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Integration of wireless and mobile technologies on college and university campuses has steadily risen over the past seven years. The 2002 Gartner DataQuest’s campus computer survey reports that “70 percent of U.S. college campuses had some local area wireless network coverage, while 10 percent had full campus coverage” (Akin, 2003, p. 91). In addition, Comscore Networks claims that “10 million Americans surf [the Web] from cell phones and PDAs” (Ellison, 2003, p. 64). In the fall of 2001, the University of South Dakota required all entering students to purchase a Palm PDA (Akin, 2003, p. 92). Experts in mobile technologies predict that handheld devices like PDAs will become as ubiquitous in workplaces and college campuses as the desktop computer (Weiser, 1998; Chen, 1999). This migration to wireless and mobile technologies means a shift in the pedagogical and curricular spaces typically reserved for writing instruction.

Going Wireless will offer a mix of practical and theoretical insights on wireless and mobile technologies to rhetoric and composition teachers, scholars, and administrators. Serving as a resource for theoretical explorations on wireless and mobile technology use and its effects on computer and composition teaching and research as well as a handbook for the members of the rhetoric and composition community charged with the responsibilities of integrating, supervising, and evaluating wireless and mobile technologies, Going Wireless will focus on a range of wireless and mobile technologies.

This page provides the table of contents, chapter proposals, and author bios for Going Wireless. Chapter manuscripts are due February 15, 2005, and final chapters are due June 30, 2005. If you have any questions about this project, please email Amy C. Kimme Hea.

 
 
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Introduction
Amy C. Kimme Hea, University of Arizona

Refiguring Writing, Teaching, & Learning through Wireless & Mobile Technologies
1. The Changing Shapes of Writing: Rhetoric, New Media, & Composition
    Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Clarkson University
    Stuart A. Selber, Penn State University

2. The Promise & Peril of Wireless Communication Technologies: Notes toward an Informed Practice
    Teddi Fishman, Clemson University
    Kathleen Blake Yancey, Clemson University


Examining Teacher & Student Subjectivities in the Age of Wireless & Mobile Technologies

3. ReWriting Wi-Fi: Changing Wi-Fi Proliferation through Writing Instruction
    Ryan M. Moeller, Utah State University

4. Reterritorialized Flows: Critically Considering the Roles of Students in Wireless Pedagogies
    Melinda Turnley, New Mexico State University

5. “A Whole New Breed of Student Out There”: Wireless Technology Ads & Teacher Identity
    Karla Saari Kitalong, University of Central Florida


Cutting the Cord: Stories on Wireless Teaching & Learning in the Composition Classroom
6. From Desktop to Laptop: Making Transitions to Wireless Learning in Writing Classrooms
    Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University
    Will Hochman, Southern Connecticut State University

7. Students Using Wireless Technology to Build Connections in First-Year Learning Communities
    Loel Kim, University of Memphis
    Susan L. Popham, University of Memphis
    Emily A. Thrush, University of Memphis
    Joseph G. Jones, University of Memphis
    Donna Daulton, University of Memphis

8. Security & Privacy in the Wireless Composition Classroom
    Mya Poe, MIT
    Simson Garfinkel, MIT

9. Changing the Ground of Graduate Education: Wireless Laptops bring Stability, not Mobility, to     Graduate Teaching Assistants
    Kevin Brooks, North Dakota State University

10. Making Connections: Introducing Students, Faculty, & Administrators to the Wireless Classroom
      Elizabeth Boquet, Fairfield University
      Betsy A. Bowen, Fairfield University
      Richard Regan, Fairfield University


Teaching & Learning in Motion: Mobility & Pedagogies of Space
11. “Anywhere, Anytime” as Learning Strategy: Exploring the Impacts of M-Learning on Composition
      Teachers & Students

      Amy C. Kimme Hea, University of Arizona

12. Metaphors of Mobility: Emerging Spaces for Rhetorical Reflection & Communication
      Nicole R. Brown, Western Washington University

13. Going to the Wireless Museum: A Paradigm for Mobile Composition
      Olin Bjork, University of Texas at Austin
      John Pedro Schwartz, University of Texas at Austin


Teaching & Research in my Pocket: Mobile Gadgets & Portable Practices

14. Leveraging Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Qualitative Research: Some Half-Baked      Suggestions
     Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin

15. Winged Words: On the Theory & Use of Internet Radio
      Dene Grigar, Texas Women’s University
      John F. Barber, University of Texas at Dallas

16. Dancing with the iPod: Navigating the New Wireless Landscape of Composition Studies
      Beth Martin, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
      Lisa Meloncon Posner, University of South Carolina

Appendix
David Menchaca, University of Arizona

Bios

Index

 

The Changing Shapes of Writing: Rhetoric, New Media, & Composition
Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Clarkson University
Stuart A. Selber, Penn State University

The dramatic shifts in writing technologies during the last several decades have challenged teachers and theorists of composition to rethink approaches designed primarily around print cultures. The now near ubiquitous use of computers for writing, to take the most prominent example, spawned the whole sub-discipline of computers and writing. And even as the technologies of writing have changed, a related transformation has begun to focus on texts beyond written words: new media technologies are increasingly addressed in composition classrooms, with teachers helping students learn the rhetorical, technical, social, and politic aspects of multimedia and Web sites. These texts, as teachers (and their students) know, are read both on printed pages and computer monitors.

The accumulated weight of print culture, though, continues to exert an enormous gravitational pull on our theories and practices. So while a relatively small number of adventurous and innovative teachers and scholars are, along with their students, composing new types of texts, the majority of work in the field—pedagogical and theoretical—continues to be driven by traditional models of what counts as a text, the rule of print being demonstrated by only isolated exceptions.

As we begin thinking about how wireless and mobile technologies might affect our pedagogies, theories, and research, we might begin asking ourselves what composition would look like if we stepped back from our assumptions about what counts as a text. What if we opened ourselves up to, for example, teaching instant messaging or text messaging? Or mobile phone interface design? Asking (and beginning to answer) such questions can not only help us broaden the scope of our teaching; it can also help us rethink what it means to theorize about composition.

In this chapter, we will pull together work from technical communication, usability, and new media as well as from composition and rhetoric in order to build a flexible framework for composition pedagogy. Working from this range of fields provides us with an approach that focuses on users and interaction, within real social contexts. Relying on such a framework can help composition to continue to work with texts we have long valued—essays, research papers, reports—while also including current and future developments in communication technologies. We will work through a detailed example of how this framework would approach a student assignment involving a wireless, mobile technology such as a cell phone. We will demonstrate the ways in which this broader framework can take into account the expertise and interests of composition teachers for and developing texts and contexts.

