Technology, the great balancing act

After reading Spinuzzi, Hart-Davidson, and Zachry’s article I began to think about how technology has changed the way I write and interact with technology both in a professional and in a personal setting. While we use technology daily for both professional and personal reasons, how much of this technology is meant to make us a better employee?

One such example is smartphones and other mobile devices. While most college students own a smartphone to gain a certain element of social cachet, in the workplace most employees qualify for a corporate phone. It is certainly not because organizations are worried about their employees Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare activities. While some employees will use this technology to benefit their social agenda it is really meant to serve as a chain to a corporate desk. There are relatively few places on earth and relatively few times a colleague or supervisor would refrain from calling.  

No matter if you are on vacation in the Caribbean or asleep when the boss calls you had better answer. As the authors explain, technology has effectively broken down any barriers between personal and professional lives. At the university level students are being trained to become effective members of a technology workforce.  From emails to Canvas these elements will reappear in their work life in the form of content management systems and primary communication mediums for clients and supervisors.  While technology has changed the way we teach, more importantly it has changed the way we work.

In examining the genres I use to mediate my work as a graduate student I have found complexity in even simplest of tasks. Grading papers is a task that requires a significant amount of time but seems to be a straight forward task that happens at all levels of the educational process. However, this task has all types of genres that govern and influence this process.  In the process of grading my students’ most recent papers I not only had to read and understand my students’ writing, I had to balance criticism with encouragement while using speed grader to interact digitally with my students’ work. Not only do I attempt to provide helpful feedback, I also have to provide a score that is translated into the overall quality of the assignment using a traditional grading system. In addition to providing a score on each individual paper, I also look for meta-level issues to discuss and explore in the class. 

Even the most common tasks in education require all kinds of genres to interpret and interact with. I would argue that the task of grading includes all of the assumptions developed by the authors.  My work is divided into events and even mini events such as finishing a sentence, paragraph or page. I have the attempt to define my own genres and these genres could be discussed as resources.  Understanding all of the elements required in this common task and studying how others engage in this process could provide insight on how to streamline and improve this process for those who grade and those who are being graded.  This type of research has wide ranging application in all kinds of fields.