Publication of Conference Materials Has Been Made Possible by a Generous Grant from IBM Corporation
Hypertext Software and Planning by Novice Writers: Two Case Studies
From Classroom to Network: Issues for Instructors
A Whole Raft of Data: Hypertext, Racism and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Panel--Report to the Profession: The ENFI/Annenberg Consortium
The Significance of ENFI
Evaluating an Open-ended Educational Innovation: "What Is It?" is as Important as "Does It work?"
In The Back Door: Making English Interaction Accessible To Deaf Students
Christine M. Neuwirth, Michael E. Palmquist, Cynthia A. Cochran, and Thomas Hajduk
Exploring the Potential of Computer-Mediated Telecommunications for the Teaching of Writing: A Report
Diane P. Thompson and Cathy Simpson
Distant Discourse: Using Connected LANs for Real Time Interactive Writing Between Classes on Two Campuses
Michael Spitzer--New York Institute of Technology
Institutionalizing ENFI
Panel--The Shape of Text to Come
The Shape of Text to Come
Paul R. Meyer and Lynn F. Easterling
How Computers are Changing the Role of the Technical Communicator
On-Line Communication: Changing Notions of Textuality
Writing the Future: Computers, Writing, and Radical Pedagogy
Students as Texts in Electronic Networks
Some Effects of the Computer on Basic College Writers
Gender Relations: A Comparison of the Traditional and the Computer Classroom
Interactive Fiction and Narrative Theory: Reading Against the Text "Playing" Robert Pinsky's Mindwheel
Computer-Assisted Class Discussion and Black Students: Breaking the Monopoly of Cultural Capital
Computer Animation and Videodisc Editing Systems: New Forums for Children's Collaborative Story Creation
Future Perfect, Present Tense: The Transition from Paper and Pencil to Electronic Writing in Elementary and Secondary Schools
Parameters of Lesgay Discourse: An Analysis of Two Months of Messages on GAYNET
Teaching with Disabilities: E-Mail
The Technical Writer Evolves: Pursuing the Role of the Information Manager
Panel--Networks in Real Time: What is Their Net Worth?
Unsettling the Known: Postmodernism and the ENFI Classroom
An "Alms-Basket of Words": The Problem of Assessment in Networked Writing
RTW--Learning To Be A Group Player
Sylvia Broffman and Marshall Kremers
Pre-Writing in ENFI and Non-ENFI Classes: Does Real-time on the Network Make a Difference?
Politics and Literacy
Thomas Ellis and Martin Rosenberg
The Nonlinear Text: HyperCard, Heuristics, and the Self-organizing Essay
Chronicling a Merger: The Marriage of Computers and Composition
Learning Literary Theory and Teaching Writing with a Word Processor
Sallyanne Fitzgerald, Peggy Mulvihill, and David Warren
Panel--Hypercomp: Placing a Hypertext Tool into the Hands of Basic Writers, Advanced Students, and Teachers
Choreographing the Computer Classroom
Alice Gasque and Nancy Zuercher
Writing the Future in the Maclab: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Practice and Pedagogy of Shakespeare On-Line
Computers & Basic Writing: Toward a New Pedagogy
HyperCard in Freshman Composition: Developing an Understanding of Rhetorical Strategies
Panel--On the Fringes or at the Frontier: The Politics of Computer-Based Technical Writing Instruction
Future Cheap: Using Less-Expensive Technology to Achieve the Benefits of a Computer Network in the Teaching of Writing
Teaching the Future: The Electronic Writing Class and the Traditions of Teaching
Computer-Based Literary Research: Implications of a Full-Text Database
The Police Chief, the Judge, the District Attorney, and the Public Defender: Using Networked Writing to bring Professionals into an Undergraduate Course on Criminal Justice
Henry Jankiewicz and John Laudun
Me Editor, You Editor: Desktop Publishing in the Classroom
Talking across Computers: Computers in the Speech Class
Entering the Discourse Community: Mediating Novice Computer Users’ Access to Computing Expertise
Rosemary Kowalski and Patrick Slattery
The Revising Processes of Beginning and Advanced College Students Writing with Computers and with Pen and Paper
Computer-Supported Management of Networked Writing Environments
The Presentation of Hypermedia Course Materials
Teaching Writing Across the Wires: An Audiographic Course in Technical Writing
Monique Loubert and Claude Langevin
The First French ENFI-PROJECT
Connections: A Systems Approach for Learners
From Margin to Mainstream: Applying Techniques of Composing with Computers to the Teaching of Literature
Panel--Computer-based Systems for Writing
Charles Moran and Cynthia L. Selfe
Computer-Based Forums for Academic Discourse: Testing the Claims for Computer Conferences
Margaret Morrison and Linda Carroll
Mac and IBM: Is there a Gender-Based Subtext that Distinguishes the Variations in Users' Attitudes
Panel--Hypertext and the "Social Space" of Writing
What Kind of Idea is Hypertext?
The Grotesque Corpus: Hypertext as Carnival
Hypermedia composition and consciousness
Panel--Community-Building in the Networked Classroom
Nurturing Community in Freshman Composition Classes
The Literature Connection: Collaborative Learning in a Literature Survey Class
The Electronic Voice: Empowering Women in the Writing Classroom
From Text to Hypertext: Designing Hypertext for the Computer Writing Laboratory
The Latent Content of Word Processing and CAI Software: How Our Students "See" Writing
What Happens Later: A Review of the Writing Habits of Students Taught to Write with Computers
Judy Pearce, Yitna Firdyiwek, Laura Muzzi, and Laura Teich
On-Line Peer Review by Novice Student Writers
Is The Networked Computer Classroom A Discourse Community?
Reconceptualizing "Conversation" in the Computer-based Classroom
Word Processing and Writing in the College Seminar: Faculty Development
The Academic Development Center: Redefining the Future of Developmental Education
A Window on Writing: The Usefulness of Keystroke Mapping to Monitor Writing Progress
A Computer-Based Technical Writing Course Using HyperCard
Richard Sammons and Susan Wagman
Setting Up a Computer Lab
Curriculum and Curtsies: A Teacher-Administrator Looks at the LAN in the Writing Classroom
Problems of Evaluation in Traditional and Computer Classrooms: The Influence of Gender and Personality on Writing Success
Cross-Cultural Team Teaching: E-mail for Literary Analysis
A Computer-Supported Communication Facility as the Site for Collaborative Student Activities: A Naturalistic Study
The Computer as Editor: Changing Roles in Writer-Editor Communication
Towards a Polylogical Hermeneutics
Commas Across the Curriculum: A Case History of Cross-Disciplinary Writing Courseware Development Using HyperCard
Hypertext, Heteroglossia, Chaos
Space/Time for Teaching Writing: A Computer-Supported Model
Literacy Online: The Continuing Dialogue
Beyond Electronic Conferencing: What's Next?
Formative Evaluation of Courseware for Writing Instruction: What are Useful Instruments?
Teaching the Future: How the Computer Revises Pedagogy
Sandra Varone and Karen Nilson D'Agostino
Teacher Research in the Computer Writing Classroom
Donald K. Wagner and Geraldine B. Wagner
Writing in Heteromedia Environments
Using Dynamic Texts
Talkback: A Hypertext Collaborative Conference
Computer Analysis of Student Essays--25 Years of Research
International Group Work: Setting up a telecomputing and writing project that gives the most benefit for the cost
Wallis May Anderson--Oakland University
Hypertext Software and Planning by Novice Writers: Two Case Studies
In a 1989 summer section of Oakland University's second-semester first-year writing class (argumentation and research), I conducted a study of nineteen students using word processors (MacWrite) and hypertext software for prompting (Learning Tool). All preliminary writing and first drafts were composed on the computer during class; I collected protocols on the first and third essays. These protocols are now being transcribed.
My study was modelled on the 1988-89 NCRIPTAL study reported at the 1989 CCCC and 1989 Computers and Writing conference, using the same data collection instruments and writing topics. During the course of the NCRIPTAL study, I began to wonder whether its very topic-specific prompts were best for teaching exploration strategies to novice writers. Would students responding to such specific questions be able to abstract the planning approach for other topics? Can specific prompts allow writers to think through the topic concretely in directions other than those established by the prompt writer? Should specific prompts be used for initial prewriting instruction, with transitions to generalized prompts during the course of first-year writing classes? Can novice writers effectively use prompts at all, especially when presented via computer software?
Thus, when planning my own project, I set out to examine how novice writers use prompts specifically linked to the topic and whether more general prompts are effective for beginning writers. Students met in the computer lab for all classes, used the computers daily, and became adept at using both MacWrite and Learning Tool (another question I had about the NCRIPTAL study was whether my novice writers were familiar enough with Learning Tool to use it effectively).
As is typical in first-year writing courses, student writing proficiencies varied greatly, from engaged and interested writers to "minimalists" who wanted only to get through the course. My hope was that the computers, with word processing and hypertext software, would increase the involvement of the less proficient writers, as well as enhance the learning of the more sophisticated ones.
At the 1990 Computers and Writing conference, I would like to present narrative case studies of two of these writers: one highly accomplished novice writer and one whose skills and involvement in writing were much more limited. Using information from the attitudes and background survey instrument as well as the protocols from papers written at the beginning and end of the eight-week term, I will describe how the two writers used Learning Tool and MacWrite and examine whether the computer seemed to hinder or help writing--both in amount of text produced and in attitude toward the task. Examination of how the students used the prompting software as well as the word processing software should lead to conclusions about ways computer software can enhance different-level novice writers' classroom experiences.