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The Promise & Peril of Wireless Communication Technologies: Notes toward an Informed Practice
Terri Fishman, Clemson University
Kathleen Blake Yancey, Clemson University

Like many technological changes, wireless communications technologies are altering our teaching and learning in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Initially, of course, compositionists welcomed wireless as a way to liberate both faculty and students from a desktop-driven environment that was often merely a mirror site of a print-driven classroom. Going wireless, however, means significantly more than losing wires: it fundamentally alters the classroom experience—or, it might. When wireless is introduced, several realities are quickly deconstructed: whereas previously we controlled (or tried to control) the space of the classroom—locating students in specific places and limiting sources, materials, and access to the “outside world”—we now find ourselves confronted by communications devices so ubiquitous and seemingly innocuous that we may not even recognize them as such. Moreover, wireless creates a new exigency for the teaching of composition: it’s not only that the how of teaching will change, but also that the what of teaching may change as well. For instance, how many of the nearly unlimited sources, materials, and references should we include in our courses? What criteria do we use to include or exclude them? Given the wealth of available material, how much time do we allow to teach the related practices of information management and assessment of online material, and the issues around intellectual property? As wireless communications technologies widen to include PDA’s, cell phones, and tablets, should we now teach composing in these sites, alone or in reference to other sites? What theory ties together these practices? What assessment practices are congruent with these new composing practices?

Not least, if wireless makes us all mobile, why come to class at all?

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ReWriting Wi-Fi: Changing Wi-Fi Proliferation through Writing Instruction
Ryan M. Moeller, Utah State University

Wi-Fi technology, even though it is relatively new to university campuses, has already claimed new paradigms of the “mobile worker,” the “mobile workplace,” and even the “mobile shopper” outside of academia. These paradigms are conceived and articulated under metaphors of increased access and efficiency and decreased downtime but often result in increased surveillance and accountability of employees (cf. Patrick Brans, Jaclyn Easton, or Mike Hogan). Mobility—in industry terms—means untethering such technologies as computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), entertainment hardware, and telephones from wires, from land-lines, from government licensing, and from telecommunications giants; all of this while promising the eventual convergence of wireless technologies under one communications protocol. Wi-Fi standards already dominate computer wireless networking standards, and operate at the same frequencies as telephones and mobile phones.

What this means for composition studies is that Wi-Fi technologies come with obvious beneficial capabilities: the extension of the classroom and research site to anywhere on campus at any time, the ability for several computers (and thus several students) to share a single internet connection, and increased collaboration amongst students using different technologies. But like the mobility offered in the workplace analogy, the likelihood of “mobile students” offers a thorny liberation from the traditional writing classroom. This article investigates the dominant rhetorical appeals of Wi-Fi marketing and product features that play a crucial role in the deployment of wireless networking technology on university campuses and affect how writing instructors might use such technologies.

Chris Anderson, Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief, touts Wi-Fi as a truly liberatory technology, one that is opening up new, open spectrum technologies that operate at unrestricted radio frequencies in homes faster than in corporations (9). In Wireless: Strategically Liberalizing the Telecommunications Market, telecommunications consultant Brian Regli argues that wireless communications and computing technologies offer a new paradigm of innovation and competition, one that challenges existing centralized economic and political institutions in favor of decentralization and deregulation. . In Brave New Unwired World, Alex Lightman and William Rojas argue that the proliferation of wireless products will render the technology of the Internet ubiquitous, just as radio wave technology has disappeared behind televisions and radios: “The Internet will be brought to a new audience, becoming a ubiquitous phenomenon, and the mobile handset will assume a much greater role in our lives. . . . Over the next decade we expect that a new industry focused on mobility and the Internet will emerge” (75). While each of these claims is true, there is a much more insidious side to the marketing and consumption of Wi-Fi technologies that resist such revolutionary potential.

For ex. Current service providers are working under what Mansell and Steinmueller call “broadcast” models, in which “clear and simple choices are made for users.” This model “avoids confronting [users] with the complexity of Internet access alternatives” (195). The complexity of alternatives is never addressed in the competitive environment of the marketplace, since “market forces”—namely corporate interests, patent holders, and government regulations—predetermine the simple choices in the first place. Mansell and Steinmueller argue that such complex choices are the products of deliberative processes that take place outside the marketplace and with little regard for consumer preferences. Moreover, the primary appeals behind Wi-Fi deployment are a mixed bag of blessings. These can be collected under three general categories:

  • Mobility, the notion that wi-fi products will enable network connectivity without physical connections. A brief glance at product packaging will indicate values of mobility portrayed by the manufacturer: speed, ease of set-up and use, freedom, compatibility with existing systems, freedom, sharing, etc.
  • Security, the strategy of protecting a network connection from computer hackers, identity thieves, child predators, and even terrorists.
  • Entertainment, the catch-all for technologies that are not specifically geared toward practical uses and the notion that having the Internet available to users on an anytime, anywhere basis will “organize” leisure time.

These appeals instruct consumers—as well as students—on how Wi-Fi products will liberate the employee from bondage at work while subjecting him or her to increased surveillance and accountability during leisure hours; the consumer from fears of identity theft or susceptibility to hackers when these fears actually serve industry needs by getting consumers to protect and secure their own Internet connections or broadband access; or the homeowner in need of managing his or her leisure time, further conflating the distinction between work and leisure. Such instruction adds another layer of education that writing students become subjected to, almost as a part of the institutional social fabric: network restrictions and virtual private networks, uneven deployment across campus, and even resistance to Wi-Fi adoption by network administrators.

As writing instructors and administrators begin to think more seriously about incorporating Wi-Fi technologies into their teaching strategies, serious considerations should be paid to maximizing the liberatory potential of these technologies—open spectrum frequencies, decentralized and consumer-based networks, and community access—rather than the pre-fabricated industry appeals to mobility, security, or entertainment which serve ultimately to shut down such potential. At the end of this article, I will list several ways that writing instructors can utilize the liberatory potential of Wi-Fi technology through class discussions, writing assignments, and service-oriented class projects.

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Reterritorialized Flows: Critically Considering the Roles of Students in Wireless Pedagogies
Melinda Turnley, New Mexico State University

The proliferation of wireless technologies is extending spatial refigurations begun by distance education and other web-based pedagogies. Wireless educational practices seemingly deterritorialize traditional classroom spaces by transforming how, when, and where learning can occur. On the surface, wireless technologies seem like an ideal solution for integrating non-traditional students into university curricula. Students who must work full time or who are unable to leave their local communities to attend school ostensibly can benefit from less place-bound visions of education. Forwarding such potentials, companies like IBM, Cisco, Toshiba, and Gateway tout wireless networks as fostering ubiquitous learning through anytime, anywhere access. They market their wireless technologies as customizable solutions that deliver mobility, convenience, efficiency, productivity, flexibility, and ease of use. Toshiba’s web site on mobile computing in higher education <http://www.toshiba.ca/web/link?id=1100>, for example, declares that “education is everywhere” and sets forth the goal to “transform virtually any space into a fully functional learning environment.”

