When it comes to how we use technology, familiarity can limit analysis and exploration. I started thinking about this challenge when encountering the work of an academic who has examined the history of word processing. When I first wrote about word processing in the 1990s, the issues were similar to current topics of whether students should read from paper or screen and whether it was better to take notes on paper or on a laptop. There were comparisons of which method was more productive and efforts to account for the advantages that were identified. It was once similar with word processing. Should students learn to write on paper or using a computer? What were the advantages and disadvantages of each approach? How might the instruction of writing skills with computers be modified to take advantage of the unique capabilities of a digital approach? My thought is that many are now no longer aware of these questions and conclusions and that personal practice and instructional emphases may ignore key findings. This concern seems especially relevant given the new issues raised by the use of AI in writing and learning to write.
I decided to write again about this topic after listening to an interview with Matthew Kirschenbaum on the “This Week in Tech” network’s “Intelligent Machines” podcast focused on Kirschenbaum’s recent focus on the role of AI in writing and learning to write. The podcast guest was a member of the Modern Languages Association (MLA) panel, generating what are likely to become several influential position papers on learning to write and AI. This interview, which makes up maybe the first half hour of the podcast, is worth the attention of any educator trying to make sense of how AI will impact schools and universities. As part of the brief introduction of the podcast guest, Krischenbaum it was noted that the guest had recently written “Trach Changes: Literary History of Word Processing”.As I suggested, word processing had been a personal interest so I did purchase and read the book.
It wasn’t that the book wasn’t well written, but I did struggle to get through it. The podcast focus resulted in my misunderstanding of the topic of the book. The history of the transition from writing on paper and typewriter was of some interest, because I lived through that transition and the mention of technology hardware and software and the required skills involved in writing with a computer brought back plenty of memories. I was less interested in which noted author had made his or her transition from a notepad or typewriter to a word processor during their career. Concerns of the reading community related to how technology might influence literature likely offers similar insights into what some think about AI. A better example might be how Bob Dylan’s fans reacted when he switched from acoustic to electric guitar. What I had falsely anticipated was that the author would examine how digital storage and revision changed writing and the teaching of writing.
I imagined I would encounter an analysis of changes in personal revision, educator feedback and learner revision, peer revision, and possibly even AI as a sounding board for a writer’s efforts. These are the topics in what I see as the evolution of writing and writing education. I decided to generate a post that would offer my own thoughts about the role of word processing in the writing process. The podcast and the book on word processing are still worth your time.
Will digital tools change our writing?
I assume you complete many of the writing tasks you take on using a word processing application. Do you do this because you assume this approach makes you more efficient or do you assume this approach makes you a better writer? Maybe you have never even thought about these questions. However, when functioning as a teacher and asking your students to engage in activities in a particular way, it may be helpful to consider why the approach you expect students to use will be productive. Often, to realize the full potential of an activity, the details matter and some insight into why an approach is supposed to be productive may be helpful in understanding which details to track and emphasize. The following comments summarize some ideas about the value of word processing and of learning to write using word processing applications.
In learning, as in other areas of life, you seldom get something for nothing. Still, a logical case has been proposed for how simply working with word processing for an extended period may improve writing skills and performance. Perkins (1985) calls this the “opportunities get taken” hypothesis. The proposal works like this. Writing by hand on paper has a number of built-in limitations. Generating text this way is slow, and modifying what has been written comes at a substantial price. To produce a second or third draft requires the writer to spend a good deal of time reproducing text that was fine the first time, just to change a few things that might sound better if modified. Word processing, on the other hand, allows writers to revise at minimal cost. They can pursue an idea to see where it takes them and worry about fixing syntax and spelling later. Reworking documents from the level of fixing misspelled words to reordering the arguments in the entire presentation can be accomplished without crumpling up what has just been painstakingly written and starting over.
With word processing, writers can take risks and push their skills without worrying that they may be wasting their time. The capacity to save and load text from some form of storage makes it possible to revise earlier drafts with minimal effort. Writers can set aside what they have written to gain new perspectives, show friends a draft and ask for advice, or discuss an idea with the teacher after class, and use these experiences to improve what they wrote yesterday or last week. What we have described here are opportunities—opportunities to produce a better paper for tomorrow’s class and, over time, opportunities to learn to communicate more effectively.
