As Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of M.I.T.'s Media Lab, sees it, information technology's great contribution to education will be in multimedia. Multimedia assisted pedagogy will, according to Negroponte, bring sound and images into the classroom; it will allow for independent learning and, ultimately, it will bridge the gap imposed by the traditional academic disciplines between "technology and the humanities, science and art, between right brain and left" (81). Many of us teaching in the humanities might wonder about the role of written language in Negroponte's vision and rightfully so. Neither he nor Bill Gates (or, for that matter, the popular press) are overly concerned with the fate of writing and the problems of teaching written texts. However, since the late eighties a great many academics have been successfully working with text-based writing technologies in their language, literature and writing classes, technologies that have -- far more than multimedia CD-ROMs ever will -- dramati cally reshaped the nature of the classroom, the role of the instructor and the activities of students. In this essay I introduce those technologies, discuss the pedagogical debates surrounding them and finally argue for a critical approach to their implementation. As you will hopefully agree, the lessons from nearly ten years of computer-assisted pedagogy are dangerous to ignore, particularly for those of us concerned with the 'humanism' of the textual humanities.