Track Changes

I’m typing the draft of this blog post in Microsoft Word on my laptop. I will then edit it by adding text, removing text, or moving text from one part of the document to another. This is easily done by using my trackpad to move the blinking line to the appropriate spot. Then I can type more text, or hit the backspace (delete) key to remove text, or I can highlight a bunch of text by dragging my finger across the trackpad, then cut and paste it to a different part of the document.

 

Before word processors, I would have to write out my thoughts with pen on paper. (I was taught in school that you had to use the pen and not the pencil.) I would then use a different coloured pen to mark-up my edits. And after I was happy with everything, I would slowly type it out on a typewriter, taking care not to make any mistakes because I hated using white-out. (I did not know of “correction tape” back in the old days.) Have word processors change the way I approach writing a document? I think so. But it has felt more like a gradual shift because I only moved to word processing in fits and starts.

 

Why am I thinking about this? Because I’m reading Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes, which is a history of word processing. Kirschenbaum digs up all manner of interesting details on the advent and evolution of word processors. There are stand-alone word processors like the Wang, much used by many authors in the 1980s. Some writers started using microcomputers with programs such as Wordstar, followed by WordPerfect. Other writers refused to use an electronic device and would use their favorite typewriter, or write longhand and hire a typist. There are fascinating tidbits in the wild and open early days of word processing, unlike the consolidation we see now where Microsoft Word and Google Docs are pretty much all my current students have ever encountered.

 

Memories. They’re mostly hazy. But I do remember using a typewriter as a child. My mother, a schoolteacher, would type out exams for her class. Sometimes I was the free labour typist. Because I had weak fingers, my technique was a strange double-finger tap – my second finger atop my third to provide the extra strength – only with my right hand. My left hand was used to hold down the shift when capitalization was needed. I was pretty quick for a “one-finger” typist.

 

In the mid-to-late 1980s, we got an Apple II clone. (The actual Apple II would have been very expensive in the country where I grew up, far from the United States.) I learned how to use Wordstar. With a much easier-to-press clone keyboard, I was able to utilize all my fingers for typing. I even practised on a simple typing computer program whose name I can’t remember. There was no mouse to point-and-click. Keyboard commands were used to navigate the document or to cut and paste. I’d like to think this prepared me when I eventually learned to use the vi text editor as a computational chemist in graduate school.

 

My first two papers in graduate school were written in TeX with an emacs editor. All subsequent papers were written with Microsoft word because we had industry collaborators and I needed to read and write research updates. When I put together my thesis, reformatting the two TeX papers into thesis chapters was very annoying with many hours spent getting things to look right. I had used Microsoft Word sparingly as an undergraduate, to write papers or lab reports when required, and for my undergraduate thesis. I carried disks around. I made backup copies because you never know when your data becomes “corrupt” and you get a disk-read error.

 

When I started as a professor, I wrote out my lecture notes longhand in pen with multiple colors for emphasis. I had access to Microsoft Word, which I used to write a problem set or an exam. I still wrote out the solutions longhand, a practice that continues to this day which my students find surprising. I explain to them that I actually take my own exams to make sure they are suitable in length and difficulty. I think the students appreciate this even though some still comment that my exams are too long and too hard.

 

My first switch to partial lecture notes in word-processor format came when I ditched the textbook for P-Chem II more than fifteen years ago. I made Word-processed worksheets with blank spaces for students to write notes. For my own lecture notes, I’d write longhand on those worksheets with multi-colored pens, as I did before. Four years ago, I did the same for P-Chem I. Just under ten years ago, I started transcribing my G-Chem lecture notes into Microsoft Word. The students don’t see these notes. I still write out all relevant information on the whiteboard in class. Except for a few topics (stoichiometry, nuclear chemistry, electrochemistry) where I still use my longhand notes, the conversion is almost complete. This semester, teaching biochemistry for the first time, I made all my notes on Word. No longhand. My conversion is complete.

 

But I wonder if something has been lost in the process. Reading Kirschenbaum’s book made me think about my thought process when preparing my lecture notes. It feels different to use a word processor compared to writing longhand. I have this nagging feeling that I was more thoughtful when I wrote longhand, because I wanted to keep my notes as clean-looking as possible – otherwise it would be hard to decipher my own scrawling in the margins accompanied by cross-outs, carets, and arrows. There’s also something about the layering of these edits that preserves the original, so unlike Word where I delete some text and it disappears into oblivion. Every semester that I re-teach a class, I always make a new copy to preserve the previous one – but to be honest I hardly look back at the earlier versions.

 

I also have this nagging feeling that the ease of word processing and editing has made my thought process more meandering. I used to have tightly choreographed lectures. Every word was chosen carefully. Now with my poorer eyesight and reading formatted Times New Roman instead of my own handwriting, I wonder if I’m starting to do a poorer job in my teaching. Yes, I’ve gained a lot of experience over the years knowing where the tricky spots are for students. But I suspect I’m less focused in my lectures than I was before. Having attained the sought-after rank of full professor some years back, no colleagues visit my classes anymore and I don’t get any peer feedback. Students still write their comments in their evaluations, although these are now electronically dashed off rather than handwritten. But the students don’t know how I have evolved as a teacher – they only see the here-and-now.

 

Track Changes is a wonderfully apt name for Kirschenbaum’s book. It reminds me that I should take some time to track the changes in my teaching and think about where I want to go with it. It also made me nostalgic for old Apple II games (I had a tiny bit of fun on an emulator). I began to wonder how other parts of technology change the teaching and learning experience, especially now that many of my students have tablets with a stylus that they use for note-taking and to write out their problem sets. I started to think about how one’s visual field, be it a tablet screen, 8x11-sized paper, a full-sized monitor, or looking up at a white-board – how does this impact teaching and learning? And the only way to learn how to improve the educational experience is to track changes!