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The changing topography of computer access for composition students
Computers and Composition
ISSN 8765-46 15 All rights of reproduction reserved
14, 269-278 (1997)
@ 1997 Ablex Publishing Corporation
The Changing Topography Computer Access for Composition Students
of
THOMAS J. REYNOLDS University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
CHARLES R. LEWIS Westminster College
This article explores the notion of computer access for composition students. The authors focus on the need for a more complex understanding of access, given the real conditions under which students produce writing. Analyzing the issue requires attention not only to traditional configurations of class and ownership but also to the ways that current and ever-changing student working conditions create new challenges and problems.
basic writing composition
class studies
computer computer
access
pedagogy
We live and learn increasingly within a city of text. The decentered and distributed classroom itself becomes a text that we access across both space and time. Hooked up and mixed up in a new cosmology, the classroom becomes a city of text in all its contours and white noise. Within it we must make do. -Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics ( 1995, p. 125) Thus the social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production, change, are transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, the productive forces.
-Karl
Marx, “Wage-Labor and Capital” (1849/l 989, p 207)
As part of his 1996 Presidential election campaign, Bill Clinton repeatedly invoked something like the computer-access analogue to his 1992 call for universal health-care coverage-a pledge that as one of the planks in his bridge to the twenty-first century, every 12year-old shall be logged on to the information highway, in an infotopia made possible, in large part, by the similarly envisioned computer in every classroom. A typical rendition of this speech could be heard in Westland, Michigan, in September 1996 when the President made the following remarks challenging the electorate to join him in supplying computers and hooking up “every classroom in this country in every school” to the Internet: Direct all correspondence to: Thomas .I. Reynolds, 55455. E-mail:.
140 Appleby
Hall, 128 Pleasant St. SE, Minneapolis,
MN
269
270
REYNOLDS AND LEWIS
If we hook up every classroom in America that in the poorest inner-city
classrooms,
to the Information
in between, for the first time in the history of our country, to the same learning at the same level of quality, in the richest schools in America.
Superhighway,
what it means is this:
in the most remote rural classrooms and all the classrooms all of our schoolchildren
will have access
in the same way, in the same time as the students
That is achievable
and we must do it. [Applause]
(Clinton,
19%)
The Clinton-Gore vision involving computer technology, the classroom, and the goal of equal opportunity presents a number of important considerations for those of us who teach composition with computers. Its simplistic assumptions about “inside” and “outside” classroom spaces, as well as its problematic configuration of the conditions of computer “access” as a binary system of absence or presence, echoes a similar lack in our awareness as teachers of writing regarding the material conditions of student writing with computers. For as our own composition classrooms have increasingly and multifariously become zones of computer access, we have found that access issues have grown no less complex, nor do they show any sign of arriving at some teleological endpoint or “end of history” scenario in which we can just (again) take the material conditions of student writing as a universal given-and, therefore, an invisible component-in our abstracted economies of writing process and production. The promise of universal computer access, as it circulates in both popular discourse and composition theory and practice, seems to us to be too given over to a number of unexamined issues regarding what our students experience when they write-an ironic situation, given the emphasis on writing process and the role computers have ostensibly played in our ability to talk and teach process in classrooms where students write on computers. Indeed, most composition teachers today find value in teaching writing process, and perhaps it is true that the use of computers in teaching writing has facilitated this emphasis on process, whether we use computers in the classroom or simply expect our students to use them outside the classroom. In either case, students still do much of their writing practice outside the classroom-practice that we increasingly assume occurs at the threshold of this era of “universal computer access.” Accordingly, the past decade has brought about a sharp rise in our expectations about how students can reasonably meet these requirements, as homes, classrooms, dormitories, laboratories, libraries, and other private and public spaces increasingly offer “computer access.” These are the spaces where abstract notions of process assume quite real, situation-bound dimensions for our students and for us as writing teachers. But this threshold of universal access seems to be something of a moving target, for its contours continue to evolve along u>irh the technology, even as hopes and promises from all quarters that the glitches finally will be removed come and go like so many versions of software. Who among us whose students actively use computers has not faced any number of complications, from software compatibility to scheduling of computer labs, both inside and outside the classroom, not to mention those difficulties that arise as students traverse various positions between them? Yet, what do we know about these access sites? What do we need to know? And what might we do with this knowledge? In our experience, these types of questions do not get asked often enough.
ACCESS
IN AN EVOLVING
WRITING
PROGRAM
We taught first-year composition at the University of Minnesota’s General College from the late 1980s to the mid 199Os, a period in which the College’s writing program made a
The Topography
of Computer
Access
271
major commitment in terms of capital outlays, research, and training to the use of computers for teaching writing. Presently, all General College composition classes are conducted in fully networked computer labs. Along with this development, but not in any way coordinated with the General College writing program initiative, the university created many “public access” labs with the idea that students would have access outside classroom labs for all kinds of computer work. As the number of computers on campus increased exponentially in what we considered a short time (over several years), the spaces, both cyber and physical, in which students were writing were changing dramatically. To some degree, this drive toward getting students’ hands on computer keyboards proceeded, and continues uninterrupted, with a notion that we are close to providing at the campus level something akin to Clinton’s equal opportunity computer classrooms. Those who want to use a computer on campus should be able to do so at nearly any time (or really, any time, as some of the labs are open all night), the reasoning seems to go. Like many writing teachers, we have been pleased with these developments because we liked what was happening in our classes. Students were doing a lot of writing in a number of ways using the computers, a major goal for our writing program. As we stepped back, however, and saw the larger picture of students developing their “literacy” skillstheir writing skills in a social and cultural contexts-we began to see that new challenges and concerns were appearing as fast as we solved the problem of getting all our students to write on computers at all. Specifically, “universal access” posed three related questions: First, how did students perceive the relationship between classroom computer access and their writing practice? Second, what were students experiencing in their writing with computers outside the classroom? And third, how did expectations, conditions, practices, and outcomes involving their writing inside and outside the classroom reciprocally delineate one another? Such questions, in turn, ought to have some bearing on how we assess what happens in our writing classrooms, how we work and plan with administration and technical support staff, and how we engage students in a variety of self-reflective activities regarding the