>Goal of paper is to "help teachers identify some of the effects of domination and colonialism associated with computer sue so that they can establish a new discursive territory within which to understand the relationship between technology and education.
>Goal of paper is to "help teachers identify some of the effects of domination and colonialism associated with computer sue so that they can establish a new discursive territory within which to understand the relationship between technology and eduction.
> This continuing pattern has encouraged many teachers of English to turn to-among other things-computer-supported writing environments as places within which they and students can try to enact educational practices that are more democratic and less systematically oppressive: for example, student-centered, on-line discussion groups in which individuals discover their own motivations for using language; on-line conferences in which students' race, gender, age, and sexual preference may not figure in the same ways that they do in more conventional face-to-face settings; collaborative groups in which students learn to negotiate discursive power. To create and maintain these communities-to defend their use and value-we have often used what Hawisher and Selfe have identified as an overly positive "rhetoric of technology"(55) that portrays computer-supported forums-among ourselves, to administrators, to students-as democratic spaces, what Mary Louise Pratt might call "linguistic utopias"(48) within which
cues of gender, race, and socioeconomic status are minimized; students speak without interruption; and marginalized individuals can acquire more central voices. And if this rhetoric is helpful in that it describes what we want to happen-and sometimes, to some extent, does happen-in our classrooms, it is also is dangerous.
>Charles Piller, in a recent article in MacWorld, notes that minority populations and lower socioeconomic populations are America's growing "technological underclass"
>we have to educate them to be technology critics as well as technology users.
>This reality is constituted by and for white middle- and upper-class users to replicate a world that they know and feel comfortable within. The objects represented within this world are those familiar primarily to the white-collar inhabitants of that corporate culture: manila folders, files, documents, telephones, fax machines, clocks and watches, and desk calendars.
>Programs like Word are already predisposed specifically for English speakers
>in training programmers to apply epistemologically diverse approaches to programming problems, and in representing non-hierarchically organized information structures like wicked or fuzzy problems (complex problems with no definite formulations or solutions)
Genre as Social Action (Miller)(Dani)
>The urge to classify is fundamental
>The semiotic framework provides a way to characterize the principles used to classify discourse, according to whether the defining principle is based in rhetorical substance (semantics), form (syntactics), or the rhetorical action the discourse performs (pragmatics).
>"a genre is composed of a constellation of recognizable forms bound together by an internal dynamic"
>Genre, in this way, becomes more than a formal entity; it becomes pragmatic, fully rhetorical, a point of connection between intention and effect, an aspect of social action.
>Miller proposes that the term "genre" be "limited to a particular type of discourse classification , a classification based in rhetorical practice and consequently open rather than closed and organized around situated actions).
>The classification Miller is advocating is ETHNOMTHODOLOGICAL!
>Idea of hierarchical levels that area formed from source material.
1. Genre refers to a conventional category of discourse based in large-scale typification of rhetorical action; as action, it acquires meaning from situation and from the social context in which that situation arose.
2. As meaningful action, genre is interpretable by means of rules; genre rules occur at a relatively high level on a hierarchy of rules for symbolic interaction.
3. Genre is distinct from form: form is the more general term used at all levels of the hierarchy. Genre is a form at one particular level that is a fusion of lower-level forms and characteristic substance.
4. Genre serves as the substance of forms at higher levels; as recurrent patterns of language use, genres help constitute the substance of our cultural life.
5. A genre is a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence; it motivates by connecting the private with the public, the singular with the recurrent.