Acknowledgements

     Many colleagues helped with the production of this essay. We would like to thank Chandra Gigliotti-Guridi , our academic instructional technologist and Blackboard administrator, for answering any and all questions we sent her way. Cheryle Dixon, our college webmaster, gave much time, talent, and patient advice to help us turn this into a web document, as did Andy Pemberton. Lowell Frye read a draft of the essay and provided helpful comments. Kevin Alansky at Blackboard provided information about the system's use nationwide, and also gave generous permission to reproduce the Blackboard images in this essay. Dickie Selfe, at a summer workshop in 2002, shared his ideas about teaching composition online and inspired us to look for creative workarounds to systems limitations. We are grateful to Kris Blair and our two anonymous reviewers at Computers and Composition Online for their helpful suggestions. Finally, we would like to thank the many Hampden-Sydney students in our Rhetoric classes. As we all work our way into using new technologies, we need their patience and willingness, and also their healthy skepticism, or we would not be able to think through the kinds of questions we pose in this essay.

    Screen shots are reproduced with permission from Blackboard. Inc.

 

References

Bachelard, Gaston. (1964). The poetics of space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981) The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Michael Holquist (Ed.). Trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas .

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson (Ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee, Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Eds.) Austin: University of Texas.  

Blackboard achieves international expansion milestone with adoption at 3,000 institutions in 140 countries  (2002 September). Retrieved on November 10, 2002 from http://company.blackboard.com/press/viewrelease.cgi?tid=186

Blackboard announces record revenue of $19 million for third quarter 2002. (2002, November). Retrieved November 10, 2002, from http://company.blackboard.com/press/viewrelease.cgi?tid=227

Blackboard revenues quadruple to $46.5 million in 2001. (2002, March). Retrieved November 10, 2002 from http://company.blackboard.com/press/viewrelease.cgi?tid=198

Cooper, Marilyn (1999). Postmodern possibilities in electronic conversations. In Gail E. Hawisher & Cynthia L. Selfe (Eds.) Passions, pedagogies, and 21st century technologies (pp. 140-160). Logan: Utah State University .

Crang, Mike (2000). Relics, places and unwritten geographies in the work of Michel de Certeau. In Mike Crang & Nigel Thrift (Eds.), Thinking space (pp. 136-153). London: Routledge.  

Day, Michael, & Trent Batson (1995). The Network-Based Writing Classroom: the ENFI Idea. In Marie Collins & Zane Berge (Eds.), Computer mediated communication and the online writing classroom, volume II: Higher education. Cresshill: Hampton.

De Certeau, Michel (1984). The practice of everyday life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California.  

Eldred, Janet M. (1991). Pedagogy in the Computer-Networked Classroom. Computers & Composition 8 (2), pp. 47-61.

Electronic Education Report (2002, June 7. 9:11). Exclusive: Course management systems filter down to K-12; professional development a driving factor.

Faigley, Lester (1992). Fragments of rationality: Postmodernity and the subject of composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh.

Foucault, Michel (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. Alan. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.    

Goldfarb, Jennifer B. (1998). Synchronous communication and the rhetoric classroom. In Janet Wright Starner, ed., Composition with computers: Lehigh's epiphany project. Retrieved on February 9, 2003 from  http://www.lehigh.edu/~ejg1/cwctoc.html

Hawisher, Gail E., & Selfe, Cynthia L. (1991). The rhetoric of technology and the electronic writing class. College Composition and Communication, 42 (1), 55-65.

Janangelo, Joseph (1991). Technopower and technoppression: Some abuses of power and control in computer-assisted writing environments. Computers and Composition 9 (1), 47-64.

Morson, Gary Saul, & Emerson, Caryl (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University .

Selfe, Richard (In press). Techno-pedagogical explorations: Toward a sustainable technology-rich instruction. Pam Takayoshi & Brian Huot (eds.) Teaching writing with computers: An introduction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Selfe, Cynthia L., & Selfe, Richard (1994). The politics of the interface: power and its exercise in electronic contact zones. College Composition and Communication 45, 480-504.

Taylor, Mark C. (2001). The moment of complexity: Emerging network culture. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Warschauer, Mark (1995). Heterotopias, panopticons, and Internet discourse. University of Hawai’i Working Papers in ESL 14(1). 91-121.

Warschauer, Mark, & Lepeintre, Suzanne (1997). Freire’s dream or Foucault’s nightmare: Teacher-student relations on an international computer network. In Robert Debski, June Gassin, & Mike Smith (Eds.), Language learning through social computing (pp. 67-89). Parkville, Australia: Applied Linguistics Association of Australia.