What I really latched onto from this week’s readings was Stuart Blythe’s representation of agency in “Agencies, Ecologies, and the Mundand Artifacts in our Midst.” According to Blythe:

We gain it not by being an autonomous individual, but by being part of something larger, by being a part of systems that constrain and enable simultaneously. This dual nature holds true for technological and institutional systems alike. Computers have enabled us to accomplish many things. Simultaneously, ‘In recognizing ourselves as computer users,’ Johndan Johnson-Eilola writes, ‘we are also articulated (at least partially) as the used, the variable piece of the machine that closes the circuit, like a key in the ignition of a car’ (n.p.). Likewise, we are part of what makes intuitions operate.

What I found particularly interesting about Blythe’s statement is the idea that composition instructors and, stretching the statement just a little bit, composition students can all be described as components of the larger institutional machine. If instructors and students are all functional components of this institutional technology, I have to wonder what happens when one of these components start to function improperly or start to become worn with age.

For example, let’s say we have a poorly functioning composition instructor whose contribution to the larger technology starts to damage the student component. Or, we have a composition instructor who starts downloading inappropriate updates and tries to integrate new forms of teaching into their classroom unsuccessfully, which in turn damages the student component. I guess what I am getting at here is that composition teachers who integrate technology into their classroom are still impact by what Peter Elbows describes in “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process,” which is that composition instructors have an obligation to knowledge and society. In other words, we are obligated to help our students gain knowledge and we are obligated to insure that the knowledge we are providing to our students will benefit them beyond our classrooms. Technology then, according to Blythe’s description of agency, seems to a third obligation to our instructional contraries because what ever we determine to integrate into our classroom pedagogies must benefit our own epistemological assumptions about composition and must help students continue to be functional components of the institutional machine.

So, when do we step back for a moment and access the benefit of technological teaching practices and who plays the IT-tech we one of the components of the institutional machine become damaged?