Reproduced with author's permission. The Luddites' lament now parodies itself, dashed off, more often than not, on word processors and then zipped across campus via e-mail. Hawisher found no verification that word processing actually helped students improve their prose. Inspection of those studies reveals, however, that most of the subjects were already accustomed to word processing and, for the purposes of the particular studies, had been asked to revert to pencil and paper. The progression in the research findings separated by a few short years makes some implicit and yet critical points.
Technology is an integral part of contemporary western culture.
Since it is now clearly a disservice to our students not to provide them with the opportunities to learn to use and think with technologies that pervade the culture, our challenge as educators is to understand how technologies work in educational contexts and then to deploy them appropriately and effectively. On the other hand, we also need to acknowledge that assessment of overly specific, isolated technologies is equally problematic, especially when we consider the multitude of migrating variables. Writing with Bank Street Writer is hardly comparable to composing with Word 6.0. As a result, assessment of narrow interface variables will be rendered obsolete and moot before the results are disseminated. The questions we ask, therefore, will be most productive for educational purposes if they sidestep the particulars of technologies and are framed, instead, in contexts most appropriate to our instructional objectives, contexts that reflect our teaching and learning practice.