From Morgan Gresham's dissertation:

There is, however, a considerable catch to their positive comments. Often, in their ongoing conversations about the class and in their semester evaluations of the class, students remark, "I've learned a great deal about computers. My writing skills have not changed." As a writing instructor, obviously my concern is that the goals I hope technology will foster in my classes are being overshadowed by the technology itself. Despite my clear theoretical warrants for incorporating technology, and specifically online computer technology, a networked classroom that only allows students textual glimpses of the very graphics-oriented World Wide Web can shift students perceptions of the class emphasis from writing to coding. Because the technology applications are not seamless (consider, for example, the differences between a command-line FTP program versus a point-and-click FTP), the integration of technology does not seem seamless to students, and this apparent lack of seamlessness has a strong impact on students' perceptions of the classes. Although I work continually to create a pedagogically and theoretically sound class, students' frustrations with the technology often become expressions of frustrations with the class design. Indeed, in recent class discussions with students about the "failures"--machines that freeze up, lack of graphics, no Windows--of our technology, our focus in the conversation kept shifting from technology to the structure of the class. These students argue that the ideas for implementing technology are sound in theory but their applications- what is available for our machines particularly--in our lab belie the possibilities of technology. Nor is our university alone in its technological antiquity. The technology grants of the '80s that fueled the boom in computers in composition have given way to funding shortages (despite the scholarship heralding technology in writing), and many English departments are finding themselves with aging technology and little or no money for upgrading software, much less hardware.

One of the strongest critiques of technology in the classroom is access, a critique that is becoming increasing difficult to answer. As LaMesa captures in the following quotation, students come to the university in particular expecting access to new technologies. Using outdated technology subsequently problematizes these students' relationships with both the university and the technology:



The only thing that I could possibly add (being, not so much now than at the beginning of the term, computer illiterate) is that these older systems add to the frustration of learning about web sites, listservs, HTML, and FTP. If the purpose of attending a university is to become educated on things like technology, why are students not given the proper equipment on which to learn. So often classes like these are a student's only opportunity to become enlightened about computer technology. How unfortunate it is not to offer them the best. --LaMesa, English 309-30

These students' goals for creating interesting and readable web sites get sublimated into the dominant discourse of technology. These students believe newer technology is necessarily better technology because their exposure to new technology is limited. It is much more difficult to critique that to which you do not have access, and provided only tangential access to newer technologies--occasional fifty-minute trips to the library, for instance--students tend to mythologize the powers of the new machines.

My point here is not to blame the technology available to my classes for students' various interpretations of class goals, a conflation that happens all too often when instructors see the technology available in labs such as ours. Such a simplification of the complex issues of access and pedagogy silences the multiplicity of discourses that CMC fosters. Rather, I want to suggest how the different features of this particular frontier play out together and how a close theory-practice relationship enables us to see those individual features of the computerized landscape more clearly. In short, the tensions that instructors and students feel in cases of mixed older and new technologies provide opportunities, not merely drawbacks, for greater understanding of the systematic workings of technology.