This utopic framing problematically assumes that technology determines space—that technical access equates with all types of access. This approach also deterministically posits that wireless technologies can render space controllable and transparent. Removing wires from our equipment, however, does not erase its ties to institutional and political concerns. We writing teachers and program administrators should be careful about the roles that we envision for students as we consider wireless possibilities. Deterministic frameworks present wireless networks as neutral spaces that automatically equalize all environments and student positions. Such approaches position learning as an individualized, decontextulized processes and thus serve to reinscribe social hierarchies surrounding issues of access and academic success.

In response to this exigency, I explore postmodern spatial theories as an alternative means for framing wireless pedagogical practices. In their critique of psychoanalytic and Marxist conceptualizations of subjectivity and desire, Deleuze and Guattari argue for the libratory potential of deterritorialized nomadic practices. They assert that, rather than offering culmination points or external ends, structures should maintain open, destratified, rhizomatic, middle spaces; they should allow for multiple trajectories and unobstructed mobility. Seemingly, this vision supports idealizations of wireless technology. Deleuze and Guattari, however, also theorize hindrances to nomadic “total flow.” Deterritorizalization works in tandem with the counter-tendency of reterritorialzation, or the potential to be absorbed back into dominant exclusions and hierarchies. Even as selves pursue lines of flight away from hegemonic structures, they can be reabsorbed. In particular, if desires are framed as autonomous and universalized rather than relational and local, the potential for multiplicity and new forms of agency is blocked.

Rather than positioning students as universalized “master subjects” (Haraway) which are absorbed into existing elisions and hierarchies, we should find ways to foster solidarity and collaboration. Thus, I offer strategies for encouraging students to situate themselves both literally and figuratively within interpersonal networks, even as their physical locations shift. Rather than positioning students as consumers of individualized educational products, I argue that wireless pedagogies should facilitate critical connections among technology, discourse, subjectivity, and information. As we deterritorialize traditional classroom spaces, we should resist the tendency to reterritorialize student roles within exclusionary educational and technological structures and instead foster new opportunities for connection and multiplicity.

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“A Whole New Breed of Student Out There”: Wireless Technology Ads & Teacher Identity
Karla Saari Kitalong, University of Central Florida

A little girl wearing beaded bracelets and a pink sweater writes with a stylus on a PDA:
I like you. Do you like me? Yes ? No ?

The central image of this ad, which appeared in Syllabus magazine, consists of a close-up of small, obviously feminine hands holding a PDA. The background looks like a wood-laminate school desk, on which we see more traditional classroom accessories—a colorful pencil and a small notebook. The ad’s message appears in a box that resembles a popup ad on a computer screen, admonishing the readers, who are teachers interested in technology, to enroll in the online master’s degree in education at Capella University, “Because there’s a whole new breed of student out there.”

Media texts like this one teach people how to see themselves within the technological landscape; in addition, they propose to readers a repertoire of behaviors, attitudes, and values appropriate to technological, disciplinary, and personal domains (Kimme Hea, 2002; Kitalong 2004, 2000; Selfe, 1999). I argue, in short, that advertising and other media representations are compelled by a pedagogical agenda (c.f. Jhally 24, Schriver 45). The Capella University ad, as an example of such pedagogically motivated ads, sells not only a graduate education, but also a range of perspectives on the ease and ubiquity of wireless and mobile technology, on the digital competency of children, and on the relative inadequacy of the adult teacher.

In this chapter, I examine advertising representations that portray the usage of various forms of wireless and mobile technology in educational contexts. The ads come both from popular magazines and periodicals aimed at teachers. In analyzing the selected ads, I look primarily at the pedagogical subtexts of these technological narratives, noting how they shape and contain the identity potential of both the represented participants—the people who appear as characters in the ads—and the interactive participants—the audience members targeted by the ads (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). The goals of this analysis are To help teachers better understand wireless technology and ubiquitous computing by identifying some of the dominant narratives that shape and contain this world; To guide teachers (and by extension, students) in conducting their own analyses of media representations and drawing their own conclusions about how these representations help to construct us and our world; and
To enable teachers and students to gain some measure of agency within seemingly overdetermined technological assemblages.

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From Desktop to Laptop: Making Transitions to Wireless Learning in Writing Classrooms
Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University
Will Hochman, Southern Connecticut State University

In the mid 1990s, Palmquist, Kiefer, Hartvigsen, and Godlew (1998) studied the transitions writing teachers made as they moved between traditional and computer-supported writing classrooms. The key findings emerging from their study included

  • students and teachers interacted more frequently in the computer classrooms
  • students interacted with each other more frequently in the computer classrooms
  • interactions among students in computer classrooms tended to focus on writing-related topics while interactions among students in traditional classrooms tended to be “off-task”
  • teachers adopted different roles in the two classrooms, lecturing and using other front-of-the-classroom techniques in the traditional classrooms and using more student-centered activities in the computer classrooms
  • teachers adopted different attitudes toward their students, directing students in the traditional classrooms and expecting students to take charge of their own learning in the computer classrooms
  • students in the computer classrooms were more confident in their writing abilities at the end of the term
  • in the traditional classrooms, writing was viewed as an object of study and students resisted writing during class; in the computer classrooms, writing was viewed as an essential part of class activities

The findings of the Transitions study led to significant changes in the approach the we and our colleagues use when teaching with technology—and, for that matter, when we teach in traditional classrooms. We now adopt a “studio approach” in our classes, where writing is viewed as an activity rather than simply as an object of study. Teachers work with students as they write; students seek support for their writing as they encounter challenges.

In this chapter, we will explore the transitions associated with the shift from computer-supported writing classrooms that use desktop computers connected to the network through wires to classrooms that use laptops connected through wireless networks. Drawing on our observations of teaching in wireless laptop classrooms, we will consider how this shift in the technological terrain of our classrooms has affected how our teachers conceptualize the classroom space, their teaching strategies, and their attitudes toward their students. Similarly, we’ll consider how the students conceptualize the classroom space and how the nature of the wireless laptop classroom influences their interactions with their teachers and each other, and their attitudes toward writing and learning. Our discussion will address:

The relationship between a flexible learning space and student learning modes: A teaching environment that can offer flexibility (use or not use, see or not see, move anywhere in class or across campus) with computers is likely to support a larger set of learning modes and styles. to include more diversity of learning modes. Such simple qualities of laptops as the ability to move them from one place to another and to close them to hide a screen clearly differentiate the laptop classroom from the desktop classroom.

Decentering effects: It might be that a laptop classroom decenters authority more than a desktop classroom simply by offering more choice to students and teachers about how to configure the classroom space. When the center of the classroom varies from day to day, and even during a class session, the notion of a center can be deemphasized and the traditional conception of a classroom space—and all the normative behaviors associated with it—can be challenged.

