Basic Writing

This essay surveys the interactions among Basic Writing students, Basic Writing curricula, and new technologies in higher education. We began the project with the goal of identifying curricular transformations which had occurred as a result of such interactions. ¹ Rather than a single set of transformations, what we found in our survey was a landscape of basic writing instruction dotted with a variety of curricular transformations. Some of these involved new technologies. But it is not likely that these transformations occurred as a result of the technologies which are featured in them. Rather, it is more likely that several factors—the historical confluence of reform in Composition Studies, the availability of new, relatively inexpensive computer and networking technology, and Basic Writing’s growth in sophistication over decades of open-admissions—have sponsored a great deal of change in the writing curriculum for developmental students, change involving a variety of technologies and uses.