It seems like I was writing about this not long ago, but I find myself back at it once again, inspired in part by CeeJ on the TechRhet listserv, as well as by local events on my campus.

To start with the latter: it would appear that our dean is unhappy with the small class sizes in the English department. In a recent letter he wrote in response to an external evaluation of our department, he noted that he did not believe that teaching writing was more labor intensive than lecturing. As such, he seems unhappy with the idea of small “writing intensive” (small means capped at 25), and he is certainly unhappy with our small graduate courses, which generally have fewer than 15 students.

Needless to say, it is a difficult environment in which to attempt to deliver a professional writing program. Writing Intensive at Cortland means 15 pages of graded writing per student; our courses are at least twice that on average. It would seem that our Dean has little understanding of, or places no value in, a workshop approach to writing, let alone the careful attention paid to a student’s writing in a smaller class.

I suppose it is a classic situation, made even more classic by the fact that the English department provides the lion’s share of writing instruction for the entire College from composition through advanced writing.

This is where I come to CeeJ’s post, which railed against the transformation of new media pedagogy into cheap distance education. Though the debate on the listserve surrounds various technologies, it would appear to overlook the connection between technology and capitalism which I have been discussing here. That is, the value of the technology has to be understood within its material context. CeeJ’s concerns elucidate that way in which information technology can work to maximize revenue while ignoring the significant effect upon the professional experience of being a teacher, to say nothing of the students’ experience.

I see this as just another incarnation of the classic situation I’m describing, all of which rests upon the logocentric, instrumental view of communication that we must make our primary site of concern. Only by moving into a new conception of language, information, and communication…of symbolic behavior…can we strive to incorporate new media into a new intellectual mode rather than a simple disappearance of the old one into military-entertainment complex.

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