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 email: [log in to unmask]