Thomas Barker--Texas Tech University
From Classroom to Network: Issues for Instructors
One of the most noticeable directions in computer-assisted composition is that of networking. Many who now teach in computerized classrooms are considering implementing networks as the next logical step in computer assistance. Our computer classroom at Texas Tech is no exception. After having made the transition from lab (housing 10-15 computers: walk-in usage) to classroom (housing 25 computers: one per student) it now seems appropriate to expand the technology to include electronic mail and shared files.
The purpose of this talk will be to present an overview of the process of making the transition from computer classroom to networked classroom. It is designed for those now faced with that transition, and intended to address some of their concerns. Those concerns fall into three broad categories: 1) What hardware and software is required for networking 2) What pedagogical differences will the networked classroom allow; and 3) What theoretical approaches are relevant to the networked classroom. The approach taken in this talk will be practical, but not "how to." The information in it is based on the author's experience in planning an Ethernet network in the microcomputer classroom at Texas Tech, as well as published information and research on networks and writing.
What hardware and software are required for networking? In this portion of the talk I will present an overview of the cards, cables, connectors, and software required for networking. Additionally, this section will include definitions of types of networks and a brief description of the Daedalus system, a system of invention and word processing software especially designed for networked classrooms. This section will include an overview of some of the capabilities networking will provide: shared directories, electronic mail, and new software. This material will be covered in a handout to the audience.
What pedagogical differences will the classroom make? Teachers considering expansion to a networked classroom need to consider what differences they will face in their new classroom. Thompson (1988) identifies a number of areas where classroom activities will differ. These include observations on the behavior of students discussing in an electronic environment, and how that environment affects their sensitivity to error, anonymity, and attitudes toward other students in the network. Also surveyed is work by Forman (1987) who identifies 7 "conclusions" from exploratory research into computer-mediated networking in the workplace. Some of her observations are pertinent to networked classrooms. In addition, writing instructors need to consider the effect of computers on traditional "proscenium" class set-ups and on the amount of text students produce.
What theoretical approaches are relevant to the networked classroom? The area of theoretical approaches is a very broad topic, and can only be sketched out in this talk. Basically, I will try to tie networking in with social constructionist thought as it is currently articulated by Berlin and Bruffee. In particular, Kremers (1988) gives an interesting view of the "liberation" of students in networked classrooms. Information in this section will be based on the experience of teachers in networked classrooms at Gallaudet University, New York Institute of Technology, and The University of Texas, as well as published work based on current theories of composing processes. Time permitting, I will begin to sketch out the main principles of a network theory of writing, based on the use of network technology in writing instruction.
Randy Bass--Brown University
A Whole Raft of Data: Hypertext, Racism and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
This paper will address how an advanced hypertext system can augment the teaching of literature not only by offering an integrated informational environment with which to contextualize a given literary work, but also by enabling teachers to raise certain issues that would be perhaps too complex, cumbersome or even too sensitive in a traditional classroom environment. Focusing on Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--a text that poses distinct challenges to sophisticated classroom treatment--I will discuss how several features of an advanced hypertext system can provide the informational environment necessary for a full exploration of the novel. In the last ten years, especially, certain critics and educators have advocated banning the teaching of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because its treatment of race and racism is too problematic for secondary school or introductory college classrooms. It is my contention that a classroom-supplemented hypertext system addresses most of the concerns raised by these critics, by providing students integrated access to wide-ranging historical, literary and cultural materials, as well as providing a student-authoring environment which emphasizes the open-ended nature of literary analysis.
The first portion of my paper will be a brief review of the two kinds of difficulties involved in teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: the novel's complicated relationship to its historical time period, and a survey of the most common reasons offered by its recent critics who object to its continued use in high school and introductory college courses. The remainder of the paper will detail how various features of an advanced hypertext system might respond to these complexities, particularly as they have been confronted in a current hypertext project coordinated by Bank Street College's Center for Technology and Education, and conducted in association with Brown's Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS). Utilizing IRIS Intermedia hypertext software, the Bank Street project is developing a corpus of materials based on the literary, cultural and historical contexts of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Targeted for use in secondary schools, particularly the 9th- and 10th-grade levels, the project addresses the same kinds of challenges inherent in adapting any hypertext system to the teaching of literary materials, at any level.
An integrated hypertext system enhances literary instruction through its ability to emphasize the dynamic relationship between a literary work and the social and cultural constructions that produced it. A linked web of materials that includes a wide range of explanatory documents, timelines, graphics, maps and contemporaneous primary documents serves to articulate a kind of fluidity between text and context that is virtually impossible to reproduce in a traditional classroom. (The Bank Street project is incorporating all of these kinds of materials--many of them modeled on materials developed in a large literature corpus already in use at Brown, called Context32.)
Additionally, the Bank Street project is capitalizing on IRIS Intermedia's capacity for extensive student authoring, by incorporating such authoring activities that--along with the contextual materials--enable each student to individually engage with difficult and complex issues raised both in and by the text. By combining historical and literary materials with a variety of research and authoring assignments, an advanced hypertext system can go beyond the traditional presentation of a "classic" work of literature by demystifying the literary text as a "sacred" object, emphasizing its nature as a cultural document that can be meaningfully interrogated by individual students, even on so complex and sensitive a subject as race and racism.
Trent Batson, Director ENFI Project
Joy Peyton, Director of Evaluation
Terry Collins and Michael Spitzer, Co-Principal Investigators
Geoff Sirc, Chris Neuwirth, Diane Thompson, Site Directors
Bertram Bruce, BBN, Outside Evaluator
Panel--Report to the Profession. The ENFI/Annenberg Consortium
Annenberg/Corporation for Public Broadcasting Project, is comprised of Gallaudet University, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Minnesota, Northern Virginia Community College and New York Institute of Technology.
This panel comes at the end of the three-year Consortium project. It will feature discussion of how the basic ENFI (Electronic Networks For Interaction) idea of synchronous network communication in a writing classroom (developed at Gallaudet university with deaf students) was transformed to fit the local populations and learning goals at the other four sites in the Consortium. Each of the five sites will present a final look at what ENFI has meant to them: the technical integration of ENFI, the modification of the original ENFI model for their context, the major findings of their site studies. The panel will also discuss the development of an evaluation plan that was broad enough to encompass the diversity of the Consortium but focused enough to produce generalizations useful to the profession. We'll present some of the findings of the three-pronged summative evaluation: the situated evaluation conducted by Chip Bruce and Joy Peyton, the student text evaluation conducted by David Bartholomae and the standardized writing test conducted by the Educational Testing Service. Each of these evaluation studies involved multiple sites.
HISTORY
In July, 1987, at the beginning of the ENFI/Annenberg Consortium, Gallaudet university had already had nearly three year's experience with the ENFI method, but very few other institutions had any. The original model of ENFI, meeting 100% of the time on the network to develop fluency in writing, was to be transported to the other four sites. While we in the Consortium were aware that the other sites had different student populations and learning and teaching goals, we felt that the basic ENFI model offered enough opportunity for current research ideas in collaborative learning and the social construction of knowledge for easy assimilation at new sites.
After a year, however, at least two of the sites had diverged and the original "purity" of the ENFI idea was threatened. We worried about how to manage this unexpected diversity but at the same time wondered if we should expect a certain teaching idea to remain unaltered in new settings. We were even concerned that our funder would object to our divergence from the original idea. After some cross-site visits and even one temporary transfer from one site to another (Batson to Carnegie Mellon from Gallaudet), we came to appreciate the richness growing out of the diversity. Other institutions outside of the Consortium began to implement the ENFI idea, also, under different names.
In the past year, we have struggled mightily (and sometimes not so mightily) with the development and implementation of the summative evaluation. While that evaluation went ahead, we also wrote the final report, from which this panel presentation is drawn. The ENFI idea, by whatever name, has spread to several dozen institutions because it seems to offer possibilities for teachers to try new ways of teaching, for institutions to mount an intensive use of computers for educational purposes and for new research windows to open into the writing/learning process.
Trent Batson--Gallaudet University
The Significance of ENFI
During the five years since the ENFI Project began, has had an impact on both the people and institutions involved in the Project and the Computers and Writing profession. It's fairly easy to see the impact on the people and institutions the Project directly involved. It's also easy to see some possible impacts on the profession, although here we're on more speculative grounds.
A number of colleges and universities now have a project similar to the ENFI projects at each Annenberg/ENFI site. Although the name ENFI is not used at most, even some that don't use the name attribute their work to the original ideas coming out of Gallaudet University. Still, it's always dangerous to claim a single source for any new idea.
But, regardless whether the ENFI idea was an idea whose time had come or not, the fact still remains that it has had an impact on our profession. The energy growing out of the ENFI work helped to get the Computers and Writing conferences started again after a three-year hiatus. The energy of the idea itself led to certain University of Texas people, who we all know, getting involved in extensive research and software development. Similar efforts are going forward on other campuses.
In the area of research, the ENFI technology provides a new way of implementing and observing collaboration and peer review. The discourse record provided by a network-based class constitutes an unbelievably rich data source for those interested in studying discourse communities, interactive writing, gender and minority participation, communication theory, the anthropology of the classroom and so on. It also allows the teacher to be both teacher and researcher, the computer network serving as a digital participant-observer.
My own view of ENFI's significance is that it shows the importance of taking the focus off the machinery and placing it on the people. This avoids the "technocentric fallacy" Seymour Papert warned about. As long as our work in Computers and Writing centers on the ability of computers to support group work, locally or at a distance, we'll continue to produce new concepts and insights about the writing enterprise; if it comes to center instead on the machine's own genius, absent a major AI breakthrough, our work may produce sound and fury but signify little.
Joy Peyton--Gallaudet ENFI Project
Bertram Bruce--Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc.
Evaluating an Open-ended Educational Innovation: "What Is It?" is as Important as "Does It work?"