modes of production in their writing economies. When we first posed the question of computer access, our focus was on how one familiar topography of diversity-issues of race, class, and gender-might be connected to what for us was an unfamiliar one+-conditions of computer use throughout our students’ writing process and production. Even though we taught in computer labs and provided information such as the availability of other campus access sites (practices that supported our demands that student writing be word processed), these conditions were still “somewhere else” and “somebody else’s business”-sites of diversity we didn’t know much about. Moreover, because the whole discourse of computer access often carries with it a variety of associations with rights and entitlements, it seemed reasonable to ask how considerations such as race, class, and gender might play a role in our students’ writing conditions and practices. What we discovered, however, is that distinctions between inside- and outside-classroom access, as well as the concept of “access” itself, are so problematic, local, and contingent as to resist any useful essentializing or global claims about the relationship between the more familiar topographies of student diversity and patterns of their experiences with computers and writing. This is not to say we are arguing for some kind of “post-ideology” or a “virtual” effacing of social conditions made possible by computers; on the contrary, we propose that discussions focusing only on “writing process,” as well as
272
REYNOLDS AND LEWIS
overdetermined assumptions about the relationship between computer access and factors such as race, class, and gender, can fall prey to critical oversights regarding the very real material conditions under which student writers labor. Put differently, our experience working with students in the General College at the University of Minnesota, with its higher percentage of “nontraditional” student population than the rest of the university, led us to expect that some of our students might face more obstacles regarding computer access than do their “mainstream” counterparts. It seemed logical that we might encounter more challenges among students, for example, who had no computers at home, who had demanding work schedules that precluded taking advantage of campus labs, who were older adult students more distant from computer culture than their younger peers, or who could not afford to live in a dormitory or other campus residence that had computer facilities. We suspected that the patterns of home, work, and school at a large public commuter school might also present a number of concerns distinct from those of, say, a small private residential liberal arts college. However, the surveys, class assignments, and anecdotal evidence we collected at the University of Minnesota, as well as more recent experience teaching at Westminster College, a small liberal arts college, suggests that inside- and outside-classroom conditions, as they relate to the question of computer access, neither follow simple student predictors such as the relative wealth of a student’s home community nor show any immediate signs of going away as a matter worthy of attention. We should note here that this study arose out of a paper we presented (Lewis & Reynolds, 1993) at the 1993 CCCC conference in San Diego. Ironically, when we first returned to our text to consider it for publication, we were troubled by how antiquated many details were until we realized that they actually underscored our claims and concerns. So, although it may seem quaint that only five years ago we were fretting about the hybrid world of two sizes of floppy disks, giving up ecumenical hope for the end of sectarian strife between the Macintosh and MS-DOS faithful, and making no reference to the Internet, we find that computer access is still a topography worth mapping. As software and hardware evolution continues unabated, interfaces have not quite effaced the denominations by which users identify themselves and by which we typically identify the spaces in which they work, and the happy fields of the World Wide Web (WWW) pose any number of nodal nuisances.
POSTSTRUCTURING
INSIDE
AND OUTSIDE
ACCESS
The more we bring computers into our classrooms, the more both the identities of and the relationships between inside- and outside-classroom positions become unstable. For example, when we speak of computer acces.s in our classrooms, we beg the question of whether we are referring to students’ access to computers, to the computer’s access to a menu of resources and operations, or to both. As we have seen our computerized composition classrooms evolve from a collection of stand-alone work stations to a locally interactive network and beyond to the Internet and back again in ever-evolving configurations for student-teacher and student-student exchanges (such as Daedalus INTERCHANGE), the relationship between what and how we teach our students to write has become more problematic. Do we begrudge or do we value the time we spend teaching computer literacy, especially as the transactions that term denotes refer not so much to a body of knowledge
The Topography
of Computer
Access
273
as a set of aptitudes and sensibilities? Indeed, whereas less than a decade ago we spent the majority of our computer training time with students focusing on word processing, such instruction has mushroomed into coverage of researching online libraries, using e-mail, accessing the WWW, and negotiating the endlessly evolving and ever-local and sometimes labyrinthine configurations of institution-specific passwords, servers, protocols, and personalities (virtual and otherwise). So, although in our 1993 surveys of General College students, 90% responded favorably when asked how they liked working in the computerized composition classrooms, this favorable rating could not be correlated with any particular relation between computer use and their writing processes. That is, no single function emerged as a primary description of how students claimed to have made use of classroom labs. Choices such as “A place to work with the teacher on the writing process,” “A place to work alone,” “A place to work with other students,” and “A place to type” were evenly distributed among the responses. It is also important to keep in mind that this survey was completed before we introduced more extensive classroom networking (such as electronic conferences), e-mail, and Internet access. Again, this speaks to how computer access inside the classroom poses for us a kind of technological and pedagogical restlessness that shows no sign of abating. Accordingly, discussions of writing process-invention, drafting, revision, and so on-seem more like schematic and even outdated parables (“Are you a pencil pilgrim in the sloughs of despondency? Do a cluster diagram!“) than realistic hands-on descriptions of and prescriptions for the material conditions of student writing, at least insofar as we fail to connect up that universalizing parable of work with the local realities of their labor. Similarly, how do we assess the effectiveness of what is happening in our classrooms (whether as instructors or as evaluators of instruction) when students are increasingly engaged in so many different tasks that are themselves variously perceived by students? More than decentering the classroom in the conventional sense, computer access increasingly seems to decenter the idea of what students are doing, how we assign value to those tasks, and even “where” those tasks are taking place (what is the location of a student online, anyway?). Indeed, taken to some sort of postcorporate virtual extreme, the Clintonian vision of a computer in every classroom might find its ultimate expression in no real classroom whatsoever, as every student could be “inside” a virtual writing economy (or community, if we prefer that term) “outside” the classroom, which would be wherever access might happen-access completely atomized, nodal, contingent, and egalitarian. In other words, the corporate classroom might be transformed into a kind of constellation of independent student consultants who do not punch in but just go online. Although this scenario is by now familiar enough to all, whether cloaked in texts of desire or dread, perhaps we need to articulate new ideologies and pedagogies (or, as our references to means of production and material conditions are meant to suggest, revise the old ones) in order to accommodate these changes that are always already underway “inside” the classroom. Again, this speaks to how computer access inside the classroom poses for us a kind of technological and a pedagogical restlessness that shows no sigh of abating. Accordingly, discussions of writing process-invention, drafting, revisions, and so on-seem more like schematic and even outdated parables (“Are you a pencil pilgrim in the sloughs of despondency? Do a cluster diagram!“) than realistic hands-on descriptions of and prescriptions for the material conditions of student writing, at least insofar as we fail to connect up that
