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Charles Moran, University of Massachusetts, Computers
and Composition 1983–2002: What we have hoped for.
Abstract: I review the first 20 years of Computers and Composition,
looking particularly at the expressed hopes for the potential of change
in the emergence of new writing-classroom technologies. Hopes in the
early issues of the journal focused on technology’s presumed
potential for improved writing, teaching, and learning in the composition
classroom; a later and recurrent hope was that by embracing technology,
composition teachers would improve their status in the academy. Authors
in recent issues looked less at the technology and much more through
the technology, toward a more egalitarian and just society. I attempt,
in this review, to locate these hopes in the context of professional
and national cultures.
Teresa M. Redd, Howard University, "Tryin to
make a dolla outa fifteen cent": Teaching composition with the
Internet at an HBCU.
Abstract: Drawing upon nearly a decade of experience, I describe
the challenges and advantages of teaching composition with the Internet
at Howard University; I also explore the implications for other historically
Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). First, I discuss the digital
divide that has made it so difficult for many HBCU faculty members
and students to access the Internet for composition courses. Next,
I describe how my students and I succeeded in harnessing the Internet
not only to practice high-level writing skills but to do cultural
work: to establish online safe houses for African American English,
to collaborate with White North Americans and Black South Africans,
and to publish Afrocentric material on the Web. In closing, I identify
the pedagogical strategies that turned the Internet into a productive
tool for the students in my writing courses.
Jim Porter, Michigan State University, Why technology
matters to writing: A cyberwriter’s tale.
Abstract: Technology does indeed matter to writing—and
in significant ways. But how it matters can vary, depending on the
particular technology, the habits and attitudes of the individual
writer, and the context of learning and use. Here I employ a personal
narrative ("a cyberwriter’s tale") to track my development
as a writer over time—from handwriting to typewriting to cyberwriting—and
to show how each new writing technology influenced practices and products.
I argue finally for a cyborgian, posthumanist view of writing technologies.
Such a view does not isolate the technological tool as an abstracted
machine apart from human use, but insists on defining technology as
use—as the human and machine working in concert (joined at the
interface) and writing in a particular social, political, and rhetorical
context.
Mike
Palmquist, Colorado State University, A brief history of
computer support for writing centers and writing-across-the-curriculum
programs.
Abstract:
I trace the evolution of computer support for writing centers and
writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) programs. Calling attention to
differences in the rate of adoption and in the type of technology
favored by scholars in each area, I discuss their adoption of technology
within the context of their varying instructional goals. I consider
early work, beginning in the 1970s, in computer-aided instruction
(CAI), the development of computer-based management tools, the growing
importance of style- and grammar-analysis software, word-processing
programs, electronic networks through the 1980s and into the early
1990s, and the rise of interest in using the World Wide Web to support
the missions of writing centers and WAC programs. I conclude by speculating
briefly on future directions for technological support for writing
centers and WAC programs.
Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Clarkson University, and
Amy C. Kimme Hea, University of Arizona, After hypertext:
Other ideas.
Abstract: Early work in and about hypertext
suggested dramatic potentials for the medium, primarily in the way
it challenged notions of authorial control, linearity, and the status
quo in general. This history of hypertext tended to portray contradicting
archetypes or pure forms that concrete developments never fulfilled.
We argue that hypertext has long been a cultural analogy rather than
a simple enactment or fulfillment of desires. To assist in creating
a more open, constructive vision of hypertext, we gather three differing
but connected tropes for hypertext from this history: hypertext as
kinship, hypertext as battlefield, and hypertext as rhizome. Although
these tropes are only three among very many possibilities, we provisionally
play them off one another to deconstruct and reconstruct hypertext
theory and practice, and to demonstrate potentials for moving beyond
archetypes in theorizing and practicing hypertext.
Joe
Amato, University of Colorado– Boulder, Source(s):
between nine days’ wonder and nineofold or nineopin [poem]
1
(I) "we would like to invite you to submit a manuscript"
(II) "we would very much like to see this genre of writing represented"
Safia
El Wakil, The Pyramids, To bee or not to bee, or teaching
in a honeycombed environment. Abstract:
As
the American University in Egypt moved toward a more prominent technology-mediated
environment in 1996, the ambition of the English department to reach
the cutting edge of technology had its shortcomings. With no sustained
training and little technical support, the initial eagerness of most
faculty members gradually waned. We realized that the availability
of computers for the use of word processing software, email communication,
and basic search tasks was one thing, but the use of the technology
for teaching purposes was a more complex thing. Here I attempt to
present the dynamics of a paradoxical situation that evolved from
our institution’s ambition to integrate technology and the ensuing
clash with departmental conceptual limitations in promoting such change.
I explore my experiences and struggles negotiating such changes and
analyze my pedagogical shifts within technological environments through
a graphic design by Richard Mesnik.
Kristine
L. Blair and Elizabeth A. Monske, Bowling Green State University,
Cui bono?: Revisiting the promises and perils of online learning.
Abstract:
We chronicle—in both an historical and bibliographic framework—the
discussion of rhetorics of empowerment and disempowerment throughout
the last 15 years, and we also examine the promises and perils of
current trends in online teaching and learning, with a special emphasis
on the role of universities in promoting distance education. This
article addresses the question cui bono?, or who benefits from the
rush to technologize teaching and learning? We address the extent
to which the continued rush to technologize teaching and learning
is a perilous return to a rhetoric of empowerment that as compositionists
we must continue to interrogate critically; we question how, in an
era of 24/7 learning, students may or may not benefit, and also how
teachers may lose out, based on the increased workload and course
management surrounding online learning.
Jeffrey
T. Grabill, Michigan State University, On divides and interfaces:
Access, class, and computers.
Abstract:
In
this article, I reconstruct the discussion of access within the field
of computers and writing, articulate a notion of class that might
be useful for work in the field, and revisit the issue of the digital
divide. This reconstruction of access, class, and divides is linked
by a heuristic framed by a rhetoric of the everyday that might guide
research and intervention strategies. A rhetoric of the everyday makes
visible the relationships between access and class, between the material
and the rhetorical, and between and among other issues of identity.
These relationships constitute a set of interfaces that work in computers
and writing must navigate. To navigate them, we need to drill deep
into intersections between materiality and activity, or into the infrastructure
of inequality.
Pamela
B. Childers, The McCallie School, Interacting with computer
technology in secondary schools.
Abstract: In this article I reflect on my teaching and scholarship
with computers in secondary schools during the past 20 years. I chart
how changing technology and changing expectations for technology shaped
my teaching and student learning in the writing centers and classrooms
where I have worked.
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