In his recently published Chronicle essay “A Brain and a Book,” James Lang invokes what I’m now calling the Ong Trope, the reference to Ong’s claim that writing is a technology that restructures thought. As with far too many uses of the Ong Trope, Lang’s invokes Ong without really thinking through the implications of Ong’s specific claim about writing restructuring thought. Lang, I think, gets the basic idea, and I don’t want to come down too hard on Lang because I read his essay as a thinking-through piece.

Where I see Lang’s essay going wrong, and where I see his invocation of Ong failing to apply Ong’s thought, is in failing to recognize books, pencils, and blackboards as technologies, in short, in failing to think through the idea that writing is a technology. Consider this passage (empahsis mine):

On the other hand, I am very skeptical that the value of “legacy content” like logical thinking, careful reading, and clear writing will diminish in our democratic society any time soon. Maybe someday but not, I’m guessing, in my lifetime or the lifetime of my students. I’m not even convinced that technology can offer better ways to teach some of those fundamental skills to our students.

Certainly technology has improved our ability to teach many subjects — students studying anatomy can now work on virtual human bodies instead of dead cats, and that seems to me like an improvement. And the ability of computer programs to simulate and model chemical processes or economic theorems certainly surpasses what instructors used to be able to do with chalk, blackboards, and overhead projectors.

But can a computer program teach careful reading skills more effectively than a great teacher working with books, pencils, and a blackboard? Maybe a properly designed program could do it more effectively for some students, but probably not for all of them.

The problem with this passage is that there is no teaching of reading and writing, no teaching of the “fundamental skills,” without technology. From an Ongian perspective, books, pencils, and blackboards are no less technologies than computers and software programs. Had Lang worked through the implications of Ong’s claim rather than just invoke it as a trope, he would understand the problem with the question: “can a computer program teach careful reading skills more effectively than a great teacher working with books, pencils, and a blackboard?

As written, Lang ascribes agency to humans when it comes to teaching with books, pencils, and blackboards, but ascribes agency to machines when it comes to teaching with computers and software. In Lang’s essay, books, pencils, and blackboards, that is the tools of writing, are not technologies.

If Lang is reading this post, I’m sure he’s now thinking, “Of course books, pencils, and blackboards are technologies,” and he states as much earlier in his essay. While he knows they are technologies, he lets his (our) interiorization of those technologies mask them as natural and, therefore, as pedagogical tools under human agency. By extension, because Lang hasn’t interiorized computers, they exist as something unnatural, as pedagogical tools that teach without human agency.

When we invoke the Ong Trope, we need to make sure we understand its implications, we need to recognize that all technology is artificial, no matter how comfortable or uncomfortable we are with them. Likewise, we need to recognize that all technology requires human agency for it be a tool. In other words, we need to recognize that while digital technologies will restructure thought in ways different than writing and print have done, we should not, we can not, assume that computers are some radical other. It’s how we use computers (or books, pencils, and blackboards, for that matter) that determines whether or not they are effective teaching tools.

And this brings me to what I think is valuable in Lang’s essay. He writes:

Anyone who takes the briefest look at theories of how human beings learn will discover that our students learn in all kinds of ways, and that we should never assume that any one method is universal or even a majority preference. Likewise, to blanket our current students with the label “digital natives” doesn’t take into account the wide range of experiences and preferences they have with technology.

What I take from this, however, is not Lang’s argument that we should “welcome the pedagogical innovations of Prensky and his collaborators,” while giving “equal respect to George Justice and his class of students holding books and pens.” It’s not that I believe students can’t learn equally well from both kinds of classrooms, as he claims, or that I believe teachers should be compelled to digitize his or her classroom. What I disagree with is the assumption that computers do one kind of thing. In her response to Lang, Sara Jameson ends by stating that we need “more ideas and ‘best practices’ for using the technology we have more fully,” and that’s what I find missing in Lang’s piece.

Learning with a computer doesn’t necessarily mean that we work through a series of drill and kill exercises or that we read/listen to some content and take a test on it. We can teach with computers as George Justice teaches with books and pens, were we all read, write, and talk about what we’re reading and writing. And we can use computers to have students apply what they’ve learned by using computers to teach other students.

While computers, as all technologies, have affordances and constraints, they allow us more affordances than do prior technologies such as books, pencils, and blackboards. As Jay David Bolter argues, computers incorporate elements of many prior technologies while at the same time allowing us to rework and even mix the capabilities of those technologies in new ways. By recognizing these affordances (and constraints) networked computers have to offer us as pedagogical tools, by developing “‘best practices’ for using [networked] technology we have more fully,” we will begin to have computers restructure our thought.