All educational innovations involving the use of computers are difficult to evaluate, if by "evaluation" we mean proving that they are effective. Many different variables (number and location of the computers, class size, teacher and student perceptions about computers, teacher and student theories about learning, and instructional approaches, to name only a few) can have a profound impact on their success. This difficulty is especially evident with open-ended innovations like computer networking, which do not even presume to be one approach, to be implemented and tested, but instead encourage a wide range of approaches and continually spawn new ones. Once researchers feel they have seized on some aspect of networking to "evaluate," the users have moved onto other things. Yet evaluation and assessment must be done so that potential users have some idea of what they can expect to accomplish and what they can hope to gain.
We will discuss some of the issues involved in designing and carrying out an evaluation for a multi-site consortium of universities and colleges implementing "ENFI," the use of computer networks for written interaction, and present our results. We found, early in the project, that because of different student populations (ranging from deaf basic writers with limited English proficiency at Gallaudet to relatively sophisticated writers at Carnegie Mellon) , different network arrangements, different institutional goals, and different teaching styles, we not only had five different realizations of ENFI at the five sites, but almost as many different ENFI realizations as ENFI teachers. The questions became, which "ENFI" were we evaluating, and was there any hope of making generalizations across these diverse implementations?
Our first step toward solving this problem was to celebrate rather than bemoan the diversity. Each site developed ENFI approaches and ENFI studies that made sense for their populations, goals, and styles. These will be reported on in the individual site presentations. Our second step was to study the diversity itself--to visit classes that said they were "doing ENFI," talk with teachers and students, and try to understand what was going on and what they might be getting out of it. The result of this study will be presented in a review of diverse ENFI implementations. Our final step was to attempt to find some common threads across classes and sites in terms of both implementation and impact. Systematic surveys of consortium ENFI users have resulted in information about successes, failures, problems, and future needs and directions that will be valuable to anyone working with a computer network. Findings from cross-site studies of student writing and attitudes, both more traditional (pre and posttests to ENFI and comparison groups) and more open-ended and qualitative, will also be reported.
Trent Batson & Joy Peyton--Gallaudet University ENFI Project
In The Back Door: Making English Interaction Accessible To Deaf Students
Deaf children don't have access to the "front door" of English acquisition--oral interaction--so have been shut out of easy access to the give-and-take in English that provides the easiest and most certain way to gain English skills. With the ENFI Project (which stands for English Natural Form Instruction at Gallaudet) , we found a "back door" for students to have some access to the interactive energy and feedback in English that they normally miss.
The ENFI Project began at Gallaudet and has consistently shown important results over the five years it's been in use there. Unlike other sites, ENFI is used mostly for developing basic English grammatical skills, although it's also been applied in more advanced writing courses and in foreign language instruction. During the five years of the Project, many teachers have used the network in English 50, the basic English skills course required of freshmen who don't pass the English Placement Test. The approaches used on the network have varied in extent from limited use for specific exercises to classes meeting on the network 1OO% of the time. Some teachers communicate for all purposes through the network while others work on the network while communicating through the air.
ENFI has been considered a success at Gallaudet. It has successfully addressed a problem that many have attempted to ameliorate with very little success. It may be that ENFI has raised the stakes for other kinds of approaches to English instruction at Gallaudet. Institutionally, ENFI has produced positive results by energizing a number of faculty members, by creating a new focus and means for research, by bringing in researchers from the outside (Dr. Peyton being one herself), and by adding new knowledge to share with the other centers of deaf education. In the area of utilizing networks for writing instruction, Gallaudet, through ENFI, became the tail that wagged the dog.
Christine M. Neuwirth, Michael E. Palmquist, Cynthia A. Cochran, Thomas Hajduk--Carnegie-Mellon University
Exploring the Potential of Computer-Mediated Telecommunications for the Teaching of Writing: A Report.
The Starting Point
At the start of the ENFI project, we felt that little was known about the effects of computer-mediated telecommunications technology on writing or the teaching of writing. Therefore, we saw developing a clearer understanding of the social-cognitive-technological dimensions of these technologies as a crucial component for the ENFI project. We conducted four studies: (Study 1) a pilot observation of an ENFI classroom; (study 2) a study on the affective dimensions of computer-mediated telecommunications; (Study 3) a classroom study examining the use of computer mediated tools and their effects on teacher-student interaction; (Study 4) a study examining the social/cognitive effects of computer-mediated and face-to-face collaboration.
Study 1
Our first goal was to integrate ENFI into a section of 76-100, Strategies for Writing, the writing course required of all incoming freshmen in the University (with the exception of Advanced Placement students). As much as possible, we used the standard curriculum and the standard course objectives. The first author met with the teacher weekly and discussed ways in which the technology might enhance course objectives.
In this observational study, we noted several things: (1) Common kinds of problems reported among writers with computer networking. Differences in the kinds of problems noted by students and their teacher; (2) Kinds of writing sub-tasks which seem particularly well-suited/ ill-suited for the use of computer networking, and similar phases of the writing processes at which these uses occur; and (3) Patterns in the use of ENFI derived material. For example, our evidence suggests that ENFI may be the most useful in planning and brainstorming activities.
This study helped us learn more about the use of computer networking in the teaching of writing. We used the results of the study to help us refine the integration of ENFI into the classroom and to confirm our third and fourth studies.
Study 2
Kiesler, et al. [1985] began with the observation that computer-mediated communication relies on text alone, thereby reducing to a minimum nonverbal feedback and information about the social context of the message. Based on this starting point, they theorized that greater attention will be focused on the message and on manipulating the message, and less on the people with whom one is communicating. They reasoned that in an interpersonal communication task, (getting to know the other person), the reduction of nonverbal feedback and information about social context would negatively affect subjects' performance.
Will a similar result obtain when the task is one in which participants should be focusing on the message? We conducted a partial replication of the Kiesler et al. study, but with a writing task rather than an interpersonal communications task. Participants were assigned to one of two conditions: peer discussion of a writing sample on a computer network or face -to-face.
Whereas Kiesler, et al. found that students rated their partners less positively in a computer-mediated communication than in face-to-face discussion, our results indicate no significant difference between students' ratings of their partners in the two conditions.
Survey 3
In a survey of the teaching practices of 560 elementary and high school teachers who were among the most successful in their communities, Freedman et al. (1987) report that teachers agreed that response during the writing process was significantly more helpful to students than response to their final version. "Although the teachers and their students agreed that in-process, teacher-student conferences were extremely helpful, they did not report using them more frequently." Freedman et al. speculate that the organization of school makes conferences difficult (111). Although similar data are not available for college teachers, teachers' additional research and administrative commitments make it likely that college exacerbates the problem. Computer-support for collaborative writing offer an interesting possibility for providing more opportunities for students to interact with each other and their teachers. The central question of this study was: Do increased opportunities for interaction lead to more interaction, and does more interaction lead to significant gains in learning and improvements in writing quality?
The study examined the classroom practices of four teachers of freshman writing. All teachers had a goal of achieving high amounts of interaction (e.g., collaborative learning). Two teachers also used the campus-wide network in their teaching. Based on pilot study interviews with teachers and students from Study 1, we predicted that using the network would alter teachers' patterns of interaction with students: teachers would encourage more frequent submission of drafts; although they would still maintain due-dates, they would encourage students to submit drafts more often with specific questions. We also expected that most students would be enthusiastic about the increased frequency of interaction as well as not having to wait until class or office hours to ask a quick question.
Study 4
Although a great deal of attention has been concentrated recently on collaborative writing, little is known about the cognitive processes that occur because two or more people are working together rather than separately (Malone, 1987). A benefit often cited for collaboration is that participants bring different knowledge and perspectives to the task. Paradoxically, this seems to be a source of difficulty as well. Participants with different knowledge and perspectives create different mental representations of the interaction itself. Further, because the interaction is verbal and ephemeral, it is difficult for participants to reflect on their own interpretations of the interaction, even when they try to take notes. For example, our exploratory research in Study 1 suggested that writers who talk face-to-face tend not to jot down remarks with which they disagree and they tend not to address those points in revision of their drafts.
Thus, we began to explore whether having a written record of collaborative interactions would benefit writers by enabling them to refer to remarks, reflect on them, and address them while writing. As in other problem-solving tasks, such a written record would act as an external representation that might significantly influence participants' success.
This, study, currently underway, investigates the cognitive processes that occur during collaboration and contrasts them to those occurring when participants work alone. In addition, it explores the possible effects of external representations (notes vs. written log). Finally, it compares these processes and possible effects for more and less experienced writers.
Diane P. Thompson, Cathy Simpson
Distant Discourse: Using Connected LANs for Real Time Interactive Writing Between Classes on Two Campuses
An ENFI environment allows students to write messages interactively in real time. At NVCC, we have our students work in small writing groups at each terminal, so that they must use a rich combination of speech, reading and writing as they create and respond to written discourse on the network.
For the past three years, we have connected the ENFI networks at two campuses, Woodbridge and Manassas, using modems and a phone line, so that they function as a single network for interactive messaging. The use of this distance connection enhances ENFI's communication possibilities both positively and negatively:
Distance connection increases the complexity, reality and objectivity of interactive discourse. It is also tricky to keep the discourse civil. Because the reading/writing connection is more difficult at a distance, there is always the potential for a rapid degeneration of communication during distance networking due to trivial misunderstandings. However, class study of these communication difficulties can help students not only to communicate better on ENFI at a distance, but also to gain insight into the essential difficulties of writing when the other person is not present.
