"The Future Ain't What It Used To Be"
Professor Mark Warschauer will deliver the keynote address at the Symposium on Second Language Writing at Arizona State University November 5-7, 2009. His address is entitled: "The Future Ain't What It Used To Be."
Address Summation
Less than two decades ago, new forms of socially constructed multimedia were believed to be devaluing writing, marginalizing the essay, and contributing to a postmodern death of the author. But today, writing is more important than ever before in human history, the essay is critical to success in schools and influence in society, and, as Chris Chesher has noted, "the author is alive and well, and has a blog." This presentation briefly summarizes the history of computers and writing, surveys its current terrain, and examines its future, particularly in relationship to second language teaching and learning. Issues addressed included the development and diffusion of low-cost wireless mobile devices such as netbooks and smartbooks; the expanding role of open source software, open educational resources, and cloud computing, especially in conjunction with these devices; the affordances of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis and their impact on writing; the evolution of artificial intelligence-based software to score and respond to writing and the increased use of such software in schools; and the social and economic context that shapes who has access to all these tools and how they are used inside and outside the classroom.
