Using I, Robot in the Technical Writing Classroom: Developing a Critical Technological Awareness

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Abstract

This article calls for technical writing courses to be more engaged in discussions on critical technological awareness. Being critically aware of technology means looking beyond a socially constructed artifact's assumed practical benefit and critiquing its effects and development. All discourse surrounding technology should be the purview of the field of technical writing. Because much technical writing pedagogy ignores cultural issues related to technology, this article promotes student engagement in discussions about social constructions of technology to foster critical thinking. This article concludes with a discussion of student responses to an essay assignment based on Isaac Asimov's novel I, Robot. Asimov envisions a high-tech world where technologies of the 1940s are amplified and new ones imagined to create stories where humans must interact with not-so-perfect robots. The novel offers a chance for students to reflect on how contemporary technologies, such as computers, are enmeshed into the social fabric of twenty-first-century life. Additionally, I, Robot generates classroom discussions that bolster student engagement and highlight the impact of contemporary (and future) technologies on workplace practices and the culture at large. Some topics that I, Robot addresses are issues of gender in technological fields, military beginnings for consumer technologies, and labor issues.

Introduction

Technical writing or technical communication should focus on all discourse surrounding technology. The ways in which we engage with, absorb information about, and communicate through technology means that a discipline focused on the communicating of technical information has a stake in analyzing the critical, rhetorical, and pedagogical value of technological discourse. Claiming that technical writing encompasses all discourse surrounding technology probably has many readers surprised. A typical view of the technical writing course is that it trains engineering, science, and information technology majors to communicate effectively. Another typical view is that assignments focus solely, or perhaps mainly, on instructions, procedures, and reports—the instrumental forms for conveying technical information. This article aims not to reconfigure the entire technical writing course, but to demonstrate how students can engage in critical technological awareness in technical writing courses that want to stress critical cultural analysis.

By expanding the definition of technical writing beyond simply communicating technical information, I hope to encourage students to engage in discussions that promote a critical understanding of technology. To embrace such a pedagogy, we need a paradigm shift away from creating products—final reports and such that showcase a student's semester-long “acquisition” of effective technical writing strategies. Professional writing textbooks often present technical communication formats as universal formulae to be applied across industries. However, the documents and contexts that students will encounter on the job will be varied and even unknown to many students because career paths can change. Instead of formats and attempts to codify formulae, we ought to privilege rhetorical situations for both general and specific professional communication situations. Analyzing writing about technology, whether it be specifications or science fiction narratives, offers teachers the chance to have students focus on ideologies surrounding textual and, therefore, material production. Such practices ask students to explore audience and purpose from a culturally aware position. The professional environments to which students aspire (or in which they participate) are politically constructed communities—firms, organizations, government agencies—that embody the ideologies of an economic system driven by producing or sustaining technology. In order to effect change, however, more teachers and students must adopt the paradigm that ideological discussions are not tangential to technical writing pedagogy (or other technology education), but germane to systemic analyses of technologies. After all, technologies reflect the cultures from which they come.

William E. Rivers (1994) suggested that technical writing teachers ought to incorporate “literature and literary criticism” into their pedagogy (p. 45). The field of technical writing has yet to consider seriously a broader pedagogy in light of Rivers’ call for looking toward non-technical discourse. This article is an attempt to consider what literature might have to offer technical writing, a field often assumed to be diametrically opposed to traditional assumptions about literature.

Section snippets

Critical Thinking in the Technical Writing Classroom

My goal for using Isaac Asimov's novel I, Robot is to move students toward being aware that there are sub(altern) discourses about technologies—and not just computers. These discourses do not consider technology inherently progressive or essentially good. The novel's setup fits in well with technical writing courses because, although it is 60 years old, it analyzes high-tech culture. Readers understand it as fiction, but they can be moved to read the novel's subtext, which illuminates the

Critical Technological Awareness Pedagogy

I define critical technological awareness as understanding how technology fits into our lives beyond merely using tools. This awareness, which initiates a student's acquisition of critical technological literacy, requires a social analysis of the impacts and demands of technologies and a personal exploration regarding one's uses and desires for technologies. In other words, having a critical technological awareness does not mean knowing how to use technology, but rather knowing how technology

Class Response to I, Robot

A graduate seminar that I taught had the most unique variations on the essay topic suggestions that I provided, and that seminar's students are the focus of this student voices section. Most essays showed very sophisticated understandings of technology from a social perspective. The overall course goal for this graduate seminar was to explore New Media as a socially constructed phenomenon. The course's main text was Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media. All but one student enrolled in the

Student Theme #1: Technology as Life/Work Necessity.

Not surprisingly, students equate the robots in I, Robot with contemporary computers and view the robots as metaphors for our reliance on computers for everyday tasks. One student, whom I will call Eve,2 notes that “we are willing to struggle with the problems that arise when we interact with these evolving technologies because we have become reliant on them for functioning in our society.”3

Student Theme #2: Technological Dis-ease.

Another theme students address when comparing I, Robot's technologies to contemporary real-world technologies is a sense of dis-ease caused by technologies that can monitor us without our knowledge, leading us to feel that we lack control over parts of our lives. Eve's discussion suggests that consumers might not feel good without the security of having a particular technology or knowing how to use one, but her classmate Barbara is emphatic “that we lack control over machines and media that we

Student Theme #3: Machine Infallibility/Predictability.

Karé also brings up a point that her other classmates develop further: The myth of machine predictability or infallibility. She notes that “we are entrusting robots and computers with more and more autonomous tasks” that cannot possibly replace human analysis. After all, as Karé asks, “how is a robot supposed to understand sarcasm or a joke? It can’t, so it simply treats everything literally.” The critically technological aware user recognizes limitations programmers and engineers—experts at

Conclusion

Ultimately, the above student observations continue the approach of working from a humanist perspective to influence technical writing pedagogy. As mentioned previously, Selber's (2004) book is a thorough blueprint for a humanist “reimagining,” but providing assignments like the I, Robot essay or just discussing alternatives to the dominant positivistic, technology-is-always-good attitude brings students to be critically aware of technology. Like Carolyn R. Miller's (1979) rationale for

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the students whose work I reviewed for this article as well as to the students who participated in all the I, Robot assignments and discussions I’ve had over the last several years. I also want to thank Greg Wickliff for his thoughtful responses to an earlier draft of this article and Aaron Jaffe for his encouragement to pursue this unique approach to technical writing. Additionally, I thank the editors and anonymous reviewers at Computers and Composition for their constructive

Aaron A. Toscano is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he teaches courses in technical communication, rhetoric/composition, new media studies, and women's and gender studies. His teaching and research interests also include rhetoric of technology, science and technology studies (STS), and popular culture studies.

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  • Aaron A. Toscano is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he teaches courses in technical communication, rhetoric/composition, new media studies, and women's and gender studies. His teaching and research interests also include rhetoric of technology, science and technology studies (STS), and popular culture studies.

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