ENG 553 Project

In any educational system, there will be students who succeed and students who, for whatever reason, do not. Recently, national attention has focused on what educators have known for years; our society is producing a large number of students that fail to achieve success in school.

As a graduate student in English Composition and Rhetoric who hopes to one day teach college composition, I am concerned about why so many students are leaving high school without a basic knowledge of writing. As a student in ENG 553 Writing Technology, I am interested in the relationship between writing education and technology, especially the assumptions about, and our uses of, technology in the classroom.

Within this blog, I hope to do several things:

1. Research the relationship between writing education and technology. In preliminary research, I've found several assumptions and over simplifications of this issue that I believe may lead to incorrect or over simplified answers. I plan to start with several basic questions and go where the answers lead me. For example: What types of technology are being used in the classroom? How are they being used? Are they successful? What are the differences between successful writers and unsuccessful writers? Who decides? In what ways are we using technology to address the failures of writing education?

2. Experiment with a "new" (to me) writing technology. Research is always a sort of intellectual journey. I'm hoping that the framework of the blog will allow me not only to recieve feedback and advice from others, but to follow the questions where they lead without the roadblocks of preconcieved notions - tangents, wrong turns, and all.