When I was in graduate school in the early 90s, the professor under whom I taught undergraduates decided that we should incorporate computer technology into the teaching of writing. So, instead of receiving a stack of papers from the students in my section, I received a computer disk onto which people in the campus computer center had put my students' work. I'd grade in the computer lab since my home computer was a PC and the school used Macintoshes; the high-tech assessment methods I was asked to follow basically amounted to jumping into a line of student writing, in a bold font, to point out errors in syntax, logic, spelling, and grammar, and writing notes at the end of the essay that attempted to summarize the sorts of observations that I would ordinarily have introduced in the margins of the paper. The system worked, I suppose. But using computers in this limited application was a little like writing while wearing a blindfold or forcing my right-handed self to use a left-handed mouse. I could do it, but the effort at duplicating my normal practices by using a limited alternative medium seemed needlessly great. When I assisted another professor the next semester, I gratefully returned to accepting stacks of stapled papers and enjoyed the freedom of letting my pen communicate my corrections and suggestions directly to the student in a way that made spatial sense to me. Sure, my handwriting was inferior to crisply fonted phrases, but I was able to easily denote the different levels of assistance and evaluation I offered each student through the use of copy editing marks, arrows and stars, and marginalia that seemed unmistakably targeted to the matter at hand. And so my first exposure to the concept of using new media technologies in the teaching of writing merely focused on the scribal nature of the computer. At the same time, of course, in my theory and literature courses, I was developing a postmodern engagement with which I now greet the advent of new media technologies and the recognition that academic culture unfairly privileges alphabetic texts. I went on to teach composition, literature, journalism, and even new media as a generalist at a small liberal arts college, but the concepts I championed in literary, cultural, and media studies were displaced when I taught freshmen to write; for me, the teaching of composition remained off by itself, stranded on a Greek peninsula of time, championing my genuine fondness for 2,500-year-old tropes. Looking back after reading Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, I give myself a small amount of credit for beginning to prepare myself for its message, however slow my process. My discomfort with bland PowerPoint presentations emanated both from my initial rejection of these clumsy efforts to unite attractive copy and higher thought, and
