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.
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?
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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