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Jeff Rice, University of Detroit Mercy, Writing about
cool: Teaching hypertext as juxtaposition.
Abstract: This article takes as its departure point the near
simultaneous work on notions of cool, technology, and composition
in 1963, to begin discussion on how the juxtaposition of these moments
can lead to an electronic rhetoric. Based on classroom work done at
the University of Florida in two courses entitled "Writing About
Cool," the article presents juxtaposition as a method for writing
electronically. Because this particular juxtaposition revolves around
the word cool, the rhetoric proposed here is called a rhetoric of
cool. The article frames a rhetoric of cool by describing how temporal
events in the respective fields of writing, technology, and cultural
studies seen in juxtaposition provide a model for electronic research.
The article considers the influential 1963 Conference on College Composition
and Communication (4Cs), writings by Albert Kitzhaber, Marshall McLuhan,
Douglas Engelbart, and Amiri Baraka, and demonstrates how these works
inform writing instruction in a contemporary networked writing classroom.
Finally, the article examines how students working with hypertext,
drawing from these works and juxtapositions, are able to not only
write about cool, but are able to write cool as well.
Liz Rohan, University of Michigan–Dearborn,
Reveal codes: A new lens for examining and historicizing the work
of secretaries.
Abstract: Using some autobiographical information from my
own life and that of my grandmother when we were both secretaries,
I argue that we in the academy lack language to describe low-status,
gendered and classed work. In order to fairly measure the work that
women do with technology as secretaries, and the literacy skills they
need to perform this work, we need to shift our perspective and better
recognize how we measure knowledge in workplace settings. I investigate
some history of secretarial work in America, its relationship to similar
female-dominated occupations and its relationship to educational programs
promoting literacy. Reveal Codes—a reference to a command in
early WORDPERFECT software programs that allowed typists to view the
formatting they had done such as indenting and underlining text—is
a metaphor for framing this project as an interrogation of both our
work as scholars and the work of secretaries.
Craig Stroupe, University of Minnesota–Duluth,
Making distance presence: The compositional voice in online learning.
Abstract: This article enacts a dialogue between my experience
as a full-time, online course designer and my background in composition
and English studies. It proposes and theorizes a more conscious and
extensive use of a compositional or third voice in online classes
as an alternative to the combination of instructional and conversational
voices typically available to students and teachers. This article
argues that teaching and learning in online classes need to be recognized
and articulated as aesthetic, linguistic, and performative processes,
for which the literary methodologies and compositional pedagogies
of English provide critical tools.
Mike
T. Hübler & Diana Calhoun Bell, The University of Alabama–Huntsville,
Computer-mediated humor and ethos: Exploring threads of constitutive
laughter in online communities.
Abstract: Joking seems to be an inescapable part of the
culture of email and mailing lists, and yet few have described the
rhetorical functions of humor in these text-based forms of computer-mediated
communication (CMC). In this article, we argue that humor serves a
critical ethos function in online communities created by mailing lists.
By connecting what humor theorists already recognize as a social dimension
in joking to the contemporary interpretation of ethos as a constitutive
force, we find that humor constitutes a virtual group ethos. Our model
of ethos-building humor emphasizes its computer mediation, drawing
close attention to what we identify as threads of constitutive laughter
that form in mailing list discourse. We apply the model to the rhetoric
of a university writing center mailing list.
Barb Blakely Duffelmeyer, Iowa State University,
Learning to learn: New TA preparation in computer pedagogy.
Abstract: In examining graduate student teaching assistants’
(TAs’) adjustment to their first teaching experience in first-year
composition (FYC) classrooms, scholars have recently noted that the
experience mirrors that of their FYC students. Both groups—new
TAs and new FYC students—are grappling with instantiations of
Courtney Cazden’s (1988) notion of performance before competence.
Specifically, both new groups work within initially uncomfortable
but ultimately developmentally positive levels of ambiguity, multiplicity,
and open-endedness. Because the computer classroom experience of new
TAs is generally not examined, in this qualitative study several first-
and second-year TAs recount, in personal narratives, some of their
early personal and educational experiences with computers and recall
their perceptions of their first semester teaching FYC in the computer
classroom. Their voices, combined with computers-and-composition theory
and learning theory, suggest that the temptation to respond to new
TAs’ feelings of dissonance with more intensive computer training
prior to their teaching may not ameliorate their discomfort and may,
in fact, be counterproductive. After examining these new TAs’
experiences, a perspective on TA preparation for computer pedagogy,
based on Wenger’s (1998) notion of communities of practice,
is presented.
(Book
Review)
Nancy Barron, Northern Arizona University, Writing Hypertext
and Learning: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches by Rainer Bromme
& Elmar Stahl, eds., 2002.
EXCERPT: As stated in the synopsis
of Writing Hypertext and Learning: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches
(eds. Rainer Bromme & Elmar Stahl), the book presented and analyzed
∑ learning effects that can be anticipated from the production
of hypertexts, and
∑ theoretical, empirical, and developmentally oriented contributions
As the editors of the collection pointed out, the articles used data
from lab experiments, studies on the production of hypertexts, and
reports on software environments designed for hypertext. Rainer Bromme
and Elmar Stahl organized the collection into ten chapters with emphases
on the "interaction between content and rhetoric during hypertext
writing"; the "cooperative learning of learning students,"
textbooks, and "personalized hypertexts and hypervideos";
and "the potential methods for further research."
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