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On Fri, 2 Jun 1995, Eric Crump wrote:

> My office is still a mess, but the piles are no longer growing. They've
> settled, gotten stable, may be turning to compost in fact, and avalanches
> are a thing of the past.
>
> Paper is a habit, not a necessity.

        Well, yes, but . . . if you don't have easy access to a computer
when you need to refer to the assignment, or if you don't have windowing
capabilities so that you can have the file with the assignment open when
you're actually _doing_ the assignment (on a computer), or if you want to
mark up parts of the assignment -- then paper's darn handy.  It might be
true that people don't really need to _read_ on paper, but paper is very
portable, requires no electricity, is a whole lot less volatile than a
lot of electronic media, and so on and so forth.

        But I think there's more here at stake than whether or not we
_need_ paper in that sense.  Another big issue is what kinds of hardships
teachers' technological demands might make on students.  I'm not yet very
good at thinking about this; I tend to assume that if it's convenient for
me, it's convenient for them.  It's sort of an outgrowth of the tendency
to assume that because we're all (here) writing on computers, we have
equal access.

Marcy
Marcy Bauman
Writing Program
University of Michigan-Dearborn
4901 Evergreen Rd.
Dearborn, MI 48128

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