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Call for Papers: Ethics in a Digital Age: Ethics, and Digital Media in the Writing Classroom

Special Issue of Computers and Composition Online for Spring 2012

Guest Editor: Toby F. Coley

While ethics has been implicitly at the center of pedagogies of digital media use for some time, extending the conversation through explicit venues creates an opportunity to explore how digital media make us aware of “new considerations that are ethically relevant to familiar ethical issues—and perhaps confront us with distinctively new sorts of ethical issues as such (Ess, 2009). These new challenges, McKee and Porter (2009) argue, include issues of blurred boundaries between public and private and researcher (and teacher) positioning to name just two. Extensive scholarship details the complexities and connections between ethics in the writing classroom as well as ethics and research, but conversations specifically related to the ethical dimensions of digital media in the writing classroom are less prevalent.

The ethical implications of digital media use cover a range of issues from access, anonymity, consent, and preference, to privacy and security. Further examples of ethical concerns include the conflation of public digital spaces with private student voice, the use and attribution of knowledge found in digital spaces, and whether students have the access and the knowledge—functional literacy (Selber, 2004)—to use such digital media in rhetorically savvy ways.

In this special issue, contributors are invited to explore the ways in which ethics overlaps with, comes into contact with, complicates, and underscores pedagogies of digital media use in the writing classroom and administration of writing programs. Webtexts should offer theories, pose questions, explore practices, and identify concerns related—but not limited—to the various sections of the journal:

Queries and proposals should be sent to Toby Coley at tfcoley@bgsu.edu. Proposals for the “Theory and Practice” and “Virtual Classroom” sections should be no more than 500 words. Accepted articles should be webtexts only, no word processor documents please. Webtexts should be created using HTML and CSS via website creation software such as Kompozer, Dreamweaver, etc., and tailored specifically for the text, not using prebuilt templates.