We have found that ENFI, whether local or distance, works very well for the following kinds of activities:
ENFI is especially good for linear or "listing" activities, such as brainstorming new ideas for papers, listing supports for arguments, naming details, etc. It provides good support for the thinking skills related to composition--the ability to identify a topic or a thesis, develop supporting material, or argue with an opposing point of view. It is less useful for complex conceptual material, especially if it has a spatial dimension, such as an abstract discussion of how to organize a paper.
Problems with the use of ENFI for distance networking, center on time, coordination and technology. Using ENFI takes time: writing takes more time than speaking and distance connection requires a level of coordination between teachers and their classes that is time consuming to establish and maintain. Further, the technology is tricky to install, modify and maintain.
Ultimately, the value of distance connection between two ENFI classes probably lies more in the adventure of the connection itself than in the academic content of that connected discourse, as students are forced to encounter and deal with the complexities, frustrations, and delights of writing to unknown others.
Michael Spitzer--New York Institute of Technology
Institutionalizing ENFI
In the fall of 1987, when the ENFI project began, New York Institute of Technology had one MS-DOS computer lab available for English classes. This lab contained 20 computers, 12 networked. Three members of the English department used the networking capacity of the lab, while several others used the machines as stand-alone word processors.
For the following Fall, the college installed eight networked labs, each with a minimum of 23 student stations, on 3 campuses. These computer classrooms were equipped with MS-Word and Real-Time Writer, software that allows interactive, synchronous writing among students, and a video switching system. Every writing class offered by the English department--developmental writing, freshman comp, business writing, technical writing--was scheduled to meet for at least one hour per week in one of these classrooms. More than 100 classes, taught by full-time and 35 part-time faculty, were involved.
In this presentation, I will discuss several of the benefits, as well as the pitfalls, that accompanied this large-scale implementation of networked, computer-based writing courses, focusing, as much as possible, on the lessons we learned that might be helpful to people at other institutions. Among the topics I will discuss are these:
(some to be reported in individual presentations at this conference)
Terry Collins, Geoff Sirc--University of Minnesota General College
The General College of the University of Minnesota has served two distinct populations under its work with the ENFI consortium: a relatively large number of basic writers, nearly all native speakers of English who have finished high school in the lower fifty percent of pre-college indicators; and a small number of deaf students, taught in special sections, most of whom have been older, working or returning students, and nearly all of whom are ASL-primary in their language histories.
Not surprisingly, the work in ENFI in General College has taken two rather distinct directions. Among a group of faculty working with basic writers, led by Geoff Sirc, the primary focus has become the transcript of exchange. His presentation will provide an overview of how he and research assistants treat the artifacts of networked communication as key, new texts in the evolution of our understanding of literacy. The particular network artifacts studied are the peer group response transcripts. These files of student conference groups who have critiqued drafts via interactive dialogue on the network (and which are available to student writers as a heuristic and to faculty researchers as a trace of students' acculturation to the writing class) are a wholly new written genre. Since they represent the step-by-step record of minds struggling, both within a given response session and over the entire course, with how to make verbal meaning, they are worthy of deep interest on our part.
Sirc will discuss the coding scheme he and his research associates have developed to allow a rather fine-grained way of reading these transcripts and determining what they tell us about students' growth over time. He will illustrate how the transcripts and their charting disclose information about the kind of remarks students make about writing, their level of textual attention, on-and off-task behavior, and sociolinguistic interaction--all suggesting the rich potential of the transcript as a research artifact.
In his presentation, Terry Collins will discuss the problems with and potential for work with deaf students in the ENFI setting. Deaf users of ENFI have been studied by experts in the relatively homogeneous and supportive environment of Gallaudet University. In fact, this is the seminal work on ENFI (Batson, Peyton et al) and its impact on how instruction in written English for deaf students is conceived and executed has been broad. At Minnesota, however, deaf students make up only O.1% of the enrollment and their role in campus life is marginal; deaf adults in the community are relatively well-employed and supported (although frequently in positions where their disability, especially in language areas, imposes a de facto cap on employment mobility). The experience for deaf users of ENFI at Minnesota has been mixed. Collins will provide an overview of outcomes relevant to those who deal with deaf students via ENFI on mainstream campuses.
Bernhardt, Stephen A.--New Mexico State University
Meyer, Paul R.--New Mexico State University
Easterling, Lynn F.--New Mexico State University
Smith, Edward--Edward Smith & Associates, Austin, TX
Panel--The Shape of Text to Come
Stephen A. Bernhardt--New Mexico State University
The Shape of Text to Come
It is important that we speculate about how computers are changing the shape of text. The advent of text databases, hypertext systems, and the general modularization of text raise important issues for writers, editors, and text designers. The medium constrains text realization: the screen offers at once a sharply delimited area for composing and lots of cheap real estate.
Several years ago I wrote an article on "Seeing the Text" (College Composition and Communication, Feb. 1986) that contributed to a grammar of visual texts. It discussed notions of rhetorical control, cohesion, page design, localization, and reader paths through documents. I have always had strong responses to this article and it continues to be cited, most recently in discussions of screen design and document databases. But my concern at the time was essentially paper presentation, and the influence of computer technology was an afterthought. I would like to update this discussion, with fuller regard for the influence of technology.
The issues I would discuss include my perspective on the debate raised in Text, Content, and Hypertext (MIT Press 1987), where John Brockmann and Geoffrey James debate the redefinition of the role of the writer/text designer in automated publishing systems. When we begin to design text modules--interchangeable parts for a documentation assembly line--then we enter a world of new rhetorical values and strategies. Likewise, when we design hypertext databases, whether as system documentation or as information-exploration environments, the issues are different from those concerning paper systems. Readers still reading, extracting information, and making decisions based on print, but the navigation tools, the emphatic devices, the features of the text that invite or repel readers, the predictability, the cohesion and coherence relations, and the intertextuality are all different.
My presentation will be punctuated with sample screens from various hypertext files--a kind of screen analysis on parallel with the methods of text analysis that are familiar to rhetoricians. I will invite audience interchange as I work toward defining a rhetoric of screen design and text/graphic integration. I will provide a useful bibliography on background in visual rhetoric and screen design.
My paper would bring the audience up to date on discussions of these issues in a diverse literature, conceptualize the important rhetorical dimensions of document databases, and challenge the audience with (hopefully) a set of provocative issues.
Paul R. Meyer & Lynn F. Easterling--New Mexico State University
How Computers are Changing the Role of the Technical Communicator
The computer revolution of the last twenty years has sparked dramatic changes in the way people write and the way they produce documents. Few professions have been affected as profoundly by this revolution as that traditionally known as technical writing. Computers have changed the profession of technical communication in ways that are often predictable but sometimes surprising. In our presentation, we will dramatize this change by contrasting the jobs and opportunities of twenty years ago with those of today. We will also go out on a limb and make some predictions about tomorrow.
In the 1960's the typical technical communicator was female, had a bachelor's degree in English or journalism, and was called a technical writer or technical editor (Moore, 1963). The main supplementary background that employers desired was knowledge of engineering or a foreign language. In 1989 the typical technical communicator is still more likely to be female than male, is still most likely to have a background in English, and is still likely to be called a technical writer or technical editor.
But this is not the whole picture. While most practicing technical communicators have backgrounds in English (Society for Technical and Professional Communication, 1988), technical communication is preferred over English as the desired background of new employees (Amsden and Parker, 1989). Most technical communicators have had some graduate training in a technical area, and their job descriptions are as diverse as documentation specialist, information developer, and technical reports analyst. Most technical communicators work with computers daily (71%), over a third work with desk top publishing packages, and almost a third (31%) are employed by the computer industry (STC, 1988).
Technical communicators work with computers on a daily basis, they are expected to be able to quickly learn new computer systems--word processors, databases, desk top publishing, and even drafting packages--and computers change the way they write, edit, and produce documents. What's not so clear is how computers have changed and are changing the professional status and career paths of these people. Are computers helping technical communicators be upwardly mobile and increase their professional status, or are they an excuse for classifying technical writers as glorified word processors?
REFERENCES
Amsden, Dorothy Corner, and Ann Parker, (1989). "Up the Ladder of Off the Track: Career Paths for Technical Communicators." Paper presented at the 36th International Technical Communication Conference, May 14-17, 1989.
Moore, Mary Furlong. (1963).Career Guide for Young People. New York: Dolphin Books.
Society for Technical Communication. (1988).Profile 88.
Edward Smith--Edward Smith & Associates
On-Line Communication: Changing Notions of Textuality
What makes a text a text? One of the primary characteristics of textuality is cohesion, the systematic grammatical and semantic ties that make a stretch of language internally coherent. But many of the traditional notions of textual cohesion are derived from written texts, and these notions do not seem to apply to on-line communication, where the emphasis is on independent text "kernels" on individual screens. The development of hypertext on-line documentation, where the kernel screens may be accessed in any order, presents further challenges to the idea of cohesion as a necessary characteristic of texts.
In this paper, I will examine textual cohesion in various samples of on-line documentation, and will consider the implications of the growing push for on-line documentation in hypertext form. Finally, I will consider what this means about how we should be teaching writing to students who may be writing in the workplace for on-line reading.
Stephen Braye--Elon College
Writing the Future: Computers, Writing, and Radical Pedagogy
I would like to discuss how computers are having an impact on writing pedagogy, whether we like it or not. The way decisions relating to computers and writing are made determine many of the sites from which we teach, influence the expectations placed upon writing programs, and constrain the pedagogy we might use to teach our courses. In a sense, computers are "writing the future" of many writing programs.
Therefore, we find ourselves in a critical position regarding the union of computers and writing instruction. If we "write" this time with a constant and forceful ideology, we can, through committed inquiry, bring about a positive, critical "reading" of this union. If we fail to do so, we will lose an opportunity which will not likely come again. For we are at a historical position where "writing the future," as far as writing and computers are concerned, may be a student and faculty empowering activity, serving radical pedagogical goals, or it may be used to restrict students within given, prescribed conventions, conventions which preserve the reproductive energies of traditional, conservative education.