universalizing parable of work with the local realities of their labor. Similarly, how do we assess the effectiveness of what is happening in our classrooms (whether as instructors or as evaluators of instruction) when students are increasingly engaged in so many different tasks that are themselves variously perceived by students? More than decentering the classroom in the conventional sense, computer access increasingly seems to decenter the idea of what students are doing, how we assign value to those tasks and even “where” those tasks are taking place (what is the location of a student online, anyway?). Indeed, taken to some sort of postcorporate virtual extreme, the Clintanian vision of a computer in every classroom might find its ultimate expression in no real classroom whatsoever, as every student could be “inside” a virtual writing economy (or cummunity, if we prefer that term) “outside” the classroom, which would be wherever access might happen-access completely atomized, nodal, contingent, and egalitarian. In other words, the corporate classroom might be transfoi~ed into a kind of c~~r~stellation of independent student consultants who do not punch in but just go online. Although this scenario is by now familiar enough to all, whether cloaked in texts of desire or dread, perhaps we need to articulate new ideologies and pedagogies (or, as our references to means of production and material conditions are meant to suggest, revise the old ones) in order to accommodate these changes that are always already underway “inside” the classroom. For example. it is not accurate to say that the student who possesses the means of production by way of ownership of a computer at home has an advantage over the student who cannot afford a computer and who is limited to classroom use and campus support facilities. We have on many occasions found that the former student presents more challenges than the latter. Probably every teacher of composition whose students work with computers has encountered students whose “home sites.” whether homes, do~jtories. or laptops on the road, are not compatible with the classroom system and whose incomp~~tibility ostensibly serves as a rationale for students to remove or at least marginalize themselves from the writing classroom community in any number of ways (e.g.. skipping class or working outside the network). Put most simply, outside access might make inside access and, therefore, the classroom itself redundant--unless (or maybe ~#ren or US) we clarify more fully the relationship between writing process, classroom community. and computer technology.
ACCESS
BEYOND
AND OVER YONDER
As our students have let us know through various means including informal ~onversat~orl, surveys we have conducted, and, more recently. assigned exercises such as environn~el~tal descriptions of student computer lab sites outside our classroams, several factors subvert the idea that access outside the classroom is a simple matter. Collectively, these data suggest that some of these factors persist through passing computer generations while others are as recently created as the latest technology. We hope that our “reading” of this data will provide both “fine-grained” and “wide-angle” views of student writers, as Christina Haas and Christine Neuwirth (1994) have recently advocated (p. 334). The term cacccxs reveals its tangle of meanings when our students describe their own experience with computers in remote. noncIassroom computer sites. At first glance, their reports suggest that we have largely won the battle of providing access. When asked to comment on their own access to these sites, an overwhelming number, 95% of those
The Topography
of Computer
Access
275
surveyed, suggested already in 1993 that they had few problems finding such a site. Since that time, we have found increasingly fewer students who say that they have no access to computers. Although there have been few surprises in the locations of these nonclassroom sites (ranging from dormitories to public labs to home sites), the comments students have made about these sites nonetheless give us reason to question whether the problem was “solved,” especially when the degree and quality of that access are taken into consideration. What sort of access is it, for example, when time spent working at these sites for most students is 34 hours per week? It would be one thing if students were simply electing to spend this small (in our estimation) amount of time working at these locations, but other pressures related to the sites themselves play a large part as well. Students have reported that computer time is so precious in some dormitory labs that there are sign-up sheets filled nightly until 2:00 A.M. Once on a computer, users in these locations are limited to one-hour stints. Some are noisy settings; others are quiet. Other students point to their job sites as primary working locations, and here, too, time “borrowed’ from an employer assumes a limited, pressurized form. Time gained by students on computers, then, does not always translate into “free” or “fully productive” time. Access is also complicated for students by the degree of compatibility of software and hardware. Some students have access to one kind of machine in their classrooms and to another kind outside. Not just a question of Macintosh versus PC, the terrain still includes students who work on old Apple computers. Various homemade hybrids complicate the field even further. To be sure, many students are dexterous enough to move among these incompatibilities with ease. As one student who uses campus labs only when it is “absolutely necessary” told us, his computer on his kitchen table has no hard drive and takes the old large floppy disks, and the software is “not compatible with any other computer in the western world.” But it keeps him away, he tells us with satisfaction, from computer waiting lists, pay-by-the-page printing, and noise of public campus labs. Access for him means putting up with incompatibilities, in the way those who drive “outdated” but serviceable Volkswagen bugs do, for his own good reasons. For others, the myriad variations in wordprocessing software (in kind as well as between versions within any one package), disk density and format, and the decoding of unfamiliar computer screen language add troublesome shades of meaning to the “writing process” in action. Again, as writing teachers who recognize that effective academic writers need to negotiate these difficulties, our actions to help (or not help) equip students with knowledge of compatibilities of this sort have a significant bearing on the kinds of “access” students will enjoy outside our classrooms. To many readers of this journal, these may seem to be temporary and relatively insignificant problems that will eventually be solved in the evolution of technology. Already, for example, some university computer labs have cross-platform computers that read both Macintosh and PC formatted disks. Our point here, however, is not so much that students’ immediate situations are fraught with nagging, unsolvable technical problems but rather that these kinds of problems (perhaps technological “white noise” is a more accurate term) continue to reinvent themselves and affect student access to computers. However, as students’ needs begin to be better understood, we ought to find ourselves talking more and more to various units outside the writing program-a scenario that does not fit easily into old patterns of doing business. It should be said here that a key obstacle to helping our students effect these negotiations lies in the demands of the real material
276
REYNOLDS AND LEWIS
