I think the piece of this week that interests me the most is perhaps Kalmbach's article on why we didn't more aggressively use typewriters in classrooms. I'm attracted to his idea of the "Liquid Paper" metaphor, that image and looks really interests students because they see the finished perfect product as something to take pride in and to encourage better grades. The metaphor is certainly compelling, because it appears to make sense on a "common sense" level, but I imagine that it's more complex than he lets on, right? Students mimicking professional appearance, and perhaps neglecting content, is something that we can all see happening, especially when we ask students to perform more dynamic assignments that use graphics, video, sound files, etc. But is that the whole of the story? Aren't students performing a rhetorical move away from convincing work and toward presentation? Are there other cultural issues at work here? Did the instructor misread students' rationale?

And since when does White-Out look good anyway? What's wrong with pencil?

The other interesting issue that Kalmbach develops is why, if typewriters and small presses encouraged so many students to work harder, if not better, did we not have a huge push to introduce typewriters into our schools? He sounds right in suggesting that either the humanists tradition or the scientific management tradition squashed such thoughts, but another consideration might simply be about budget. The people that make budget decisions probably weren't convinced that the cost of hundreds of similar typewriters, plus ribbon, plus repair, plus storage, etc. was worth the small gain in student ability. If we can't fund art programs, in some cases, and we're still having a great deal of trouble coming up with money for computers, typewriters may not have been the first expense on people's minds thirty years ago.

Also really impressed with Stephen Bernhardt's article, too. He's relatively on-the-ball for 1993.