β Scribed by Helen J. Schwartz; Christine Y. Fitzpatrick; Brian Huot
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This study explores lhe possibility thai writing on a computer can become unmedialed lhought, a kind of Vygotskian inner speech important to thought formation. Twenty-two college sludenls were asked to respond to a set of heuristic questions regarding their choice of plays assigned in class, once using paper and pencil and once using a simplified wordprocessing facility. The two groups reversed the order of writing medium with the same assignments. Respohses were longer and were judged mare developed with the computer regardless of which medium sludenls used first. A more in-depth study of a stratified sample showed: (a) that some students now feel profoundly disadvantaged wri~ling by hand; (b) that even a student who felt uncomforlable on lhe computer wrole a longer, belier developed response in that medium; and (c) thai on an emotionally charged topic one student's text seemed to show thought in process, like whal Bakhlin called "internally persuasive discourse." Students' texts suggest that a computer-assisted tulorial may act like Vygolsky's "zone of proximal development," which increases a sludenl's ability to do intellectual work. Writing lo discover on screen may create the kind of teaching movement in which students are particularly available for learning.
Research on the computer as a medium of writing instruction has been under investigation for more than a decade, encouraged by informal observations and claims of composition teachers and by widespread adoption of word processing as the medium of choice by writers from students to professional authors. (For a review, see Bernhardt, Edwards, & Wojahn, 1989; Hawisher, 1989, pp. 48-51.) Following Hawisher's call for a redirection of questions, efforts have turned from showing whether computer-mediated writing is "better" than writing with paper and pencil to focus on naturalistic studies that describe the nature of writing with computers. One of the most provocative claims for writing in the new medium comes from J. David Bolter (1991), who postulates that writers using computers experience a kind of writing that denies its limitations as writing and becomes unmediated thought. It would seem that writing is no longer separate from the mind, if the computer can forge an instantaneous link between the writer's thought and the writing surface. (p. 217)
We gratefully acknowledge the help of Ain Haas of Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis for help with statistical analysis and Elizabeth Stroble for her comments on a draft of this article.
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