conditions of our work-heavy teaching loads, research demands, and class structures of academia that delineate relations within and among groups of students, faculty, and staff, for example. This point, in turn, underscores how some of the more familiar material conditions of work continue to play a role in newer iterations of the question of access for our students. Other vectors important to the mapping of outside-classroom access are the various social factors that shape the use of outside sites. Technical support, for example, is a factor many students tell us they lack outside classrooms. One might expect this to be the case more at nonuniversity sites (kitchen tables or friends’ rooms), but we have found that even the public access labs can cause problems. Even though there are technical people present to check students in at these sites, it is not at all clear that a technician’s presence insures a smooth log on to, let alone operation of, computers. One student, for example, when asked in class to write about his access situation, described it as nearly ideal. But when the first paper was due, he wondered if he might revise his assessment. He then told a story of lab attendants in two separate locations who brushed him off when he asked a few “very basic” computer-related questions. He rightfully felt that for the price of his tuition he should get these questions answered. In talking with him, we discovered that at least part of the problem may have been that neither our student nor the lab attendant had the means for communicating effectively across the expertise gap. Access at this point in the system had created a new communication situation not necessarily accounted for in the implementation of the open lab system. The point is not that most students have this kind of unsatisfactory experience but that writing pedagogy that asks students to write on computers away from class involves others in the student writing experience. An important consideration, then, for the issue of access is “portability” of the knowledge and language of the computer classroom to other sites. This kind of knowledge involves not only the physical know-how to operate a mouse and other hardware at remote sites but also the communication skills that will (almost literally) get you in the door. Memorization of passwords, log-on procedures, and desktop configurations are important, but so are the very words-both oral and written-students learn to use to describe these features and processes to others. Another factor shaping access to outside sites is the quality of environment found at them. We have already indicated that some students prefer to work at their kitchen tables while others prefer the “get down to work’ atmosphere of the public or dormitory labs. Finding a “home” site (or multiple sites) where students feel comfortable enough to write maximizes the quality of access gained. Cultural centers, Greek houses, and friends’ places are all significant in this regard. One student stakes out computers #37 and #38 in one of the public labs and makes it a nightly home for a friend and herself. How our classroom “community” intersects with these communities again raises the question of what constitutes access for students. Are these communities of writers who interact? Do they perform some of the communal tasks that we theorize make some students more effective writers? And, once online, does the community extend electronically, perhaps through email, to other friends across campus, to friends at other campuses? Access here may be even more “open” than we know. Other factors related to broader social and economic conditions also figure into the relationship between accessibility and location of sites. Several women made a point of mentioning to us, for example, that even though they have access to the campus public
The Topography
of Computer
Access
277
computer labs, their schedules allow for only late-night use, which raises other sets of safety and security concerns. Clearly, these students do not have the same degree of access as those able to confidently travel to and from labs. Similarly, students with demanding work schedules may find public access labs effectively off-limits. Complications such as these return us to traditional relations between class and educational resources. Our students’ experiences suggest that we need to recognize and honor their struggles with these kinds of complications, but we also need to avoid the “promised land’ kinds of solutions that ignore the full range of student experiences. Extending access to, for instance, a computer in every home would again present us with another generation of problems involving compatibility and classroom community-and yet another round of issues related to the moving target of access. Will access in this case include stand-alone or network capabilities? How will we insure that users’ home sites have equal access to what we might call the “hardwire highway,” given recent discussions about which neighborhoods will get next-generation infrastructure? As the boundaries for access change, so do our analyses of what constitutes effective access. Access issues are not limited to large institutions like the University of Minnesota. Computer access has been the recent focus of a major investment by Westminster College in a “Manuscripts to Megabytes” campaign featuring the construction of an impressive new wing to the library with a multimedia classroom, four fully networked computer labs, and offices for technical support staff. It is indeed a beautiful facility that is already heavily used and that offers much promise for future innovations in teaching. But, again, the arrival of computer access has created another set of short- and long-term concerns. For example, as a central site, it makes for an attractive showcase and ostensibly offers a degree of convenience. However, the college is now addressing the question of access in terms of scheduling, security, and expense, as students present diverse needs and expectations regarding their use of the computer labs. Moreover, as students, teachers, administrators, and technical support staff continue to work together to maximize the facility’s effectiveness, another “generation” of questions regarding computer access in student living quarters is born. Given the popularity of “home sites,” getting these sites online makes sense, even as doing so poses new challenges (e.g., cost and management of those sites that are both a part of and apart from the college, such as Greek system and independent student housing). As at a large commuter university, the small liberal arts college presents students with a writing economy whose modes of production will continue to evolve and that, therefore, must be addressed by teachers of writing rather than ignored as somebody else’s problem or imagined to have arrived at some sort of steady-state solution.
CONCLUSIONS:
TOPOGRAPHIES
AND MAPS
Our surveys and speculations leave us with a number of suggestions. First, teachers of student writing ought to have some familiarity with the conditions under which students write. This involves mapping two topographies: inventorying campus facilities and speaking with support staff, as well as surveying students in writing programs about outside access (and inside access in other courses). A second suggestion is to use this information to bring instructors, administrators, and technical support staff together for planning purposes. Because these three groups sometimes represent very different constituencies and sensibilities (e.g., student learning, student recruiting, building maintenance and secu-
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REYNOLDS AND LEWIS
rity. budgeting, decisions about software and hardware, working relationships with vendors, etc.), there should be dialogue before, rather than antagonism or indifference after, schools continue to pursue the moving target of computer access. Third, we believe it makes sense to make computer access a topic of reading, talking, and writing within the composition classroom. As course “content,” the question of computer access can serve as a useful way for us to become acquainted with students, for them to become acquainted with one another and share resources, and for them to develop a degree of self-awareness about their identities and predicaments as working writers.
Thomas J. Reynolds teaches composition and co-administers the writing program in the University of Minnesota’s General College. He has published on computers and English studies in this journal and in others. He is studying the connection of popular magazines compositional literacy for his dissertation. His e-mail address is and. Charles R. Lewis is an assistant professor at Westminster College, where he teaches literature, fiction writing, and composition and also coordinates the Writing Across the Curriculum Program. He has published on Toni Morrison and Robert Stone. His e-mail address is .