Extending the classroom: When students associate the classroom with the laptop—a laptop that they can carry with them across and beyond campus—they might begin to rethink the idea of a learning space. When the space in which they learn is always with them, the place in which they can learn are expanded. Most important, students—and teachers —might become more likely to conceive of learning as something that is portable, as something that can take in a variety of contexts. It might also affect student attitudes about issues such as lifelong learning, particularly if they see their laptops help them not only to research and write papers, but also to help them communicate and explore learning spaces throughout their lives.

As we analyze our observations, we will no doubt find additional issues to consider in this chapter. As we were in the Transitions study, we expect to be surprised. By focusing on the transitions that students and teachers make as they move into this new classroom space, we hope to extend our understanding of the relationships among classroom space, technology, and learning.

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Students Using Wireless Technology to Build Connections in First-Year Learning Communities
Loel Kim, University of Memphis
Susan L. Popham, University of Memphis
Emily A. Thrush, University of Memphis
Joseph G. Jones, University of Memphis
Donna Daulton, University of Memphis

In its first-year composition course measure of ability encompassing “three kinds of knowledge: contemporary skills, foundational concepts, and intellectual capabilities” (p. 2). The university recently recommended a “technology across the curriculum” approach in which the applications, skills and knowledge-base relevant to each discipline be taught within that field of study (2002). To serve these goals, working through the first-year composition courses makes sense. As two of only three courses required of all university students—the program has widespread access to students for accomplishing its technology goals. However, a critical approach is necessary if technology is to be incorporated effectively. We know that users adapt technologies to systems of need, practice, and use already in place in their lives, and reject forced use that does not help them accomplish their tasks or otherwise does not fit their needs (Grudin, 1990). Thus, learning the ways in which students use technology when given access would lead to the development of policies and curricula that are truly effective. This study sheds light on a profile of community building among a particular population of first-year students engaged in first-year writing program curricula. The purpose of this study was to see how students become skilled at using technology to learn to become better writers, to accomplish their writing assignments, and to develop and maintain social ties with faculty and other students.

In addition to increasing technology fluency, promise looms large for learning communities to help students succeed in college by fostering increased social and intellectual interactions with both faculty and other students, improved learning through collaboration and dialogue, and overall cultural familiarization for first-generation college students (Zhao & Kuh, 2004, Gillespie, 2001; Lipson, 2002). At the same time, the potential for wireless technology to support online communities promises virtually unlimited access to the wealth of resources on the Web, including supplemental information and lessons for students, pedagogical resources for teachers, and the power of multimodal capabilities to enhance delivery of it all (Adewunmi, Rosenberg, Sun-Basorun, & Koo, 2003). Wireless’ greatest advantage for learning communities may be that its 24/7, mobile access promotes increased interaction among students, much as cell phones have increased our ability to communicate with each other on the go, and has altered a sense of access to each other (Koo, Adewunmi, Lee, Lee, and Gay, 2003; Gay, Stefanone, Grace-Martin, Hembrooke, 2001; Swan, 2002). Finally, current research indicates that computer tools are effective in developing good writing skills, from brainstorming through drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing (Goldberg, Russell, and Cook, 2002). In this chapter the researchers follow twenty, first-year students equipped with wireless laptops as they navigate their way through their first semester at college as a learning community of healthcare majors. Student use of technology to support the learning of writing, technology fluency acquisition, and communication within the learning community were of particular interest.

In fall 2004, the Learning Communities program involved 20 first-year students with expressed interests in medicine, veterinary science, dentistry, ophthalmology, nursing, physical or occupational therapy. The student cohort stayed together through three courses over two semesters—English 1010 and 1020 (required first-year writing courses) and ACAD 1100, a student skills course. We gave students notebook computers with wireless capability for six weeks and had them keep journals on their technology use and contact with faculty and students in their learning communities. Students were randomly signaled three times per day, when they would note whether or not they were using technology (laptop, cell phone, etc.) and if so, if they were working solitarily or in contact with others. They also recorded the type of work or social activity they were engaged in. Although faculty teaching the courses developed curricula that incorporated classroom use of computers and outside assignments designed to produce technological fluency and improve student writing skills, this part of the study focused on students’ voluntary use of the technology.

From this study, we have developed a profile of student technology use when students have wireless capabilities at their disposal. Patterns and frequency of use (times of day when communicating with their communities, type of technology used, types of communication they engaged in) allow us to better understand how wireless technology can support students as they learn to write and to become college students.

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Security & Privacy in the Wireless Composition Classroom
Mya Poe, MIT
Simson Garfinkel, MIT

Wireless writing environments offer new possibilities for innovations in teaching, development of writing communities, and access to digital technologies. However, wireless writing environments also pose new security and privacy issues. In this chapter, Simson Garfinkel, award-winning MIT commentator on information technology and author of 12 books on computing, and I will discuss four documented cases of wireless ‘hacking’ at American universities. Each of these cases demonstrates how wireless environments present security challenges that are not present on wired networks. For example, in wireless ‘passive hacking’ students can eavesdrop on each other, including scan email and internet usage, watch other students’ instant messaging conversations, and watch MACaddress traffic. In instances of wireless ‘active hacking’ students can gain access to other students’ hard drives and disable other students’ laptops, i.e., “denial of service.” While new wireless security technology such as 802.i can increase security on wireless networks, such technology still remains too costly for most universities.

Such cases of security threats in wireless environments raise a number of theoretical and pedagogical considerations for teaching and research. First, are security issues in the wireless writing classroom the responsibility of Writing Programs or are they the responsibility of the University? How much should students be expected to know or be taught about wireless security issues? How do the limitations on security in wireless writing spaces change the nature of writing, especially when writing process pedagogy is based on the theory of “private writing”? What ethical concerns are raised when privacy is violated in the wireless writing space? How does a Writing Program address such violations?

Through the analysis of the case studies, we will explore these issues to suggest possible solutions or alternatives that can address the needs of various kinds of institutions, including budget issues, student computing needs, and faculty expertise. Wireless technology is an exciting innovation in the teaching of writing, but its security limitations also need to be explored. Through a review of existing security and privacy issues that face wireless computing networks, we hope to contribute a thoughtful addition to the teaching of writing in digital environments.

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Changing the Ground of Graduate Education: Wireless Laptops bring Stability, not Mobility, to Graduate Teaching Assistants
Kevin Brooks, North Dakota State University

Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) in English, when compared to other constituencies in higher education, have a compelling case for needing and deserving institutionally provided wireless laptops. GTAs are typically asked to teach 1-3 courses per semester, they are asked to share cramped office space with little more than a desk to call their own, they are frequently in a situation where they have to share a single institutional computer with ratios ranging from 1:4 to 1:25, and they are paid such small stipends that purchasing their own laptops frequently means increasing their student loan debt, their credit card debt, or taking an additional job on top of their teaching assistantship. Graduate teaching assistants at mid-size and large public colleges and universities in America typically teach close to half of the incoming class each year, but they are being asked to do so without good or reliable access to what most teachers would now consider a basic tool—a computer. Add on top of that the fact that some English department’s operating funds permit for very little photocopying (an increasingly common scenario in public education), and we see a picture of GTAs being asked to teach with very few resources provided. Before departments, colleges, or universities seek funding for new labs or other high end equipment, I suggest they focus their efforts on enriching the basic teaching environment for GTAs through a wireless laptop initiative as a way to get the best use out of their technology dollars.

