English and information: Rhetoric, educational work, and teaching with technology.

摘要

In this dissertation, English and Information: Rhetoric, Educational Work, and Teaching with Technology, I analyze educational technology projects as they can be related to English teaching, emphasizing how technology's shifting constraints and demands inform both teaching and research. The analysis is rhetorical, since educational technology projects generate constructive figurations of teaching and learning, and these figurations transform educational situations to solve technical and practical problems. These rhetorical transformations affect education in educational practice, teacher discourse, and institutional organization. Once isolated by rhetorical analysis, figurations can suggest not only insights about education's changing public and institutional situations but also practical strategies for coping with change.; My analysis focuses on three different projects in educational technology, drawing from each one insights and strategies according to its place in relation to English teaching. First, I explore what English teachers can learn about their educational work from the metaphorics of writing assessment deployed in the development of computerized essay assessment technologies, including Ellis Page's Project Essay Grade (PEG). Next, I analyze the specifically pedagogical potentials of "information overload" as a constitutive figuration in the technological development of the Internet protocols associated with the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). Third, I describe the political ramifications of figuring students as flexible communicators as this figuration appears in the projects of EDUCAUSE, a prominent institutional advocate of distance education in colleges and universities. In a final chapter, I argue that rhetorical analysis of past and present technology projects can inform contemporary figurations of rhetorical education in English.