REFERENCES Clinton, Bill. (1996, September
17). White House press release. Remarks by the President in address to the community of the Westland area. Campaign speech, Westland, Ml. Available: http:// library.whitehouse.gov/ [“09 17 l996”]. Haas. Christina, & Neuwirth, Christine M. (1994). Writing the technology that writes us: Research on literacy and the shape of technology. In Cynthia L. Selfe & Susan Hilligoss (Eds.), Literaq and computers: The complications ofteaching and learning with technology (pp. 3 19-335). New York: Modern Language Association. Joyce, Michael. (199.5). Of mo minds: Hypertext pedagogy and poetics. Ann Arbor, Ml: University of Michigan Press. Lewis, Charles, & Reynolds, Thomas. (1993. April). Heterotopography and computerized composition: Some shapingjkzctors ofliteracy. Paper presented at the conference on College Composition and Communication, San Diego, CA. Marx, Karl. ( 1989). Wage-labor and capital. In Robert C. Tucker (Ed.). The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. (pp. 203-217). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1849)
ISSN 8765-46 15 All rights of reproduction reserved
14, 269-278 (1997)
@ 1997 Ablex Publishing Corporation
The Changing Topography Computer Access for Composition Students
of
THOMAS J. REYNOLDS University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
CHARLES R. LEWIS Westminster College
This article explores the notion of computer access for composition students. The authors focus on the need for a more complex understanding of access, given the real conditions under which students produce writing. Analyzing the issue requires attention not only to traditional configurations of class and ownership but also to the ways that current and ever-changing student working conditions create new challenges and problems.
basic writing composition
class studies
computer computer
access
pedagogy
We live and learn increasingly within a city of text. The decentered and distributed classroom itself becomes a text that we access across both space and time. Hooked up and mixed up in a new cosmology, the classroom becomes a city of text in all its contours and white noise. Within it we must make do. -Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics ( 1995, p. 125) Thus the social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production, change, are transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, the productive forces.
-Karl
Marx, “Wage-Labor and Capital” (1849/l 989, p 207)
As part of his 1996 Presidential election campaign, Bill Clinton repeatedly invoked something like the computer-access analogue to his 1992 call for universal health-care coverage-a pledge that as one of the planks in his bridge to the twenty-first century, every 12year-old shall be logged on to the information highway, in an infotopia made possible, in large part, by the similarly envisioned computer in every classroom. A typical rendition of this speech could be heard in Westland, Michigan, in September 1996 when the President made the following remarks challenging the electorate to join him in supplying computers and hooking up “every classroom in this country in every school” to the Internet: Direct all correspondence to: Thomas .I. Reynolds, 55455. E-mail:
140 Appleby
Hall, 128 Pleasant St. SE, Minneapolis,
MN
269
270
REYNOLDS AND LEWIS
If we hook up every classroom in America that in the poorest inner-city
classrooms,
to the Information
in between, for the first time in the history of our country, to the same learning at the same level of quality, in the richest schools in America.
Superhighway,
what it means is this:
in the most remote rural classrooms and all the classrooms all of our schoolchildren
will have access
in the same way, in the same time as the students
That is achievable
and we must do it. [Applause]
(Clinton,
19%)
The Clinton-Gore vision involving computer technology, the classroom, and the goal of equal opportunity presents a number of important considerations for those of us who teach composition with computers. Its simplistic assumptions about “inside” and “outside” classroom spaces, as well as its problematic configuration of the conditions of computer “access” as a binary system of absence or presence, echoes a similar lack in our awareness as teachers of writing regarding the material conditions of student writing with computers. For as our own composition classrooms have increasingly and multifariously become zones of computer access, we have found that access issues have grown no less complex, nor do they show any sign of arriving at some teleological endpoint or “end of history” scenario in which we can just (again) take the material conditions of student writing as a universal given-and, therefore, an invisible component-in our abstracted economies of writing process and production. The promise of universal computer access, as it circulates in both popular discourse and composition theory and practice, seems to us to be too given over to a number of unexamined issues regarding what our students experience when they write-an ironic situation, given the emphasis on writing process and the role computers have ostensibly played in our ability to talk and teach process in classrooms where students write on computers. Indeed, most composition teachers today find value in teaching writing process, and perhaps it is true that the use of computers in teaching writing has facilitated this emphasis on process, whether we use computers in the classroom or simply expect our students to use them outside the classroom. In either case, students still do much of their writing practice outside the classroom-practice that we increasingly assume occurs at the threshold of this era of “universal computer access.” Accordingly, the past decade has brought about a sharp rise in our expectations about how students can reasonably meet these requirements, as homes, classrooms, dormitories, laboratories, libraries, and other private and public spaces increasingly offer “computer access.” These are the spaces where abstract notions of process assume quite real, situation-bound dimensions for our students and for us as writing teachers. But this threshold of universal access seems to be something of a moving target, for its contours continue to evolve along u>irh the technology, even as hopes and promises from all quarters that the glitches finally will be removed come and go like so many versions of software. Who among us whose students actively use computers has not faced any number of complications, from software compatibility to scheduling of computer labs, both inside and outside the classroom, not to mention those difficulties that arise as students traverse various positions between them? Yet, what do we know about these access sites? What do we need to know? And what might we do with this knowledge? In our experience, these types of questions do not get asked often enough.
