3.992 being human with computers, cont. (30)

Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Thu, 1 Feb 90 22:11:36 EST

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 992. Thursday, 1 Feb 1990.

Date: Wed, 31 Jan 90 10:00:00 EST
From: EIEB360@UTXVM
Subject: 3.986 humans and computers (87)

Stephen Clausing suggests one reason why computers might be humanizing
rather than de-, as my Provost suggested the other day, when he
(Clausing, that is) tells the story of his son and his son's friends
teaming up against the computer. But the CAI environment I work in
doesn't have much to do with reporting error, one way or another: the
primary function of our classroom system is to enable *communication*,
which occurs to a far greater degree and with far greater freedom than
I've ever experienced in my more traditional classrooms; maybe it has
something to do with my telling them (as I have to do at the beginning
of every semester) that there's no time, in a real-time environment like
ours, for me to worry about their bloody spelling; what counts is what
they say, not whether they've misspelled it. But I have this sneaking
suspicion that my provost, along with about 200 million other Americans,
regards "English teachers" as being concerned primarily with correcting
one's spelling and pointing out one's teensiest grammatical blunders, so
I decided not to tell him about that...
John Slatin