Technological Efficiency in The Learning Management System: A Wicked Problem with Sustainability for Online Writing Instruction

摘要

Many online writing instructors are forced to use their institution's learning management system (LMS) as a result of interstate agreements for online course accreditation and a correlated requirement to create course shells. This situation presents a wicked problem for online writing instruction (0WI): the necessity to teach with/through an LMS, despite a well-developed scholarship tradition of technological critique in the computers and composition field. Using a framework comprised of problem, need, and solution, I highlight this problem's effects by conducting a literature review of critiques on technologies associated with the teaching of writing; uphold the argument that technological efficiency partially causes the problem; show how some writing teachers are attempting to solve the problem; and trace the outline of a solution using Thomas Rickert's (2013) theory of ambient rhetoric as it relates to efficiency and sufficiency in order to keep OWI a sustainable practice.