BEFORE YOU READ
     I believe technology is anything that can keep growing into something even better than what it started out as.  As an example, a computer started out with only being able to do a few works, such as paint, playing card games, and looking up a few documents on the internet.  Now the computer can do much more than that like finding maps, ordering items, doing research papers, even as simple as ordering and paying for pizza, and having it delivered to your front door.

     In Dennis Baron's article, "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies he wants to prove writing as a technology.  He wants to show the good side of computers, and how they have come so far in the last fifteen years.  The concept of writing can be so tiresome, and slow that your hand may start to hurt after writing so much.  This is where the computer comes into play.  It is much easier to type a one page paper than it is to write.  This could also be helpful, because for most people type faster than they write.  Writing is slow, and ideas are quick.  So, what if you forget the ideas you had, because you could not write them down quick enough before they slipped away?  Baron starts to talk about how pencils were not made for writing in earlier years, and how they came farther into the picture.  They are now used for writing, and looked at as being an old fashioned form.  The phone was also not made for what it is used for today.  The phone was made to transfer writings and readings.  It clearly does so much more than that today.  Computers have so many different features than they did when they were first made that we can not begin to imagine the things they will have ten years from now.  As the years go down, prices also drop drastically in the making and buying of these products.  This makes it accessible to be in almost every middle class home.  Baron's main point is that as old technologies seem automatic to us, we look forward and focus more on the new than the old. 

COMPARE
  Baron's article could go in conversation with James Porter's article, "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community," because they both show how things can progress.  While Porter is explaining how newer writings can contain traces of older writings, Baron shows that new technologies can contain traces of older technologies.  In both article they are showing how things progress from old to new, but yet keep some part of the original on which they were based upon. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
5) Baron focuses so much on fraud and authenticity, because research is so much more accessible now and easy to copy.  If I needed to figure out something to write a paper on, I could type it up on google and get thousands of websites.  Some people might just copy the text they see on the screen, and be done with it.  He basically is pointing out that fraud is very easy to participate in now, especially considering the fact that fake money has been printed, and used.  Nobody even realized until it became an issue that there was counterfeit money.

META MOMENT
I have always thought of writing as a technology, even before reading this article.  I have thought of it this way, because I look at technology as anything that can progress.  Writing clearly progresses everyday of our lives.

     I found this article to  be very informative on certain technologies that have progressed over they years.  I never knew that the telephone was not made for what it is used for today, or that the pencil was not used to write in the beginning of it being made.  He states the obvious in explaining how much computer have progressed over the years.  That is clear to anyone who has ever used a computer as a child to now.  The graphics, speed, etc are so much better on computers than they were even just a few years ago.  Every couple of months there are new computers made and sold on the market.  This just goes to show the fast growing process of computer technology.