In this paper, I will argue that in order to "write the future" in a "hope-full" manner (as Cynthia Selfe suggested last year), we must push for a consistent ideological approach to the union of computers and writing, an approach that will provide for a radical reading of the two. If we fail to develop and maintain such an approach, the future will surely be written in a way which restricts rather than enhances the possibilities this union offers.
I will go on to elaborate how we may develop such an ideological approach. First, we must understand how decisions relating to computers and writing are currently being made and how these decisions are most often informed by a conservative ideology. Second, we must recognize how this ideology constrains writing pedagogy and the possibilities of the writing classroom. Third, we must understand the possibilities offered by a radical ideology and how such an ideology may transform into a useful and practical pedagogy. Finally, we must push for a consistent application of this ideology, one which critically examines each development in the union of the two fields. Only through such a diligent development and application of radical ideology may we be able to develop a process-oriented, student-centered pedagogy, utilizing both computers and writing, capable of generating significant change.
Jerome Bump--University of Texas, Austin
Students as Texts in Electronic Networks
I would like to explore the implications of students using a local area network to produce their own texts and then basing future writing assignments on them. The network was used for class discussion as well as communication outside of class in freshman English, senior literature courses, and in graduate literature and humanities computing classes. In the undergraduate classes the emphasis was on self-disclosure and emotional intimacy. In my latest experiment, in a year-long freshman composition class, the students began generating their own texts in small groups during class, using a synchronous network program to talk about their emotional reactions to literature. However, they were not only allowed but encouraged to leave the subject of literature and go on to discuss their family systems and their personal lives. The transcripts which resulted became communal textbooks for the class as a whole. Their first assignments were to write two page analyses of the group dynamics revealed in these transcripts.
Then the focus shifted to the individual. Unlike most attempts to recount conversations, the transcripts revealed exactly who said what, and allowed students to see themselves in context as they really were. The students went on to write individual essays about the pictures of themselves which emerged from those texts and posted their essays on the local area network. Students then responded individually to the essays of others using an asynchronous network program. Students were not told how to respond to the essays of other students, and, as a result, instead of the customary peer editing advice, they gave each other strong, detailed emotional feedback and support, which created more intimacy, increased self-disclosure, and decreased writers' block. They then revised their essays in response to these readings of their peers as well as the more conventional editing suggestions of the instructor.
When that class assignment was complete the individual comments were combined into a single document comparable to a synchronous network transcript and the two documents compared, revealing more ironic prose in the latter and deeper emotional sharing. In comparisons of synchronous and asynchronous network programs in previous classes, students preferred synchronous programs but in this class with its strong emphasis on intimacy, after they had "broken the ice" with synchronous program, they liked the asynchronous program as well.
Students were divided up into groups to talk to each other on the synchronous network program and then the same students met face to face in their small groups during another class period, giving them ample opportunities to compare those experiences. At times in the small face-to-face groups they were encouraged to replay interchanges from the transcripts to see the effects of including the paralinguistic clues necessarily left out of the electronic interactions.
Extensive testing of various ways of selecting students for such groups was conducted during this class, using all the variables of the Myers-Briggs personality type scale and the Family Environment Scale, as well as by sex. As in previous classes, I explored the question, what effects do the use of pseudonyms have: do they encourage honesty and expression of emotions or increase confrontation? Because these students will be using the synchronous program for a year, I have also been able to test more thoroughly the new hypertext options in the program, determining student willingness to use the reply thread and search options. In addition, I continued testing in this class a number of other hypotheses tested in previous courses, including collaborative exams, conducted on the synchronous networking program. In this case the students did not analyze the communal transcript they generated, but again they defined themselves in the new electronic medium which so clearly links them to others and thus demonstrates that even the writing of competitive tests is a social act.
Kay Butler-Nalin--College of San Mateo
Some Effects of the Computer on Basic College Writers
The findings of studies which investigate basic writers, in general, reinforce many of the trends found in the complied body of research about computers and writing. Basic writers who used computers often show a dramatic increase in fluency as measured by text length. Many instructors are especially interested in these findings which suggest composing using the computer seems to help basic writers avoid writers' blocks so they can produce a volume of text and see themselves positively as writers.
We examined variables investigated by other studies as well as other variables in hopes of deepening the portrait of the ways the computer influences basic college writers. The variables we looked at were text length, the effect of font size on length, paper quality, grammatical errors and revising.
The students who wrote the papers for us were those in the Basic Writing Skills course offered at a community college. The assignment was to write a description of a person. Some students produced their first drafts using the computer while others used paper and pencil. All final drafts were produced using the computer. We used a two way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to assess the main and interactive effects of medium (paper and pencil or computer produced first draft) and language (those students for whom English was their first and only language, or English as an acquired second language).
Other studies have shown that many changes in student writing occur slowly and over time. However, if we look at the research which has focused on computers and writing, some changes happen simply when students use a different medium (the computer) for writing. These changes, albeit small, may point us to important considerations.
Although the findings of this study need to be replicated, we noted several interesting outcomes. Writing fluency seemed to be enhanced when basic writers composed using computers. Across both language groups, the final drafts written by students whose initial drafts were computer produced were longer than those by students whose initial drafts were paper and pencil produced. Font size did not seem to influence the length of the paper. Also not all basic writers respond to the computer in the same way. Native English speakers, especially when compared to ESL speakers, were more fluent when they began and finished the writing assignment on the computer. Finally, we suggested that computers do not always focus revising on superficial concerns. The basic writers in this study directed more of their revising to higher level concerns of one or more sentences.
Lynn Byrd--University of Texas at Austin
Gender Relations: A Comparison of the Traditional and the Computer Classroom
This study will examine the impact of networked computers in the classroom and will evaluate any social/political implications of computer classrooms in terms of gender division in involvement and domination of classroom discussion.
Using previous sociolinguistic studies as its basis, the study will treat the classroom as a social setting and will trace two separate English 309 classes (substantial writing component courses based on a variety of literary/cultural topics) that use both the traditional classroom and the computer networked classroom. The study will evaluate the types of interactions that occur between students and instructors and between the students themselves in the two different settings. Several variables, including mitigation, intonation (and its equivalent in terms of emphatics in the computer classroom), and questioning techniques will be studied to see how classroom conversations/interactions actually occur.
The data has been collected from the printed computer transcripts and by tape-recording the exchanges in the traditional classrooms. Both teachers are assistant instructors and both are approximately the same age. One is male and the other, female. In addition to studying the empowerment of the students themselves, this study will see if differences occur due to the presence of a male or female instructor. (Preliminary study has revealed that, at least in the female instructor's class, an equal--and predominant--amount of the teacher's response goes to male students in both the traditional and the computer classrooms.)
Other statistics that may be analyzed include the actual number of responses and the percentage of male, female: and teacher contributions in the same class, on the same subject, but in the different settings.
Michael P. Campbell--University of California, Berkeley
Interactive Fiction and Narrative Theory: Reading Against the Text "Playing" Robert Pinsky's Mindwheel
Interactive fiction, with its emphasis on the reading process (on the playful/creative aspects of reading), challenges the insistent linearity (and logocentrism) of narratological theories. With interactive computer fictions (such as Robert Pinsky's computer novel, Mindwheel) , the processes of reading and writing are conflated. One is both reading and writing the story as one moves through the text. This conflation, I will argue, mirrors our actual reading habits, our tendency to read against a text in a writerly way.
The novel-game exaggerates the play that normally occurs in the reading process and finally blurs the distinctions between playing and reading in such a way as to make such distinctions nearly meaningless. When we read, we do not always read in the highly structured manner assumed by most narrative theorists. We are free, in fact, to read in a non-sequential, non-linear way, to pay attention when we want to, to whatever catches our interest. As readers, then, we help create the works we're reading. We act, in effect, as co-authors.
In the particular Mindwheel session discussed in this paper, the reader has decided (against the advice of the story's narrator) to stay (to spend time) in a particular "room" and engage the "characters" found there in conversation. A story (or narrative) ensues. I will be using this story (a narrative within a narrative) as a testing ground for certain structuralist theories. Specifically, I will be arguing that interactive computer novels (such as Mindwheel) create various taxonomic problems for those insisting on a "scientific"/"narratological" approach to literature. I believe that these taxonomic problems (the inability to generate appropriate or consistent categories or definitions) are symptomatic, that they stem from a reliance upon questionable assumptions about the nature of readers, texts, and writers.
Athelstan S. Canagarajah--University of Texas at Austin
Computer-Assisted Class Discussion and Black Students: Breaking the Monopoly of Cultural Capital.
British Sociolinguists Stubbs and Coulthard have spearheaded the study of classroom discourse to describe the linguistic conventions students need to know for acquiring knowledge as well as for participating in the class effectively. Such conventions are: the teacher regulates turn-taking, the teacher initiates exchanges as well as topics for discussion, students interact with each other through the teacher, the teacher asks questions in order to display students' knowledge (which is already known to the teacher) for the purpose of evaluation; the further discourse is decontextualized the more appropriate. Such conventions fit Bernstein's characterization of "strong frames" of knowledge transmission (i.e. a teacher-controlled pedagogy).
Bernstein as well as ethnographers like Heath have shown that students from mainstream society have competence in these conventions because their verbal interactions at home are similar to the ones in the school, with parents usually playing the teacher's role. But minorities like blacks who use speech events that are more context-bound and collaborative are at a disadvantage in the class. Such research confirms the claim of sociologists Bourdieu and Passeron that the dominant social groups enjoy not only economic advantages but a stock of cultural resources such as appropriate discourse conventions (i.e. "cultural capital") that privilege them to succeed educationally.
