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Jeffrey T. Grabill, Michigan State University,Community
Computing and Citizen Productivity.
Abstract: This article is about the development of a community
network in an Atlanta, Georgia neighborhood. The project was a long-term
effort using community-based design with the goal of helping a community
use information technologies more effectively to enhance the life
of the community. The argument is about the necessity of designing
information technology tools in community contexts, about developing
new models of research for community-based work, and about the critical
importance of engaging in community-based work that can be sustained
over time. The argument also focuses on the necessity of designing
community networks that both recognize the productive power and expertise
of community residents and allow for productive practices to be developed
and utilized in the future.
Patricia Webb, Arizona State University, Technologies of
Difference: Reading the Virtual Age through Sexual (In)Difference.
Abstract: French feminist Luce Irigaray critiqued the phallocentric
structures' creation of woman as man's Other, a critique that can
be applied to a study/critique of our representations of information
technologies in the virtual age. The representations present contradictory
ways of man engaging with technology, expressing both a fear of technology
(connecting technology with woman) and an embracing of technology
(situating technology in the realm of supra-man). In our current system
of sexual (in)difference, men use technology in two very distinct
and different ways: to distance themselves from their own bodies and
to consume technology so that their bodies are one with technology.
At the heart of both these moves is the desire to control the Other,
technology and/or woman. Because phallocentrism groups Others together,
women and technology become unlikely bed partners. By studying representations
of technology through Irigarian lenses, then, we can see that the
sexual revolution, a revolution that would acknowledge two sexes rather
than the One (read: patriarchal sexuality), has not even begun, much
less been completed.
Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin, Open Systems
and Citizenship: Designing a Departmental Web Site as an Open System.
Abstract: Academic web sites are often “brochureware”: monologic
sites that primarily provide information about an academic unit, with
strongly limited feedback or contributions from those who are represented
by the site. In such sites, divergent ideas and viewpoints are typically
papered over, since the means of producing such pages tend to be concentrated
in the hands of a small group of people. This article describes how
we redesigned one such site as an open system in which control is
distributed among departmental members. Our goal was to provide a
productive civic forum for those citizens while still meeting the
needs of the site’s visitors. We describe the conversational approach
we used to redesign the site, apply it to a critique of the original
web site, then describe the changes we implemented to remake the site
as a civic forum. Finally, we describe the site’s early successes
and failures and the lessons we learned.
Yi Yuan, National University of Singapore, The use of chat
rooms in an ESL setting.
Abstract: This article explores the combination of online chat
rooms with regular classroom interactions in a personalized English
program and its potentials to enhance second language development.
Two non-native English speaking university professionals participated
in a one-hour online chatting session each week with the author for
10 weeks in addition to weekly classroom meetings. Printouts of the
chat sessions were used in subsequent classroom discussions and were
analysed for the present study. Qualitative and quantitative analyses
of the data show that the participants sometimes noticed the errors
they made in their online chatting and initiated repairs on them.
Such noticing of linguistic forms has positive effects on learners
and is necessary for language acquisition to occur. These results
suggest that the face-to-face interactions may have highlighted the
participants’ language problems and enhanced their awareness of such
problems while the online chatting provided the participants a unique
opportunity to put their grammatical knowledge to practice through
meaningful communication.
Bruce Mynt, Teachers College Columbia University, Book Review
of Oversold and Underused by Larry Cuban (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 2001).
Excerpt: Oversold and Underused is useful reading for
anyone interested in the dis-use and mis-use of educational technology…
continues to examine the unfolding history of school reform and the
complicated, and often contradictory, aims of education. .. When computers
are used, according to Cuban, they are often employed to reinforce traditional
teaching practices. As a means for school reform, his argument goes,
educational technology remains an expensive failure. The core of the
book consists of ethnographies of three learning contexts: pre-K and
kindergartens, high schools, and a university. All were conducted in
California's Silicon Valley. Why is it that despite unprecedented access
to technology computers are unused or whether they want to adopt, reject,
or modify educational technology.
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