ACCESS
IN AN EVOLVING
WRITING
PROGRAM
We taught first-year composition at the University of Minnesota’s General College from the late 1980s to the mid 199Os, a period in which the College’s writing program made a
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major commitment in terms of capital outlays, research, and training to the use of computers for teaching writing. Presently, all General College composition classes are conducted in fully networked computer labs. Along with this development, but not in any way coordinated with the General College writing program initiative, the university created many “public access” labs with the idea that students would have access outside classroom labs for all kinds of computer work. As the number of computers on campus increased exponentially in what we considered a short time (over several years), the spaces, both cyber and physical, in which students were writing were changing dramatically. To some degree, this drive toward getting students’ hands on computer keyboards proceeded, and continues uninterrupted, with a notion that we are close to providing at the campus level something akin to Clinton’s equal opportunity computer classrooms. Those who want to use a computer on campus should be able to do so at nearly any time (or really, any time, as some of the labs are open all night), the reasoning seems to go. Like many writing teachers, we have been pleased with these developments because we liked what was happening in our classes. Students were doing a lot of writing in a number of ways using the computers, a major goal for our writing program. As we stepped back, however, and saw the larger picture of students developing their “literacy” skillstheir writing skills in a social and cultural contexts-we began to see that new challenges and concerns were appearing as fast as we solved the problem of getting all our students to write on computers at all. Specifically, “universal access” posed three related questions: First, how did students perceive the relationship between classroom computer access and their writing practice? Second, what were students experiencing in their writing with computers outside the classroom? And third, how did expectations, conditions, practices, and outcomes involving their writing inside and outside the classroom reciprocally delineate one another? Such questions, in turn, ought to have some bearing on how we assess what happens in our writing classrooms, how we work and plan with administration and technical support staff, and how we engage students in a variety of self-reflective activities regarding the modes of production in their writing economies. When we first posed the question of computer access, our focus was on how one familiar topography of diversity-issues of race, class, and gender-might be connected to what for us was an unfamiliar one+-conditions of computer use throughout our students’ writing process and production. Even though we taught in computer labs and provided information such as the availability of other campus access sites (practices that supported our demands that student writing be word processed), these conditions were still “somewhere else” and “somebody else’s business”-sites of diversity we didn’t know much about. Moreover, because the whole discourse of computer access often carries with it a variety of associations with rights and entitlements, it seemed reasonable to ask how considerations such as race, class, and gender might play a role in our students’ writing conditions and practices. What we discovered, however, is that distinctions between inside- and outside-classroom access, as well as the concept of “access” itself, are so problematic, local, and contingent as to resist any useful essentializing or global claims about the relationship between the more familiar topographies of student diversity and patterns of their experiences with computers and writing. This is not to say we are arguing for some kind of “post-ideology” or a “virtual” effacing of social conditions made possible by computers; on the contrary, we propose that discussions focusing only on “writing process,” as well as
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overdetermined assumptions about the relationship between computer access and factors such as race, class, and gender, can fall prey to critical oversights regarding the very real material conditions under which student writers labor. Put differently, our experience working with students in the General College at the University of Minnesota, with its higher percentage of “nontraditional” student population than the rest of the university, led us to expect that some of our students might face more obstacles regarding computer access than do their “mainstream” counterparts. It seemed logical that we might encounter more challenges among students, for example, who had no computers at home, who had demanding work schedules that precluded taking advantage of campus labs, who were older adult students more distant from computer culture than their younger peers, or who could not afford to live in a dormitory or other campus residence that had computer facilities. We suspected that the patterns of home, work, and school at a large public commuter school might also present a number of concerns distinct from those of, say, a small private residential liberal arts college. However, the surveys, class assignments, and anecdotal evidence we collected at the University of Minnesota, as well as more recent experience teaching at Westminster College, a small liberal arts college, suggests that inside- and outside-classroom conditions, as they relate to the question of computer access, neither follow simple student predictors such as the relative wealth of a student’s home community nor show any immediate signs of going away as a matter worthy of attention. We should note here that this study arose out of a paper we presented (Lewis & Reynolds, 1993) at the 1993 CCCC conference in San Diego. Ironically, when we first returned to our text to consider it for publication, we were troubled by how antiquated many details were until we realized that they actually underscored our claims and concerns. So, although it may seem quaint that only five years ago we were fretting about the hybrid world of two sizes of floppy disks, giving up ecumenical hope for the end of sectarian strife between the Macintosh and MS-DOS faithful, and making no reference to the Internet, we find that computer access is still a topography worth mapping. As software and hardware evolution continues unabated, interfaces have not quite effaced the denominations by which users identify themselves and by which we typically identify the spaces in which they work, and the happy fields of the World Wide Web (WWW) pose any number of nodal nuisances.
POSTSTRUCTURING
INSIDE
AND OUTSIDE
ACCESS
The more we bring computers into our classrooms, the more both the identities of and the relationships between inside- and outside-classroom positions become unstable. For example, when we speak of computer acces.s in our classrooms, we beg the question of whether we are referring to students’ access to computers, to the computer’s access to a menu of resources and operations, or to both. As we have seen our computerized composition classrooms evolve from a collection of stand-alone work stations to a locally interactive network and beyond to the Internet and back again in ever-evolving configurations for student-teacher and student-student exchanges (such as Daedalus INTERCHANGE), the relationship between what and how we teach our students to write has become more problematic. Do we begrudge or do we value the time we spend teaching computer literacy, especially as the transactions that term denotes refer not so much to a body of knowledge
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as a set of aptitudes and sensibilities? Indeed, whereas less than a decade ago we spent the majority of our computer training time with students focusing on word processing, such instruction has mushroomed into coverage of researching online libraries, using e-mail, accessing the WWW, and negotiating the endlessly evolving and ever-local and sometimes labyrinthine configurations of institution-specific passwords, servers, protocols, and personalities (virtual and otherwise). So, although in our 1993 surveys of General College students, 90% responded favorably when asked how they liked working in the computerized composition classrooms, this favorable rating could not be correlated with any particular relation between computer use and their writing processes. That is, no single function emerged as a primary description of how students claimed to have made use of classroom labs. Choices such as “A place to work with the teacher on the writing process,” “A place to work alone,” “A place to work with other students,” and “A place to type” were evenly distributed among the responses. It is also important to keep in mind that this survey was completed before we introduced more extensive classroom networking (such as electronic conferences), e-mail, and Internet access. Again, this speaks to how computer access inside the classroom poses for us a kind of technological and pedagogical restlessness that shows no sign of abating. Accordingly, discussions of writing process-invention, drafting, revision, and so on-seem more like schematic and even outdated parables (“Are you a pencil pilgrim in the sloughs of despondency? Do a cluster diagram!