This study argues that by breaking away from the conventions of traditional classroom discourse and encouraging "weak frames" of knowledge transmission, Computer-Assisted Class Discussion (CACD) empowers minority students to participate in class discussions using discourse features in which they are more competent, framing topics in terms that are more relevant to them, and constructing knowledge according to the definitions of their community. The main discourse feature of CACD that enables this is that turn-taking is not regulated by the teacher. As a result, students have the freedom to initiate exchanges and set topics, while students as well as the teacher are forced to negotiate knowledge collaboratively.
This thesis evolves from an ethnographic study made of a computer-assisted freshman composition class I taught in the summer of 1989 at the University of Texas at Austin. Specially designed for minority students, this class had a majority (66%) of Black students. Focusing on the discourse of Black students, I made a comparative study of the computer-assisted and oral (i.e. face-to- face) class discussions. A fine-grained linguistic analysis was made of five transcripts of computer-assisted discussions (each ranging 45-60 minutes), apart from the data collected through participant-observation, sociolinguistic interviews and survey questionnaires. Data of verbal interactions within peer-group situations as well as group interviews in informal settings were also collected in order to compare their classroom discourse with informal discourse outside the class. The class discussions were held through the software program Interchange which is a "live" or "real-time" communications program that enables students and instructors to conduct intensive, text-based class discussion over the computer network.
Some of the differences that emerged include: more students participated in CACD rather than in oral instruction, more topics were initiated by students in CACD, more discussion of texts in CACD were conducted with relevance to the culture and lifestyle of the students, more exchanges were initiated with the teacher as well as other students in CACD. Also, students frequently used Black English Vernacular in the CACD whereas they tended to stick closer to Standard American English in the oral discussion; there was frequent usage of Black speech events like signifying, sounding, and rapping in CACD whereas none of these occurred in oral discussions. Furthermore, a discourse analysis of the computer-assisted class discussions shows the students using strategies that are collaborative and context-bound, which are typical of the students' community-based conventions.
The study confirms that CACD has the potential of breaking the monopoly of cultural capital, providing ethnic minorities a greater chance of participating in the construction of knowledge in educational institutions.
REFERENCES
Bernstein, Basil. Class, Codes and Control. Vol. 3: Toward a Theory of Educational Transmissions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
Bourdieu, P. and J. C. Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1977.
Coulthard, Malcolm. Discourse Analysis. London: Longman, 1977.
Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Stubbs, Michael. Language, Schools and Classroom. London: Methuen, 1976.
Cynthia A. Char--Center for Learning Technology
Computer Animation and Videodisc Editing Systems: New Forums for Children's Collaborative Story Creation
Two studies were conducted to explore how computer animation software systems might offer a valuable environment for children's collaborative story composition. Thirty two children, aged 8-12 years, worked in pairs with two different animation software packages that allowed them to create stories through animated graphics, music and text. Researchers observed children while they worked with the systems, and interviewed them at the end of each user session. Analyses were conducted on the narrative elements of the stories children created, and the types of children's discussion, actions, and decision-making that surrounded the stories' creation.
Results suggest that these interactive visual systems, rather than obviating the use of text, can foster children's lively discussions on how to make creative and selective use of language, images, and sound when constructing stories. Specifically, the discrete graphic images (e.g., human and animal figures, scenery props) served as manipulable story elements which gave rise to children's discussion about characters, settings and genre. Furthermore, children also recognized the special function of language to convey the psychological and emotional dimensions of a story, as reflected by the dialogue and third person narration they incorporated into their visual narratives.
Eve B. Coleman--College of Charleston
Future Perfect, Present Tense: The Transition from Paper and Pencil to Electronic Writing in Elementary and Secondary Schools
The near future of writing in elementary and secondary schools is already written. We in academia, research centers, and industry are presently living the future which present-day students will soon experience as writers in the workplace. In the workplace, professionals write in an environment where drastic technological advances have been made during the past few years. Some of these advances have made their way into elementary and secondary schools.
The future of writing for elementary and secondary students is promising, if not perfect. How will schools make the transition from the present tense, where a great percentage of students is still composing with paper and pencil, to a state of electronic writings? One way for schools to envision changing from "present tense" to "future perfect" is to examine existing programs which give students access to computers, electronic mail, and electronic conferencing. This paper will acquaint conference participants with several existing programs where students are already "writing the future."
Louie Crew--Rutgers University
Parameters of Lesgay Discourse: An Analysis of Two Months of Messages on GAYNET
GAYNET is a node on Internet. On November 13th, GAYNET registered 272 addressees, some of them campus lesgay groups, some of them isolated individuals. During October and November 1989 GAYNET users logged 2,065,415 bytes in messages.
SYSOP Mark Rosenstein, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has given me permission to analyze this discourse. This analysis will provide information about telecommunications in general and also information specific to one discourse community.
Colleague Cynthia Selfe at Michigan Tech has kindly shared a list of the key features that she monitored in a similar project analyzing discourse at Megabyte University. I will monitor these features in common with Dr. Selfe:
I will also analyze several features peculiar to GAYNET, such as the distribution of gaynet subject matter. How much of it is cultural but not genitally sexual? How much of the subject matter is generally but not specifically erotic? How much of the discourse is political?
I will analyze any lesgay jargon, using the computer to count words used repeatedly. I will be particularly sensitive to stereotypes about lesgay people. For example, do gay men manifest features more common in heterofemale discourse? Do lesbians manifest features more common in heteromale discourse?
Never before has the discourse of this private community been accessible to scholars in such candid and quantifiable form. Most study of lesgay language has been either literary or anecdotal. I will make all messengers anonymous.
GAYNET discourse provides a useful way for us to look at writing on computers precisely because only secondarily do GAYNET users come together as writers or as computer users. Many of them are learning to use a terminal solely so that they can connect to other lesgay people. All link primarily as members of a sexual minority, though admitted as members privileged enough to enjoy access a university computer network.
I will also monitor how lesgay discourse addresses the Conference's interest in the "social & political implications of computers & writing."
William J. DeRitter--Rochester Institute of Technology
Teaching with Disabilities: E-Mail
The following is a description of a computer conference program for teaching composition skills which I developed after suffering a disabling accident.
Rochester Institute of Technology has been developing computer science and technology programs for a number of years. Computer literacy is one of the educational goals of the Institute and every student, upon matriculation, is provided with an account number and is expected to become at least basically proficient with the Institute central system.
The conferencing system, which is simply one of a variety of computer based courses, is probably a fairly commonplace program in many colleges and universities. There are both "open" conferences, available to any member of the Institute family and "closed" conferences, like my composition course, which may be used only by those who have registered and paid tuition.
There are two separate parts to my conference program. The first is the NOTES segment, which simply discusses the elements of developing effective written English. Some of the notes are strictly pedagogical; others deal with the ideas and methods of development in a set of readings. The second part is the practicum program in which the students submit their essays to me through the computer for my criticism, evaluation and grading. I meet the students in the "conventional" classroom setting only three times during the regular quarter.
I decided to create my own set of Notes rather than depend upon a commercially developed program, simply because I have not found any one program that does just what I consider necessary for a sound writing course. I don't pretend that my program is any where near perfect, but at least it emphasizes the ideas that I believe are most important.
Most importantly, the conference system allows for considerable interaction between the individual student and me. There is a RESPONSE segment within the NOTES which allows the individual student to react to ideas, questions and assignments as he reads a particular note. The immediacy of the situation contributes greatly to student participation. Each student quickly learns that a response is expected and there is no chance for any one simply to depend upon someone else to carry on a class discussion. On occasion the RESPONSE segment becomes rather demanding and time consuming.
Besides the positive interaction which the Notes provide, a second advantage to the computer based program is the amount of writing that each student must do. Some of the responses to the notes can be very brief and deliberate. At other times paragraphs or even thoroughly developed essays are necessary to answer some of the questions. I like to think that the students begin using and practicing the skills of written communication without actually being completely aware of doing so.
In addition to the writing in connection with the Notes, the student also submits a series of essays of moderate length over the ten weeks that the conference runs. The topics vary, sometimes arising out of the outside reading that has been assigned, sometimes reflecting opportunities to air personal ideas as the spirit moves them. Here the computer functions as a word processor over which the student labors, perfecting the technics I have talked about in the Notes.
My assignments reflect my belief that the experience derived from composing many short papers outweighs the learning opportunity which occurs with working and reworking a longer, more comprehensive paper. I want my students to develop papers which demand careful organization for coherence, economical and effective expression and sound unity. The Notes talk about these qualities and the essays are supposed to reflect them.
When the final draft is ready, the student sends me a copy via the campus wide VAXmail. I do the usual things that writing teachers have been doing for the last two or three thousand years and then send the essay, with my critical comments, amendments, emendments, evaluation and grade back to the student through the same mail system
Even though the interaction of the traditional classroom has been replaced by the interaction of the computer conference, there are still some conventional aspects to the course. There is outside reading. One book is Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, and another is Plato's Last Days of Socrates. In addition there is a collection of short readings which I have chosen not only for the topical material but because they also represent interesting styles of writing. These readings are on reserve in the library. I keep changing them as times and current interests change.
I wish I could report unqualified success with the conference. That is hardly the case. The first quarter that I used my program I learned humility and the students learned frustration. I have, since then, revised, reworked, edited, added and subtracted considerably. Though there is still much room for improvement, it seems to be getting better. The students are more successful, and they seem to enjoy the idea of the conference.
