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nicholas carr"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Nicholas Carr, former executive editor for the Harvard Business Review, is the author of several widely-acclaimed books on technology and the economy. Mr. Carr's writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Financial Times, The New York Times, Strategy and Business, and The Guardian.

Over the last two decades, there has been significant debate surrounding the potential benefits, or potential harm, generated from the provision of written corrective feedback (WCF) on the writing of language learners. The majority of research in the field has been conducted within a positivist paradigm, which often adopted experimental research designs that measured language development in the form of correct output of targeted linguistic items, with the output sometimes being limited to a single writing task. Through the use of an interpretive paradigm and a socio-culturally informed theoretical framework, this case study examines language development reflected by progression within the language learners’ zone of proximal development (ZPD), generated via the provision of direct WCF. Retrospective interviews provide rich qualitative data that highlight the experiences of participants as they process three different types of WCF. This case study found that WCF was not able to generate any significant shifts towards self regulation within the participants’ ZPD, and thus learning generated via WCF was, at best, minimal. The need for learners to collaborate in order to co-construct their ZPDs during both the processing of WCF and construction stage of writing tasks was identified. Pedagogical implications for language teachers are discussed.