"The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class"

In "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class," Hawisher and Selfe (1991) argue that teachers of composition must be vigilant in order to prevent unwittingly reproducing dominant power structures. As of now, there's an overly optimistic discourse that pervades the fields of composition and/or computers and composition. Teachers talk about technology's pros, about how utopian it is, how it has the potential to erase power asymmetries and realize long-held educational ideals, etc., but they don't talk about technologies darker side--about how, for instance, teachers can draw on ed tech to surveil their students. Thus Hawisher and Selfe (1991) advocate for a more balanced, complete, truthful, etc. discourse about technology in the classroom--rather than the rhetoric of technology that's popular now ("rhetoric" being used in the bad sense, here).

Technology has the capacity to realize different relations between teacher and student, but we have to let it by being critical of the rhetoric of technology. But we also have to listen carefully to the technology itself, to how the technology has the capacity to change the nature of the situation (rather than just reproducing a prior situation).

How do we be critical though? or listen to the technology? let the technology itself be an agent? rather than the habit of prevailing education? By sticking to outcomes (64). That was one answer they hinted at.

My question is: how can we be architects--control f count = 1--of classrooms when we, well, aren't architects of the classroom? how can we be architects of technology without being masters of it? is it by turning to information architecture? by design practices? by misusing the technology? by making sure that the technology is making people's relationship to other people better? or is it by changing the architecture in a more literal sense? as in, learning how to advocate for the development of new infrastructure when we're tenured faculty? or maybe by not automatically thinking we have to use the technology? like: thinking of tech as a means to an end? rather than just an end in itself (like, because it's just a means, we can just as easily not use technology for this exercise...)?