Institutionally provided wireless laptops can immediately lower the GTA-to-computer ratio to 1:2 or even 1:1, giving all or most GTAs reliable access to an instructional technology that can help them communicate with their students, find and develop course materials, organize their work in a logical and re-usable way, and help them develop skills that will be of use to them in their careers as information workers. Laptops with wireless connectivity can also alleviate some over-crowding by making the institutionally provided desktops unnecessary, freeing up a bit of space in offices. Wireless laptops can support GTAs in finding their own productive workspaces near their official workspaces, and as a mixed blessing, GTAs can always have their work near them.

While two of the benefits just mentioned suggest that wireless computing enhances user mobility, my observation of one-semester of our wireless graduate program, where we were able to achieve a 1:1 GTA to computer ratio, is that the wireless laptops have primarily provided a more stable computing environment for our GTAs, which in turn has supported a more stable teaching and learning environment. Information gathered from a mid-semester survey of laptop use revealed that most GTAs have been disappointed by their lack of mobility due to the heaviness of the load that comes with carrying both books and a computer, and because there are very few hot spots on campus, they see their mobility as being limited to word processing mobility. They have, however, been impressed by how they use their office time more productively, how the healthiness of the office space seems to have improved, and how the laptops have provided them with security and stability when their primary, home desk-tops have broken down. As we make arguments to committees and administrators responsible for distributing technology dollars, we can certainly use “wireless computing” as leverage in our arguments—it is cutting edge, it is mobile, it is going to free up space—but in the end, our goal for our GTAs should be to create a more stable teaching and learning environment, out of which will emerge creative and innovative assignments, lessons, and knowledge sharing.

This chapter will elaborate on the establishment and execution of the wireless laptop initiative in the MA Graduate Program at North Dakota State University, drawing on GTA responses to mid-term and end of semester surveys. Analysis of the program will focus on what Marshall McLuhan and contemporary media ecologists call a figure-ground analysis. Shifting from a wired to a wireless environment is clearly a shift in media ecology, and that which is now figure (wireless), will presumably become ground. Wireless computing is the technological “figure” that has emerged from a ground of wired networking and captured the attention of the media, educators, and our students. But wireless computing is not our goal in writing or literature classes—active, engaged, teaching and learning remain our focal points. Wireless computing has the potential to enhance the orality of our classes, according to Christopher Dean from Southern Connecticut State University, because students can see and talk to each other in laptop classrooms, and it has the potential to transform teachers into writers, says Carra Hood, also from SCSU, but it will only do these things when wireless computing becomes part of the stable ground of higher education computing. Wireless computing will succeed when it becomes more or less invisible, when it becomes the environment we live and work in, and when all the participants in higher education have access to affordable and reliable wireless devices. English graduate programs are well-positioned to enrich and stabilize the computing environment for the GTAs while wireless is still a figure, and they have the potential to shape the wireless ground of higher education computing in the coming years.

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Making Connections: Introducing Students, Faculty, & Administrators to the Wireless Classroom
Elizabeth Boquet, Fairfield University
Betsy A. Bowen, Fairfield University
Richard Regan, Fairfield University

“Computers complicate the teaching of literacy” Selfe and Hilligloss noted in their Introduction to Literacy and Computers in 1994. A decade later, computers still complicate the teaching of literacy—and wireless technology complicates it still further. This chapter examines those complications, the ways in which wireless technology enriches, changes, and occasionally interrupts the teaching of writing at a small, residential university.

Historically, innovations in the uses of technology to teach writing have been driven by large state universities, whose institutional missions and dispersed student populations were well served by the information superhighway, digital media, and asynchronous communication. Fairfield University, our home institution, certainly does not fit this profile. Ours is a private, largely residential, primarily undergraduate institution with some 3000 full-time undergraduate students, most of whom have arrived straight from high school, having barely switched their tassels to the left. Face-time with faculty is highly-prized (and highly paid for) by students and parents alike. Yet, in this environment, several of us worried that too much talking was going on and not enough writing (by faculty and students, respectively) in our first-year writing courses. And so, at various points in our teaching careers, we have each come to embrace technology—and specifically, wireless classrooms—as an integral factor in ensuring that our writing classes are about writing and that students’ experiences writing in class are consonant with their experiences of writing outside of class.

Crafting writing pedagogy for the wireless classroom, however, has not been without its frustrations; and some of these difficulties arise, we believe, out of contexts that are specific to the kinds of problems that faculty, staff, students, and administrators are more likely to encounter at small schools—even at small schools with relatively generous budgets—than at larger institutions.

In this article, then, we propose to address the following issues:

  • Why go wireless? Or perhaps, more to the point, what’s the difference between wired and wireless, anyway? In this section, we address the social dimension of the wireless classroom. What implications are there for a sense of ownership of the texts one creates in the wireless classroom, where students’ personal signatures are evident, for example, in the desktop photos they choose and the bells and whistles (literally) that signal they’re powered up or rearranging or pitching something into the virtual trash? What role does online chat have in classrooms where students can see one another regularly both in and out of class?
  • How do we go wireless? Here we consider the problems and possibilities inherent in configuring wireless classrooms at a school such as ours, where technical support is limited (meaning it may consist of one person who knows how to work the equipment on which your lesson plan depends) and where faculty, staff and administrators must work together on every aspect of the planning, configuration, and implementation of the wireless classroom.
  • How do we get others on board? Faculty at our school enjoy a tremendous amount of pedagogical autonomy. In our required writing courses that has meant faculty members are free to adapt—or ignore—technology as they choose. At the same time, our students demand relatively little autonomy in their intellectual lives. In this section, we will explore that paradox and the ways in which we use that tension to champion the benefits of the wireless classroom to faculty and students alike.

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“Anywhere, Anytime” as Learning Strategy: Exploring the Impacts of M-Learning on Composition Teachers & Students
Amy C. Kimme Hea, University of Arizona

In a recent report on m-learning (mobile learning), Mary A. C. Fallon (2003) noted that "hundreds [of colleges and universities] are experimenting with how to enhance learning with the mobile devices-hoping to leverage the coming convergence of wireless networks, Web services, and enterprise applications." As more classrooms and even campuses migrate to wireless and mobile technologies, we compositionists must interrogate the potential impacts of m-learning on our roles as teachers and scholars. Such technologies are often constructed as ubiquitous, pervasive, and portable. These cultural narratives influence student and teacher assumptions about the ways in which wireless and portable technologies are integrated in our writing curricula. In an effort to understand the implications of these emerging technologies for our writing curricula, I will draw on non-place theory and its discussions of immediacy, embodiment, and mobility (Latour, Virilio, Auge) to critique emerging discourses and practices on wireless technologies and m-learning initiatives.