Do writers take the opportunities provided by word processing programs and produce better products? The research evaluating the benefits of word processing (MacArthur, 2006; Wollscheid, Sjaastad, & Tømte, 2016) is not easy to interpret. Much seems to depend on the experience of the writer as a writer and familiarity with word processing, and on what is meant by a “better” product. If the questions refer to younger students, it also seems to depend on the instructional strategies to which the students have been exposed. It does appear that access to word processing is more beneficial for older learners and some even interpret this difference as having a neurological basis (Wollscheid, Sjaastad, & Tømte, 2016). General summaries of the research literature (e.g., MacArthur, 2006) seem to indicate that students make more revisions, write longer documents, and produce documents containing fewer errors when word processing. However, the spelling, syntactical, and grammatical errors that students tend to address and the revision activities necessary to correct them are considered less important by many interested in effective writing than changes improving document content or document organization. The natural tendency of most writers appears to be to address surface-level features.
Writers appear to bring their writing goals and habits to writing with the support of technology. Beginning writers and perhaps writers at many stages of maturity may not have the orientation or capabilities to use the full potential of word processing, and their classroom instruction may also emphasize the correction of more obvious surface errors. Thus, there are typically improvements in the products generated when working with word processing tools, but the areas in which younger writers seem to improve are not necessarily the most important ones
Many of the potential educational advantages of word processing appear only as students acquire considerable experience writing with the aid of technology and some question whether using a keyboard is better than a pencil for young writers (Wollscheid, Sjaastad, & Tømte, 2016). Perkins’s (1985) argument that writing with word processing programs will improve writing skills because word processing allows students to experiment with their writing makes sense only in situations in which students have written a great deal and experimented with expressing themselves in different ways. The fact that most research evaluating the benefits of word processing has examined performance over a short period of time, with students having limited word processing experience, thus represents a poor test of the potential of word processing (Owston, Murphy, & Wideman, 1992). Research based on a three-year study following elementary students as they learned to write with and without access to word processing opportunities has demonstrated a significant advantage for students with ready access to technology (Owston & Wideman, 1997). A recent study (Yamaç, et al., 2020) examining the benefits of consistent writing on laptops found a similar advantage in contrast to paper and pencil writing tasks for early elementary learners. These researchers point to social media activities such as blogs and multimedia writing with tablets as expanding the writing opportunities available in classrooms.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) demonstrates that in the U.S. greater experience writing with technology is predictive of schools with more proficient writers (Tate, Warschauer & Abedi, 2016). Studies such as this are still controversial as it is difficult to parse out other variables such as the income levels of the majority of students in different schools that may influence both access to technology and writing proficiency. Overall, the role of word processing in developing writing skills depends on the goals of the teacher and individual students, the social context provided for writing, and the amount of writing that students do with the assistance of word processing.
Summary
Many of the posts I write concern the cognitive processes involved in learning, thinking, and academic behavior. Often, I focus on how these processes are impacted for good or bad by involving technology. We seem to be past the point at which educators question writing on a computer, but the distinction I raised between opportunities get taken and desirable difficulty have yet to be resolved with writing. This is clearly the case when educators debate the role AI should play. My suggestions related to the opportunities get taken hypothesis should also be approached would even be that we examine whether the opportunities (often called affordances) of revision are actually employed. Do students get useful feedback from which they might learn to improve what they have written? Despite the likely benefit of revision, do students quantitatively do much revision? Perhaps like other ideals (tutoring, personalizing learning) that are impractical for one reason or another (e.g., cost, teacher time), AI might find a productive role in guiding revision experiences.
References:
MacArthur, C.A. (2006). The effects of new technologies on writing and writing processes. In C.A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & j. Fitzgerald (Eds.) Handbook of Writing Research, pps. 248-262. New York: Guilford.
Owston, R., Murphy, S., & Wideman, H. (1992). The effects of word processing on students’ writing quality and revision strategies. Research in the Teaching of English, 26 (3), 249–276.
Owston, R., & Wideman, H. (1997). Word processors and children’s writing in a high-computer-access setting. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 30 (2), 202–220.
Perkins, D. (1985). The fingertip effect: How information-processing technology shapes thinking. Educational Researcher, 14, 11–17.
Tate, T. P., Warschauer, M., & Abedi, J. (2016). The effects of prior computer use on computer-based writing: the 2011 NAEP writing assessment. Computers & Education, 101, 115-131.
Wollscheid, S., Sjaastad, J., & Tømte, C. (2016). The impact of digital devices vs. Pen (cil) and paper on primary school students’ writing skills–A research review. Computers & Education, 95, 19-35.
Yamaç, A., Öztürk, E., & Mutlu, N. (2020). Effect of digital writing instruction with tablets on primary school students’ writing performance and writing knowledge. Computers & Education, 157, 1-19.
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