Finally, one of the more important advantages of the program is that it allowed me to return to active teaching, to be a contributing member of my profession even after I experienced my accident. Although I have returned to classroom teaching for some other courses, I have every intention of continuing with this computer conference. Indeed, I may even incorporate some of the very positive advantages of the computer conference into some of my other offerings.
Albert DeSimone, Jr.--University of Georgia
The Technical Writer Evolves: Pursuing the Role of the Information Manager
As technical writers, most of us pride ourselves on our ability to "write technical information for the reader with a non-technical background." Particularly in the academic environment, this is quite likely the primary criterion by which our value to our organization is judged. But how well do we really understand the "technical information" we impart; moreover, how well do we apply the tools of technology that we, through our writing endeavors, encourage others to use?
Many technical writers would admit that they started their technical writing career with a sparse, if not non-existent, technical background. Perhaps they, as I, felt that working in a technical environment--in my case the University of Georgia Computer Center--would somehow make us more technically competent. Although this passive approach will certainly have some positive results, the technical writer who takes an active approach to technical competence will evolve to become a more effective communicator of technical information. Simply stated, a passive approach to technical competence will keep the technical writer forever on the defensive; an active approach to technical competence will put the technical writer on the offensive. It is this aggressive technical writer who will evolve to become the information manager-a technical writer who actively applies information management technology to the creation of accurate and well-written documentation. I define "information management technology" to mean "the use of computers to assist in the production, organization, maintenance, presentation, and delivery of knowledge." While some of my co-workers have objected to the use of the term "information manager" as too general, I call upon co-workers and colleagues to give a better name to the "technical writer who actively applies information management technology to the creation of accurate and well-written documentation." I would further qualify the information manager as:
A technical writer who actively applies information management technology to the task of preparing user's guides, reference manuals, and similar materials which describe and instruct.
A technical writer who does not consider each document a stand-alone creation; each has the potential of being integrated into larger, more comprehensive documents.
A technical writer who builds a set of easily modifiable and maintainable documents. Documents are created with the idea in mind that they will have to be updated, that changes in technology will (a) make information in a document obsolete and, just as important but perhaps not quite as obvious, (b) make the means by which a document is produced and disseminated obsolete.
A technical writer who considers that the information in the document may be presented via different media. Documents will, for the most part, either be read in paper form or presented on-line and read directly on the computer screen.
Our Computer Center (the official name is University Computing and Networking Services) has recently produced a comprehensive, general user's guide which embodies the qualities of good information management. The Facilities Access and Services Guides was designed as follows.
Whatever approach we take to our writing tasks, whether we consider ourselves technical writers or information managers, we can all agree that we have a responsibility to our readers. Without a readership, we have no purpose. A riddle I recall from years gone by comes to mind: "If a tree fell in the forest and no one was there to hear it, would it make any sound?"
Anthony DiMatteo, Susan Suchman, Richard Toby Widdicombe, Sylvia Broffman, and Marshall Kremers--New York Institute of Technology
Panel--Networks in Real Time: What is Their Net Worth?
In this panel we explore the dimensions of a new kind of writing classroom. Putting groups of students on a LAN in real-time requires a broad re-assessment of our traditional pedagogy. What happens when we give students new freedom, and thus new responsibility, to explore ideas in groups on a network? What is the difference between oral and network conversations? How do real-time dialogues alter the traditional ratio of teacher authority and student discipline? What happens to writing assessment, to traditional grading and to holistic scoring? In what areas is our pedagogy inadequate to deal with these new concerns?
The panelists will draw from their work with the ENFI project led by Trent Batson of Gallaudet University. Anthony DiMatteo argues that teachers in the ENFI classroom will understand their work better with some grounding in postmodern theory. Susan Suchman describes a model for collaborative work that combines traditional and ENFI classrooms into a focused, integrated conversation. Toby Widdicombe recommends a way to bring traditional assessment criteria in line with criteria better suited to network writing. Sylvia Broffman and Marshall Kremers describe a study of how basic writing students pre-write using oral conversation in the traditional classroom and network conversation in the ENFI classroom.
Anthony DiMatteo
Unsettling the Known: Postmodernism and the ENFI Classroom
Postmodern theory understands writing as a drama that composes all knowledge and identity. Writing circumscribes the author and his or her claims to knowledge and exposes knowledge as a discourse without a ground beyond writing, which eludes mastery, ownership and control. This postmodern scene of writing can be usefully compared to the networked writing classroom in which writing is conspicuously open-ended, unpredictable, and unruly. In fact, postmodernism both describes and develops out of the computerization of knowledge and writing. Teachers of synchronous network writing can use new writing technology to explore challenging postmodern perspectives upon the issues of authorship, argumentative writing and learning. A series of exercises in real time shows how teachers can achieve certain tasks that develop these controversial but invigorating perspectives by opening up knowledge to the historicizing pressure of discourse and writing.
Richard Widdicombe
An "Alms-Basket of Words": The Problem of Assessment in Networked Writing
The problem with assessing network writing is that the traditional criteria of assessment (grammatical correctness, syntactical variety, paragraph unity, clarity of argument, and so on) either do not directly apply to, or else severely distort the progress in, student writing that a network dialogue-program is capable of engendering. Other assessment criteria can and need to be developed, ones which focus on audience, voice, variety of idea, originality, and syntactical smoothness, but these are not easy to formulate, and the fit they should have with more traditional sentence- and grammar-based criteria is problematic.
To illustrate my sense of what needs to be done in assessing network writing--a form of writing which seems likely to be the compositional form of the future--I would analyze transcripts of RealTime Writer multivoice conversations in order to emphasize the virtues of such discourse. It is possible to develop an effective assessment instrument for network writing, but it is one that may have to come inductively rather than deductively and pay more attention than is traditionally given to the issue of authorial intentionality rather than achievement.
What is particularly novel about my approach is that I will interpret the sorts of "noise" with which nearly all network dialogues begin rather differently from most other faculty and, indeed, students. The consensus from these two groups is that this verbiage (some of which is crude and awkward) needs to be eliminated; that it gets in the way of the "legitimate" uses for interactive computer-dialogues. If only it could be eliminated (so the argument runs), then the dialogue could become more quickly focused and valuable. My belief is that the "noise" serves a number of useful purposes. Among these are getting the students comfortable with the idea of communicating with each other in a permanent way; allowing them to brainstorm (however tangentially) about the subject under discussion; making them realize that there are points of view different from their own; making them conscious of the ambiguity of the language they use giving them the opportunity through their dialogue harmlessly to vent their frustrations at both the difficulty of writing coherently, and at the dominant (and, sometimes, intimidating) presence of the teacher; and showing them the efficacy of committing even the most fleeting and marginal ideas to paper in the creation of an essay. Students are almost allergic to prewriting and planning what they write: communicating via a network allows them to see the topic narrow down and focus even as they write and discuss. No other method has, in my experience, worked as well.
I will conclude the paper with a set of recommendations about how to dovetail the more traditional assessment criteria with those better suited to network writing. The balance among holistic, single-trait, and analytical forms of assessment needs to be different for network writing if the progress in writing that students can make through frequent use of the new technology is to be judged fairly.
Susan Suchman
RTW--Learning To Be A Group Player
One of the problems with the introduction of synchronous computer software (in this case Realtime Writer) in the classroom has been how to teach students to sustain conversational focus. While teachers may be dedicated to the theory that talking in written words provides practice in collaboration, listening and clearer self-expression, many of us find that in practice, students let loose on a computer network use it to flirt, tease, cast obscenities back and forth, and make plans for the weekend. In an effort to break through this barrier, I developed an assignment geared to accommodate and eliminate it. For my presentation I would like to describe both the assignment and the reasons why I feel that it was successful.
At the core of my approach was the belief that students can, could and should find a computer network a useful prewriting tool. However, before this could happen, the group as a whole had to feel that something valuable could be accomplished if they had used the network to do the assignment. They also had to make a connection between better writing on the network and easier writing at home.
The assignment involved a 4 part progression that integrated the team-writing approach in their text (Gebhardt & Rodriguez) and work on Realtime Writer. First, I asked them to conduct open-ended conversation on the network about TV and then to focus on a proposed TV show for January 1990 for a particular audience. Next, I asked them to take the Realtime Writer transcripts, use these to consolidate their ideas, and assign each member of the group to write a proposal for the network, a sponsor, a star, or a review. Then, after beginning their own work at home, they were asked to help each other via a network conversation. Finally, they again used the regular classroom to review drafts with team members.
In this way, I reinforced the use of network software with regular classroom activity. I tried to eliminate the distinction between "learning" to do skills in class and "learning by working on the network. The initial transcripts for this class were as obscene and monosyllabic as any I have seen. However, by the end of the assignment all 5 groups and most group members were making substantive contributions to a focused discussion. This proved to me that computer software is a tool, an asset to a total teaching strategy, not a substitute for one. I had to make the skill of focused conversation a part of my total classroom before it would really take off on the computer network.
Sylvia Broffman & Marshall Kremers
Pre-Writing in ENFI and Non-ENFI Classes: Does Real-time on the Network Make a Difference?
At the ENFI meeting this past June in Washington, Shirley Brice Heath suggested a research project for examining differences between paper/pencil classes and network classes in real-time (ENFI classes). Heath's concern is that since oral discourse enhances written -communication, ENFI classes, with their emphasis on written discourse, might be taking oral communication out of the composition class, thus robbing students of the reinforcement that comes from expressing thoughts about concepts orally. We assume that Heath's suggestion is rooted in Vygotsky's observation that children use oral language to talk themselves through tasks. We set up an experiment to evaluate how remedial students prepare for formal writing by responding orally and in written conversation to the teacher's prompts, and to each other. The observation included models for three different classroom environments: (1) teacher intervention in the paper/pencil class, and (2) teacher intervention in the ENFI class, and (3) teacher non-intervention in the ENFI class.