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Metaphors of Mobility: Emerging Spaces for Rhetorical Reflection & Communication
Nicole Brown, Western Washington University

As rhetoric and composition teachers think critically about what it means for writing pedagogy to consider and potentially include mobility, there is a simultaneous focus on place-based education and the grounding of curricula and instruction in local cultures, ecologies, geographies and histories. Furthermore, a critical pedagogy, as McLaren and Giroux emphasize “must be a pedagogy of place, that is, it must address the specificities of the experiences, problems, languages, and histories that communities rely upon to construct a narrative of collective identity and possible transformation” (1990, p. 263).

With the increased presence of wireless networks on college campuses, new understandings for what it means to write and distribute text in a context-aware manner are evolving daily. While metaphors of mobility— like “the nomad” or “the frontier”—are certainly relevant to positioning our work and pedagogies in sites of broad impact, location-awareness technologies require rhetoric and composition teachers and researchers to also consider what our role (and our students’ role) will be in writing the infrastructure of the location-specific environments around mobile technologies (Gillette, 2001).

Many are familiar with the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, where, as the national guard corralled protestors for arrest, the protestors used cell phone technologies to disperse at just the right moment and come together again at key city locations. Such use of mobile technologies to become location-aware is useful for considering how writing pedagogy might further expand beyond the desktop. Sites for this type of writing are already available to us through various forms of mobile, public reporting: museum and city audio-tours, automobiles and hikers equipped with GPS technologies and even local radio broadcasting. In this essay, the author augments communication contexts like these, with the visual and rhetorical analysis of an open-access, location-aware and mobile form of writing frequently enacted by college students—the annotation of campus-geographies through “chalkings” or what Gunther Kress might refer to as “multi-modal” graffiti. In ways similar to, yet distinctly different than, the WTO protestors, student “writers”, independent from traditonal means for the production and distribution of texts, establish public oratories that reclaim and illuminate otherwise denied spaces.

Through visual and rhetorical analyses—of what might appear to be less technological forms of writing—the author of this essay articulates the mobile, yet place-based, metaphor of graffiti as a useful construct for understanding and theorizing the influence that mobile and location-awareness technologies could have on our pedagogies and the writing we and our students reflect upon, design and interact with. The creation and distribution of text is the nature of teaching composition, and mobile and location-awareness technologies call upon us to rethink what it means to engage students in the configuration of the world.

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Going to the Wireless Museum: A Paradigm for Mobile Composition
Olin Bjork, University of Texas at Austin
John Pedro Schwartz, University of Texas at Austin

The Fall 2004 issue of Kairos features four “CoverWeb” articles on the “Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Portable Technologies.” These articles testify to the fact that the “wireless laptop classroom” is fast replacing the desktop model in computer assisted composition. But the configuration of many of these classrooms reveals that the adjectives wireless and portable (or mobile) are far from synonymous: students can only use the laptops in the traditional confines of the classroom due to security issues and/or network limitations. Even the ideal “wireless laptop classroom” would seem to offer no more range of movement or flexibility in seating than a Wi-Fi Starbucks.

Composition teachers can explore learning environments outside the composition classroom for ideas on how to augment their rhetorical pedagogy with mobile—not just wireless—technology. The museum is one such environment: critics in the field of “museum studies” have exposed the museum as a highly rhetorical space—a discursive instrument of cultural politics and identity-formation rather than merely of knowledge dissemination. Increasingly, museums are incorporating new media into their representational practices. Here at the University of Texas, for example, the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art is following a growing trend of museums providing handheld computers to visitors. Through the tour applications and content loaded onto these handhelds, visitors can interact with the objects, exhibits, artists, and curators by selecting the information they want to see or hear, typing in questions, and in some cases even communicating in real time with other visitors through a wireless network. Headphones allow visitors to examine the displayed objects and listen to contextual information without having to oscillate between looking at the objects and reading wall text about them. As any teacher in a wired or wireless classroom knows, the machines often compete with the instructor for the students’ visual attention—a well designed museum handheld application enables dual-channel processing by allowing the handheld to play the role of a tour guide or a teacher.

Though expansive, museums are still bounded by walls or other barriers—just like composition classrooms. In English Composition as a Happening, Geoffrey Sirc uses the museum as a metaphor for the canonical composition classroom. Sirc calls into question the tendency of some instructors to build exhibits from rhetorical examples and conventions, and presents an alternative vision of what could or should be “happening” there. We will argue that the main problem in English composition is not what happens in the classroom so much as a dependence on the classroom itself. We are calling for composition to happen in the field, in the wild—that is the promise and the allure of mobile technology. Museum curators and educators are increasingly aware of this potential, and some of them envision a time in the not too distant future when visitors will bring their own PDAs to the museum after downloading software and information from the museum’s website. Visitors would then be able to interact with the museum and each other wherever they choose to take their PDAs, both inside and outside the physical borders of the museum. Composition scholars, we argue, should similarly forecast and work toward a future when students are equipped with mobile technologies, instructors promote rhetorical literacy by scheduling “field trips” to museums and other environments, and assignments require students to leave their libraries or dorm rooms and explore the various sites of composition around them. In this new paradigm for mobile composition, the writing students produce will reflect their intimate, material interaction with these technologies and places.

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Leveraging Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Qualitative Research: Some Half-Baked Suggestions
Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin

Socrates famously declared that writing destroys memory. Perhaps so, but Socrates' environment was not as textually mediated as ours, nor did he have to manage massive projects such as we now routinely juggle. Not only have texts become necessary for conducting research, they have often come to define research, particularly the research done by rhetoricians. Planning, funding, management, data collection, analysis, and reports are all performed or mediated largely through textual genres or related digital genres (such as audio and video recordings). In qualitative research, these textual genres have proliferated, leading to considerable effort in managing and analyzing them. Some qualitative researchers have moved from cut-and-paste techniques to computer-based qualitative analysis. Some have begun taking field notes and conducting interviews with laptops. But few have exploited the full capabilities of mobile devices at each stage of the qualitative research process. And that's too bad, because mobile technologies can collapse almost all of the texts that mediate ethnographic research into a package the size of a deck of cards. Yet at the same time, the control over data implied in this convergence must be counterbalanced somehow.

In this paper, I discuss my use of handheld devices in recent research, then examine how the impulse toward data control has to be counterbalanced by an awareness of participants’ stake in research. I end by speculating on ways to draw participants into qualitative data analysis, drawing on networked genres for inspiration.

