fashioned pen and paper.
There are also always a few – usually the most distractible ones – who just can’t focus very well using technology. They will hop from app to app to app. Even if you restrict them to just a word processor, they will type one word ... then change the font a hundred times, make it huge, make it tiny, change the colour, try italics, erase it and try another word – anything but continue writing. At the end of the period you’ll be lucky to see a sentence or two. These kids too would be better off with a low tech pen and paper.
So in general I’d conclude yes, keep the tech – but keep an eye on how students are using it and be sensitive to the fact that (as with virtually everything in education) it isn’t a one size fits all solution and some students will do better other ways. And that seems to be especially true the more creative the assignment. In my experience, tech works quite well for essays and research papers, less effectively (at least for the rough drafts) of things like poetry. There seems to be something indefinable about the freedom of pen on paper that prompts the flow of creativity. They might produce the same volume of words on a computer, but the writing sometimes seems to be more mechanical and, especially with weaker writers, there can be too much reliance on the thesaurus. But if basic competency with words is what you’re after – and that’s the goal for the majority – then, for the majority, technology will help achieve it just a little more easily.
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