“) than realistic hands-on descriptions of and prescriptions for the material conditions of student writing, at least insofar as we fail to connect up that universalizing parable of work with the local realities of their labor. Similarly, how do we assess the effectiveness of what is happening in our classrooms (whether as instructors or as evaluators of instruction) when students are increasingly engaged in so many different tasks that are themselves variously perceived by students? More than decentering the classroom in the conventional sense, computer access increasingly seems to decenter the idea of what students are doing, how we assign value to those tasks, and even “where” those tasks are taking place (what is the location of a student online, anyway?). Indeed, taken to some sort of postcorporate virtual extreme, the Clintonian vision of a computer in every classroom might find its ultimate expression in no real classroom whatsoever, as every student could be “inside” a virtual writing economy (or community, if we prefer that term) “outside” the classroom, which would be wherever access might happen-access completely atomized, nodal, contingent, and egalitarian. In other words, the corporate classroom might be transformed into a kind of constellation of independent student consultants who do not punch in but just go online. Although this scenario is by now familiar enough to all, whether cloaked in texts of desire or dread, perhaps we need to articulate new ideologies and pedagogies (or, as our references to means of production and material conditions are meant to suggest, revise the old ones) in order to accommodate these changes that are always already underway “inside” the classroom. Again, this speaks to how computer access inside the classroom poses for us a kind of technological and a pedagogical restlessness that shows no sigh of abating. Accordingly, discussions of writing process-invention, drafting, revisions, and so on-seem more like schematic and even outdated parables (“Are you a pencil pilgrim in the sloughs of despondency? Do a cluster diagram!“) than realistic hands-on descriptions of and prescriptions for the material conditions of student writing, at least insofar as we fail to connect up that
universalizing parable of work with the local realities of their labor. Similarly, how do we assess the effectiveness of what is happening in our classrooms (whether as instructors or as evaluators of instruction) when students are increasingly engaged in so many different tasks that are themselves variously perceived by students? More than decentering the classroom in the conventional sense, computer access increasingly seems to decenter the idea of what students are doing, how we assign value to those tasks and even “where” those tasks are taking place (what is the location of a student online, anyway?). Indeed, taken to some sort of postcorporate virtual extreme, the Clintanian vision of a computer in every classroom might find its ultimate expression in no real classroom whatsoever, as every student could be “inside” a virtual writing economy (or cummunity, if we prefer that term) “outside” the classroom, which would be wherever access might happen-access completely atomized, nodal, contingent, and egalitarian. In other words, the corporate classroom might be transfoi~ed into a kind of c~~r~stellation of independent student consultants who do not punch in but just go online. Although this scenario is by now familiar enough to all, whether cloaked in texts of desire or dread, perhaps we need to articulate new ideologies and pedagogies (or, as our references to means of production and material conditions are meant to suggest, revise the old ones) in order to accommodate these changes that are always already underway “inside” the classroom. For example. it is not accurate to say that the student who possesses the means of production by way of ownership of a computer at home has an advantage over the student who cannot afford a computer and who is limited to classroom use and campus support facilities. We have on many occasions found that the former student presents more challenges than the latter. Probably every teacher of composition whose students work with computers has encountered students whose “home sites.” whether homes, do~jtories. or laptops on the road, are not compatible with the classroom system and whose incomp~~tibility ostensibly serves as a rationale for students to remove or at least marginalize themselves from the writing classroom community in any number of ways (e.g.. skipping class or working outside the network). Put most simply, outside access might make inside access and, therefore, the classroom itself redundant--unless (or maybe ~#ren or US) we clarify more fully the relationship between writing process, classroom community. and computer technology.
ACCESS
BEYOND
AND OVER YONDER
As our students have let us know through various means including informal ~onversat~orl, surveys we have conducted, and, more recently. assigned exercises such as environn~el~tal descriptions of student computer lab sites outside our classroams, several factors subvert the idea that access outside the classroom is a simple matter. Collectively, these data suggest that some of these factors persist through passing computer generations while others are as recently created as the latest technology. We hope that our “reading” of this data will provide both “fine-grained” and “wide-angle” views of student writers, as Christina Haas and Christine Neuwirth (1994) have recently advocated (p. 334). The term cacccxs reveals its tangle of meanings when our students describe their own experience with computers in remote. noncIassroom computer sites. At first glance, their reports suggest that we have largely won the battle of providing access. When asked to comment on their own access to these sites, an overwhelming number, 95% of those
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surveyed, suggested already in 1993 that they had few problems finding such a site. Since that time, we have found increasingly fewer students who say that they have no access to computers. Although there have been few surprises in the locations of these nonclassroom sites (ranging from dormitories to public labs to home sites), the comments students have made about these sites nonetheless give us reason to question whether the problem was “solved,” especially when the degree and quality of that access are taken into consideration. What sort of access is it, for example, when time spent working at these sites for most students is 34 hours per week? It would be one thing if students were simply electing to spend this small (in our estimation) amount of time working at these locations, but other pressures related to the sites themselves play a large part as well. Students have reported that computer time is so precious in some dormitory labs that there are sign-up sheets filled nightly until 2:00 A.M. Once on a computer, users in these locations are limited to one-hour stints. Some are noisy settings; others are quiet. Other students point to their job sites as primary working locations, and here, too, time “borrowed’ from an employer assumes a limited, pressurized form. Time gained by students on computers, then, does not always translate into “free” or “fully productive” time. Access is also complicated for students by the degree of compatibility of software and hardware. Some students have access to one kind of machine in their classrooms and to another kind outside. Not just a question of Macintosh versus PC, the terrain still includes students who work on old Apple computers. Various homemade hybrids complicate the field even further. To be sure, many students are dexterous enough to move among these incompatibilities with ease. As one student who uses campus labs only when it is “absolutely necessary” told us, his computer on his kitchen table has no hard drive and takes the old large floppy disks, and the software is “not compatible with any other computer in the western world.” But it keeps him away, he tells us with satisfaction, from computer waiting lists, pay-by-the-page printing, and noise of public campus labs. Access for him means putting up with incompatibilities, in the way those who drive “outdated” but serviceable Volkswagen bugs do, for his own good reasons. For others, the myriad variations in wordprocessing software (in kind as well as between versions within any one package), disk density and format, and the decoding of unfamiliar computer screen language add troublesome shades of meaning to the “writing process” in action. Again, as writing teachers who recognize that effective academic writers need to negotiate these difficulties, our actions to help (or not help) equip students with knowledge of compatibilities of this sort have a significant bearing on the kinds of “access” students will enjoy outside our classrooms. To many readers of this journal, these may seem to be temporary and relatively insignificant problems that will eventually be solved in the evolution of technology. Already, for example, some university computer labs have cross-platform computers that read both Macintosh and PC formatted disks. Our point here, however, is not so much that students’ immediate situations are fraught with nagging, unsolvable technical problems but rather that these kinds of problems (perhaps technological “white noise” is a more accurate term) continue to reinvent themselves and affect student access to computers. However, as students’ needs begin to be better understood, we ought to find ourselves talking more and more to various units outside the writing program-a scenario that does not fit easily into old patterns of doing business. It should be said here that a key obstacle to helping our students effect these negotiations lies in the demands of the real material