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Winged Words: On the Theory & Use of Internet Radio
Dene Grigar, Texas Women’s University
John F. Barber, University of Texas at Dallas

Throughout the Odyssey, Odysseus' "winged words," called in ancient Greek epea pteroenta, sustain him in his journey and gain him great gifts from gods and men alike. While this epic has come to represent what is left of an ancient, lost culture, the notion of well-crafted or passionate words, spoken aloud, intended to be heard by a listening audience still remains. One iteration of winged words growing in popularity thanks to broadband networks is internet radio.

Imagine this scenario: You have created a digital music composition in Dallas, Texas. You want to perform it live to a group of people in New York City. To do so, you pack up your equipment, fly to NYC, find a space to perform, and so on . . . Or, you send your friends an email message notifying them when you plan to perform and the URL for the site where they can listen in. They connect to the site using their MP3 player, and you perform live, on the radio.

Over the last decade, based on the popularity of “computing”-based opportunities, numerous digital and new media writers and artists have rushed to colonize the electronic spaces of the Internet and the World Wide Web. While we acknowledge that the move online has brought about the opportunity to morph text and images; to create new, moving symbols for communication; to create new ways of presenting or performing the communication process in an interactive context where the reader/viewer is an active participant, we also recognize that what has been forgotten, or at least left aside, is the sound and power of the author's voice, her rhetorical skills to inform, persuade, or convince, the aural quality of her dance with language and ideas, and the immersive quality of sound and its ability to facilitate interaction with an audience.

Given this context, re-imagining streaming audio content for scholarship and communication in wireless, mobile contexts provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between orality and aurality, between message and audience, and between visual culture and a growing aural one, a culture that needs tools for understanding the gravitas behind the words of any speaker who would attempt to persuade or convince us to believe, accept, or follow a particular concept or action plan.

The authors of this essay will address these relationships, outline various internet radio projects emerging around the world, describe various mobile applications for internet radio, and speak specifically about their efforts to facilitate scholarship and pedagogy through their own internet radio station, Nouspace Radio Café. Their discussion may be of interest to new media theorists and practioners along with traditional musicians, poets, fiction writers, and other artists interested to move their creative expressions into the larger realm of digital media.

Drawing upon such theories as Edgard Varesé’s “liberation of sound,” R. Murray Schafer’s “acoustic ecology,” Mark Slouka’s notion of silence, Mary Russo and Daniel Warner’s concept of “noise and junk,” and Marshall McLuhan’s ideas concerning visual and auditory cultures, they will show the reapplication of the layers of rhetorical intent to spoken words adds exciting prospects for multimedia in that it allows additional ways to examine the intent behind a speaker's words, as well as encourage a more direct connection between the spoken word and its preservation as printed text. In a time increasingly influenced by visual images, being able to hear authors deliver their own words, in the intended rhetorical style, adds greatly to the ability to understand background and intent, both of which can be examined simultaneously in different ways through other forms of media.

In a network-fast media age where increasingly one's image as well as words can be fabricated, the prospect of paying more attention to the pace of the spoken word may offer advantages for contemporary scholarship, especially that seeking understanding of the connection between personal ethos and cultural change.

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Dancing with the iPod: Navigating the New Wireless Landscape of Composition Studies
Beth Martin, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Lisa Meloncon Posner, University of South Carolina

Composition studies is intimately connected to its spatial context. Throughout our scholarship we constantly invoke spatial metaphors (mapping, zone, structure) as a means to help our students find their own place/space within the classroom and within their writing. However, mobile and wireless technologies confound and extend our present geographies of theory and pedagogy into un-charted and little understood territories.

Cultural geographers approach the analysis of a landscape through two primary means: narrative and cross-sections. D. W. Meinig’s approach incorporates both; he selects particular moments in time, describes the geography of that time, and then includes a connecting narrative to another moment in time, and so forth. Using Meinig’s notions of successive landscapes, we expand his original theory to the realm of what we call the wireless landscape. We then interrogate this landscape through the lens of the iPod via access. Access is a loaded and problematic term and we will attempt to unpack it by exploring access as an entryway; access as information; access as social class; and access as tool.

iPod provides a unique entryway into another learning and writing landscape that allows students a way to enter into the academic conversation while maintaining a link to their own identity. This identity is “heard” through the music choices and classroom downloads and “seen” through the storage space, calendar, to-do lists and web interface. This entryway follows the path of the unique playlists but is derived from the universal tools used to access the device. This universal tool can be used to define the individual identity.

The use of the iPod opens up a new way of information delivery which is a key component of pedagogy. For a number of years teachers have been able to deliver information via internet sites. The iPod can take this one step further by creating an information space that is aural, visual, and portable but incorporates internet pedagogy as well. The rhetorics of writing and speech may be placed together as never before. Although internet sites have long incorporated sound that plays while users interact with the text this allows the student to study the written rhetoric and take with them the oral rhetoric. It opens up the student to whichever pedagogical style suits them best. No more are students restricted to 3 hours a week of instructor “aural” class time then several hours of written textbook instruction. It is an interactive and extraordinarily mobile pedagogy that delivers information in forms to help each student. Unlike phones, the iPod holds the information and serves as a conduit for the information.

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Johndan Johnson-Eilola works at Clarkson University, where he teaches courses in information architecture, mass media, new media, and rhetoric. His recent books include Central Works in Technical Communication(with Stuart A. Selber, Oxford UP, 2004), Writing New Media (with Anne Wysocki, Cynthia Self, and Geoff Sirc, Utah State UP 2004),
and Datacloud (Hampton P, in press).

Stuart A. Selber is an Associate Professor of English at Penn State. Most recently, he's the author of Multiliteracies for a Digital Age (Southern Illinois UP, 2004) and the co-editor, with Johndan Johnson-Eilola, of Central Works in Technical Communication (Oxford UP, 2004).

Teddi Fishman is a member of the MAPC faculty at Clemson University where she participates in the work of the Pearce Center for Communication and teaches writing courses in wired classrooms and in online spaces. Her research interests include issues in technology and ethics within the fields of professional and public communication.

Kathleen Blake Yancey, the R. Roy Pearce Professor of Professional Communication at Clemson University, teaches writing and rhetoric and directs the Pearce Center for Professional Communication and the Pearce Center Studio for Student Communication. Past President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, she has edited, co-edited, or authored 8 books and over 60 articles and book chapters. Among her current projects are a book on digital portfolios and work on the forthcoming National Assessment of Adult Literacy.

Ryan Moeller is an Assistant Professor of English specializing in rhetorical theory, rhetorics of technology, and professional communication at Utah State University. His work has appeared in Technical Communications Quarterly, Kairos, and in book chapters. His work is concerned with human agency in social spaces dominated by technique and technology.

Melinda Turnley is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication at New Mexico State University. Her research and teaching interests highlight connections among media pedagogy, teacher training, and critical approaches to technology. She has published on issues of student and faculty development in Kairos and Rhetoric Review and has a piece on teaching web design forthcoming in Computers and Composition.

Karla Saari Kitalong teaches in the Technical Communication and Texts and Technology programs at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Her research interests include usability, technological literacy, and visual representations in/of technological contexts.

