John T. Harwood

Freshman English Ten Years After: Writing in the World.

Beliefs about the uses of writing in adult life sanction and direct the teaching of writing from elementary school through freshman English. Formal instruction in writing is ostensibly designed to help students meet the demands faced at the next educational level. Since colleges and universities hope to equip their graduates with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for adult life, writing teachers should know quite clearly the actual demands for and uses of writing among college graduates. In an effort to understand the uses of writing among college graduates, I surveyed in the fall, 1979, a random sample of 500 alumni of a small, state-supported institution, Christopher Newport College (Virginia). Approximately half of the alumni I contacted agreed to provide me with information about their writing, a rate of return considered acceptable in survey research. I found no significant differences between respondents and non-respondents in sex, race, age, or major. While my remarks must be considered tentative because of the small sample size and the exclusive concern with the alumni of one college, I believe that my findings illuminate some aspects of the Great Literacy Crisis of the 1970s. I asked each person in my sample to complete a 75-item questionnaire that was to be returned anonymously to me. I asked the alumni to identify the frequency with which they had done particular kinds of writing at work or at home during the previous two weeks. Next I wanted to know if they usually wrote alone or sought the help of others; whether they thought they were as skillful in writing as most other college graduates; whether they thought various undergraduate courses in composition and in their majors had prepared them for the writing tasks they faced; which aspects of rhetoric and style college teachers should stress; and how important to their career development they thought writing was. Finally, I gathered such demographic information as age, sex, race, income, length of employment, grade point average, major, and the type and prestige of their job.

Bringing Technology to the Learning Enterprise: A Talk with Carole A. Barone of EDUCAUSE.

Using technologys enormous potential to support student learning requires that we enter a new world—one that our students already inhabit. John Harwood and Carole Barone reflect on this and other challenges.