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conditions of our work-heavy teaching loads, research demands, and class structures of academia that delineate relations within and among groups of students, faculty, and staff, for example. This point, in turn, underscores how some of the more familiar material conditions of work continue to play a role in newer iterations of the question of access for our students. Other vectors important to the mapping of outside-classroom access are the various social factors that shape the use of outside sites. Technical support, for example, is a factor many students tell us they lack outside classrooms. One might expect this to be the case more at nonuniversity sites (kitchen tables or friends’ rooms), but we have found that even the public access labs can cause problems. Even though there are technical people present to check students in at these sites, it is not at all clear that a technician’s presence insures a smooth log on to, let alone operation of, computers. One student, for example, when asked in class to write about his access situation, described it as nearly ideal. But when the first paper was due, he wondered if he might revise his assessment. He then told a story of lab attendants in two separate locations who brushed him off when he asked a few “very basic” computer-related questions. He rightfully felt that for the price of his tuition he should get these questions answered. In talking with him, we discovered that at least part of the problem may have been that neither our student nor the lab attendant had the means for communicating effectively across the expertise gap. Access at this point in the system had created a new communication situation not necessarily accounted for in the implementation of the open lab system. The point is not that most students have this kind of unsatisfactory experience but that writing pedagogy that asks students to write on computers away from class involves others in the student writing experience. An important consideration, then, for the issue of access is “portability” of the knowledge and language of the computer classroom to other sites. This kind of knowledge involves not only the physical know-how to operate a mouse and other hardware at remote sites but also the communication skills that will (almost literally) get you in the door. Memorization of passwords, log-on procedures, and desktop configurations are important, but so are the very words-both oral and written-students learn to use to describe these features and processes to others. Another factor shaping access to outside sites is the quality of environment found at them. We have already indicated that some students prefer to work at their kitchen tables while others prefer the “get down to work’ atmosphere of the public or dormitory labs. Finding a “home” site (or multiple sites) where students feel comfortable enough to write maximizes the quality of access gained. Cultural centers, Greek houses, and friends’ places are all significant in this regard. One student stakes out computers #37 and #38 in one of the public labs and makes it a nightly home for a friend and herself. How our classroom “community” intersects with these communities again raises the question of what constitutes access for students. Are these communities of writers who interact? Do they perform some of the communal tasks that we theorize make some students more effective writers? And, once online, does the community extend electronically, perhaps through email, to other friends across campus, to friends at other campuses? Access here may be even more “open” than we know. Other factors related to broader social and economic conditions also figure into the relationship between accessibility and location of sites. Several women made a point of mentioning to us, for example, that even though they have access to the campus public
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computer labs, their schedules allow for only late-night use, which raises other sets of safety and security concerns. Clearly, these students do not have the same degree of access as those able to confidently travel to and from labs. Similarly, students with demanding work schedules may find public access labs effectively off-limits. Complications such as these return us to traditional relations between class and educational resources. Our students’ experiences suggest that we need to recognize and honor their struggles with these kinds of complications, but we also need to avoid the “promised land’ kinds of solutions that ignore the full range of student experiences. Extending access to, for instance, a computer in every home would again present us with another generation of problems involving compatibility and classroom community-and yet another round of issues related to the moving target of access. Will access in this case include stand-alone or network capabilities? How will we insure that users’ home sites have equal access to what we might call the “hardwire highway,” given recent discussions about which neighborhoods will get next-generation infrastructure? As the boundaries for access change, so do our analyses of what constitutes effective access. Access issues are not limited to large institutions like the University of Minnesota. Computer access has been the recent focus of a major investment by Westminster College in a “Manuscripts to Megabytes” campaign featuring the construction of an impressive new wing to the library with a multimedia classroom, four fully networked computer labs, and offices for technical support staff. It is indeed a beautiful facility that is already heavily used and that offers much promise for future innovations in teaching. But, again, the arrival of computer access has created another set of short- and long-term concerns. For example, as a central site, it makes for an attractive showcase and ostensibly offers a degree of convenience. However, the college is now addressing the question of access in terms of scheduling, security, and expense, as students present diverse needs and expectations regarding their use of the computer labs. Moreover, as students, teachers, administrators, and technical support staff continue to work together to maximize the facility’s effectiveness, another “generation” of questions regarding computer access in student living quarters is born. Given the popularity of “home sites,” getting these sites online makes sense, even as doing so poses new challenges (e.g., cost and management of those sites that are both a part of and apart from the college, such as Greek system and independent student housing). As at a large commuter university, the small liberal arts college presents students with a writing economy whose modes of production will continue to evolve and that, therefore, must be addressed by teachers of writing rather than ignored as somebody else’s problem or imagined to have arrived at some sort of steady-state solution.
CONCLUSIONS:
TOPOGRAPHIES
AND MAPS
Our surveys and speculations leave us with a number of suggestions. First, teachers of student writing ought to have some familiarity with the conditions under which students write. This involves mapping two topographies: inventorying campus facilities and speaking with support staff, as well as surveying students in writing programs about outside access (and inside access in other courses). A second suggestion is to use this information to bring instructors, administrators, and technical support staff together for planning purposes. Because these three groups sometimes represent very different constituencies and sensibilities (e.g., student learning, student recruiting, building maintenance and secu-
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rity. budgeting, decisions about software and hardware, working relationships with vendors, etc.), there should be dialogue before, rather than antagonism or indifference after, schools continue to pursue the moving target of computer access. Third, we believe it makes sense to make computer access a topic of reading, talking, and writing within the composition classroom. As course “content,” the question of computer access can serve as a useful way for us to become acquainted with students, for them to become acquainted with one another and share resources, and for them to develop a degree of self-awareness about their identities and predicaments as working writers.
Thomas J. Reynolds teaches composition and co-administers the writing program in the University of Minnesota’s General College. He has published on computers and English studies in this journal and in others. He is studying the connection of popular magazines compositional literacy for his dissertation. His e-mail address is and
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17). White House press release. Remarks by the President in address to the community of the Westland area. Campaign speech, Westland, Ml. Available: http:// library.whitehouse.gov/ [“09 17 l996”]. Haas. Christina, & Neuwirth, Christine M. (1994). Writing the technology that writes us: Research on literacy and the shape of technology. In Cynthia L. Selfe & Susan Hilligoss (Eds.), Literaq and computers: The complications ofteaching and learning with technology (pp. 3 19-335). New York: Modern Language Association. Joyce, Michael. (199.5). Of mo minds: Hypertext pedagogy and poetics. Ann Arbor, Ml: University of Michigan Press. Lewis, Charles, & Reynolds, Thomas. (1993. April). Heterotopography and computerized composition: Some shapingjkzctors ofliteracy. Paper presented at the conference on College Composition and Communication, San Diego, CA. Marx, Karl. ( 1989). Wage-labor and capital. In Robert C. Tucker (Ed.). The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. (pp. 203-217). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1849)