Mike Palmquist is Professor of English and University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Colorado State University. His scholarly interests include writing across the curriculum, the effects of computer and network technologies on writing instruction, and the use of hypertext/hypermedia in instructional settings.

Will Hochman is Associate Professor of English and Technology Coordinator at Southern Connecticut State University. He has developed computerized writing classes since the l980s at New York University, the University of Southern Colorado, and Southern Connecticut State University. His work on hypertext and wireless, laptop learning is published in Kairos, his poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and criticism has been published widely, and he is an editor of Across the Disciplines, War, Literature & the Arts, and Letters to J.D. Salinger.

Loel Kim, Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis, researches social and cognitive aspects of communicative acts, particularly in technology supported collaborative environments. Student-teacher interaction, healthcare, and communications in collaborative settings are a few of those areas she is currently exploring. She is also investigating visual narratives in interactive interfaces. Loel teaches in both the Composition and Professional Writing programs.

Susan L. Popham, Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis, teaches in the Professional Writing and Composition concentrations in the English department. She directs the First-Year Composition Program and conducts research in the areas of writing program administration and healthcare communication, and is currently finishing a book on medical business writing.

Emily Austin Thrush is Professor of Professional Writing and Applied Linguistics at the University of Memphis. She has served as coordinator of the English Department computer labs for 14 years, and has headed several technology projects and secured grants supporting them, including one to study the use of streaming video to support online classes.

Joseph G. Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Composition Studies and Professional Writing Concentration at the University of Memphis where his research interests include composition theory and pedagogy. He also has an extensive and varied background of teaching in public schools.

Donna Daulton is a graduate student in English at The University of Memphis, whose focus of study centers on English as Second Language. She has prior experience in teaching special education.

Mya Poe is a PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is also a Lecturer in Scientific Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT she has helped direct various assessment projects, including the freshman essay evaluation and iMOAT online essay evaluation. Previously, she was a Research Associate for Assessment at the Office of Academic Planning and Assessment, University of Massachusetts, where she helped conduct educational assessment research.
 

Simson L. Garfinkel is a researcher in the field of computer security and award-winning commentator on information technology. Currently a doctorial candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Garfinkel's research interests include computer security, the usability of secure systems, and information policy. He writes monthly columns Technology Review's Magazine and website and for CSO Magazine, for which he was awarded the 2004 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for Best Regularly Featured Department or Column. Prior to joining CSAIL, Garfinkel founded Sandstorm Enterprises, a computer security firm that develops offensive information warfare tools used by businesses and governments to audit their systems.

Kevin Brooks is an Associate Professor of English at North Dakota State University in Fargo. His research in graduate school and early in his career focused on the history of writing instruction, but more recently he has turned his attention to the future of writing instruction. He has published work on Marshall McLuhan, weblogs, and hypertext, and he teaches courses called “Rhetorics and Poetics of New Media” and “Visual Culture and Language” in addition to teaching first-year English and directing the First-Year Writing Program at NDSU.

Elizabeth Boquet is an Associate Professor of English and director of the writing center at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT. She is co-author of The Writing Center Journal, and her book Noise from the Writing Center was published by Utah State University Press in 2002.

Betsy A. Bowen is Associate Professor of English at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT. She has a long-standing interest in technology and composition. She co-authored Word Processing in a Community of Writers (Garland, 1989) and has written articles on telecommunications and computer-mediated conferencing.

Richard Regan has been teaching Composition in a wired laptop classroom for several years. He is a former Director of Composition at Fairfield University, and former English Department Chair. He currently chairs the Educational Technologies Committee.

Amy C. Kimme Hea is an Assistant Professor in the Rhetoric, Composition, and Teaching of English program at University of Arizona. Her research interests include web and wireless teaching and learning, teacher training, and professional writing theory and practice. She has published on articulation theory and methodology, visual rhetoric, WWW design, hypertext theory, and service learning projects. Her work appears in the anthology Working with Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance and journals including Computers and Composition, Kairos, Educare/Educare, and Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy.

Nicole R. Brown is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Washington University, where she teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, computers and writing and professional and technical communications. Her scholarship looks at the intersections of academic, social and workplace contexts, with particular focus on the critical and rhetorical analysis of discourse linked with emerging technologies. Other interests include community-based learning and cyber-cultural studies.

Olin Bjork is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and assistant director of the Division of Rhetoric and Composition’s Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL) at The University of Texas at Austin. Through his teaching and research, he investigates the applications of mobile and multimedia technologies for literary and composition studies. He has served as the department’s webmaster, and is currently working on a hypermedia edition of Paradise Lost. His dissertation, entitled “Hypermediating Milton: An Interfacial History of Paradise Lost,” explores the influence of print and digital interface design on the transmission and interpretation of the poem.

John Pedro Schwartz is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin. He has taught composition and literature courses in computer-assisted classrooms and incorporated MOO, Web, Blog, and other new media into his pedagogy. He has served as a multimedia developer in the Division of Rhetoric and Composition's Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL). His dissertation, entitled “The Museum and Its Discontents: Joyce, Borges, and Modernism,” focuses on museum discourse within transnational modernism. Awarded the 2004-05 Henderson Fellowship, he is currently completing his dissertation at the University of Vermont.

Clay Spinuzzi is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at The University of Texas at Austin, where he direct the Computer Writing and Research Lab. Spinuzzi's interests include research methods and methodology, workplace research, and computer-mediated activity. His book Tracing Genres through Organizations was published by MIT Press in 2003.

Dene Grigar is an Associate Professor of English at Texas Woman’s University, specializing in new media, ancient Greek literature, feminist studies, and rhetoric. She founder of Nouspace MOO and Internet Radio and is the International Editor for Computers and Composition.

John F. Barber teaches at The University of Texas at Dallas within a multidisciplinary arts, humanities, and interactive technology program, exploring the realm where art, science, and technology converge. His research and publication often addresses new media and how they might be used to facilitate teaching, learning, and communication.

Beth Martin is pursuing her Master's degree with an emphasis in technical writing at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Other than her interest in technologies, she is currently doing historical research in technical writing that involves genre theory and embodied knowledge in an effort to see how genre inhibits or spurs innovation. Prior to school she worked 15 years as a network engineer.

Lisa Meloncon is completing her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition with a specialization in Technical Communication at University of South Carolina. Her dissertation examines early modern medical treatises and the rhetorically complex ways they codified popular scientific medicine. Lisa’s research works at the center of an interdisciplinary nexus: technical communication, rhetoric, technology, history, and visual literacy. She also has over 15 years of technical writing industry experience.

David Menchaca is a PhD student in the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English program at the University of Arizona and cofounder of the Learning Games Initiative (with Ken McAllister). His primary research interest is the Rhetoric of Technology with secondary interests in Information Design, Games Studies, and Classical Rhetorics.

 

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