Experimental Method
We used video cameras to record both the paper/pencil class and the ENFI class, taping on several occasions to avoid intrusive behavioral variables such as self-consciousness about being taped. We conducted follow-up audio-tape recorded interviews of several students. In order to observe theme selected students more closely, we looked at their responses to the Daly-Miller writing anxiety questionnaire and the Palmer computer anxiety survey. We also examined responses to a personality survey indicating the individual's source of motivation. We will summarize results drawn from these questions:
Panel Presentation
Depending upon the time allowed for our presentation, we will show brief clips from the video tape, and we will use overheads to illustrate Realtime Writer transcripts and statistical data.
Roger Easson--Christian Brothers College
Politics and Literacy
As teachers of writing, we have ignored the very domain that is most critical to the enterprise of teaching writing: its technological context. If we are to direct the transformation of our classrooms and curricula in response to the new computerized workspace currently reconstructing our text handling and text production capabilities, then we must rediscover the centrality of technology in the writing process.
We have assumed that print is only a display medium and contains no pedagogically significant distinctions which we must include in our classroom practices. As a result student writers inhabit a strange world:they produce single author manuscripts but they read printed texts which are the result of an enormously complex collaborative publishing process. The social, intellectual, and perceptual gap between the printed texts students read and the manuscripts they write is profound. In the traditional writing class, teachers expect that the highly polished and collectively generated surface features of print must be replicated in the single author manuscript. Even though "real" authors have a small army of "fixers" swarming their texts, student writers in traditional writing classrooms are shut out of the collective nature of the working writer's experience by the insistence that each student must do only his/her own work.
Now, even though we have failed to consider the old print technology as central to our classroom practices, we are preparing to embrace a new computerized electronic workspace. Unless we are more considerate of this new technology, we will make all the same mistakes again. Critics have taken the position that this technology is the practical implementation of poststructuralist literary theory. However, as engineers are developing this technology in a very pragmatic response to a massive information geyser which every five years doubles the amount of accessible information about the world this seems unlikely.
What is clear is that the technology proposes profound transformations in the rhetorical tradition of textuality and substantial reorganization of classroom practice. It is likely that Computer Assisted Collaborative Work environments currently under development will be the next generation of this technology, replacing both Word processing and Hypertexts. We must deal with the transitional period with as much creativity as we can muster, but we must never forget that the security we had in paperbased print has been shattered. That tradition, as wonderful as it was, is sliding into the past and we must let it and its censorious ideology go.
Thomas Ellis & Martin Rosenberg-University of Michigan
The Nonlinear Text: HyperCard, Heuristics, and the Self-organizing Essay
HyperCard, as a classroom tool, has the potential for directing students' attention toward the self-interactive process of conceiving, clarifying, questioning, and reworking ideas, and thus implies a new model for student-teacher interactions. Through HyperCard, the feedback loop of student-teacher relations can be opened up to include one or more loops at the command of the student at every stage in the process of composition. Is it possible that the symbiosis between creativity and discipline we have always recognized in our very best students can be introduced, externalized, and mastered by any student of composition, through the mediation of heuristic processes made possible by computer technology?
We wish to present the following HyperCard applications to illustrate some of the possibilities inherent in this technology for helping students to model their own thinking processes, assuming that mastery requires self-consciousness. If students have at their fingertips a self-generating series of questions to probe the logical and rhetorical soundness of any given contention, they may to some extent co-opt many of the critical operations that are normally performed by the teacher. This approach aims not to make students dependent upon this technology nor technologies to come, but rather to use technology to illustrate graphically formal operations that students are quite capable of performing independent of the technology. By modeling the processes of critical inquiry, these HyperCard applications can instill habits of critical inquiry that the students can own, in the popular sense of "empowerment."
We are currently developing a pilot project entitled "Writer's Workshop" to explore these possibilities. "Writer's Workshop" is an interactive environment within which students are encouraged to test out possible topics of invention, and explore the assumptions or implications of their contention. It consists of five interconnected HyperCard stacks: (1) Argupromt, the "home base" stack, a large scrolled writing field with invention prompts for title, thesis, introduction, and next paragraph; (2) Writer's Block, a heuristic sequence that solicits students' interests and helps them to shape interests into a thesis statement; (3) Topic Generator , a random generator of arguments which provides exploratory prompts and writing space, based on students choice on a Likert scale of between complete agreement and complete disagreement; (4) Enthymemes, a stack for testing the logic of any assertion by translating students' enthymemic statements into formal syllogisms and then examining assumptions and evidence; and (5) an alphabetical reference grammar for the most common usage problems.
This HyperCard system is but one example of the heuristic possibilities of the medium. Such systems could be expanded to incorporate other rhetorical schemata such as those of Toulmin, Meiland, or Burke. An interesting theoretical issue, yet to be explored, concerns the limit of such heuristic systems: at what point and in what way might a heuristic feedback system such as this interfere with the student's invention process, rather than assisting it?
In this project, we assume that the initial stage of invention, when a student is hatching his or her conception and exploring its implication, is the time when generic (and hence easily programmable) heuristic intervention strategies are most likely to be useful. As students begin to clearly perceive their purpose and explore possible avenues of development, the feedback they need becomes increasingly context-bound, and hence less predictable.
Nevertheless, by externalizing techniques of modeling concepts and their relationships, HyperCard's technology can enable us to teach the process, rather than simply the concepts, of critical thinking to our composition students. In doing so, we may resolve one of the thorniest problems of composition pedagogy: the tendency of instructors, by virtue of their contradictory roles as helpers, initiators, readers, and judges, to hinder rather than help students to find their voice.
Patricia Freitag Ericsson--Dakota State University
Chronicling a Merger: The Marriage of Computers and Composition
Through years of experimentation with computers in the writing classroom, mainly dealing with freshman composition, I have developed an approach to computer assisted composition that makes pedagogical sense. My entry into the world of computers and composition was due to a 1984 mission change at Dakota State University (DSU) which included a mandate that the computer be fully integrated into all courses. The struggle from the beginning of our mandated integration has been to make the marriage between composition and the computer a happy and productive one.
Knowing that the approach taken had to be pedagogically sound and logical, I believed that more than serendipity should guide the implementation of a successful composition course. I knew that a such a course had to be informed by the most current and valid theories of writing instruction and that to implement these theories while also integrating computers in the classroom would be a challenge. Happily, I found that the two elements I needed to utilize did compliment one another. My exploration has resulted in several conclusions; the most important is that composition instruction and the technology offered by computers present an opportunity to implement an exceptionally effective freshman composition course.
Assignments in this course are based in the writer's personal experience, but lead to a research paper. These assignments include some or all of the following: a personal experience narrative, several summaries, a character sketch, an opinion paper, comparison and contrast writing, a definition, and finally a research paper. All assignments deal with one topic. Each paper builds on the already completed papers. Word processing technology makes this building fairly simple. The final research paper combines elements of all the papers previously written, and again the technology implements this process.
The success of this approach to freshman composition is evident in the final research papers. Students actually know and understand their subject matter because they have been immersed in the subject and have written about it from several different perspectives. They are also invested in the topic since they have chosen a topic in which they have a personal interest.
A course of similar design that did not use computer technology would be much less effective. The students have the ability to use parts of "old" papers to build "new" ones. They construct their own database of information on their particular subject and able to access it at any time.
This paper fully explains the background, development, and pedagogical underpinnings of my approach to this class and deals with the specifics of implementing such a course.
John F. Evans--University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Learning Literary Theory and Teaching Writing with a Word Processor
My presentation describes what happens in a second semester Freshman English classroom where I use word processing to create files of short texts and exercises which encourage students to engage in textual manipulation and reflection. My research suggests that the fluidity of the text on a monitor allows students to respond in ways less cumbersome than paper and pencil. Furthermore, my study indicates how students begin to change the way they think about the text in front of them. Through sample texts, exercises, excerpts from student essays and journals, I will present a way microcomputers may be used to manipulate texts by writing and reading between the lines, by filling in the gaps of texts, and by changing the perspective of texts.
So, this proposal undertakes to weave together three strands of interest in the field of English Education: writing-to-learn theory, reader-response literary criticism and computer-assisted composition. Weaving these strands presents a unique procedure for bringing together emerging technology, literary theory and pedagogy. This presentation will focus on how writing responses to reading at a computer increases freshman college composition students' awareness of their response behaviors and this increased awareness affects their response behaviors as they read and write about what they read.
Currently, literary critics, theorists, and reading researchers are positing new ways of considering the relationship between the reader and the text. This new relationship turns the authority of a literary interpretation and teaching literature inside out. It endeavors to establish a community of readers and learners who create meaning which is no longer contained in the text on the page, but is derived from an interaction between the content and the structure of the author's message and the experience and prior knowledge of the readers (Chase and Hynd 1987). A good reader, then, is one who defines and refines one's own thoughts while recognizing that truth is often a point of view, indeed a multitude of viewpoints (Bartholomae and Petrosky 1986). This assault on the objective certainties of literary criticism has become known as reader-response literary criticism or theory, depending on the audience or speaker, of course (Holland 1975, Bleich 1978, Fish 1980). Suggesting ways of putting reader-response theory into practice are a wide range of scholars at every level of education (Holland 1975, Rosenblatt 1978, Scholes 1985, Probst 1984).
In his book, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English, Scholes fashions a pedagogy where teachers help their students recognize the power texts have over them and "assist the same students in obtaining a measure of control over textual processes, a share of textual power for themselves." Furthermore Scholes claims that, "In working through the stages of reading, interpretation, and criticism, we move from a submission to textual authority in reading, through a sharing of textual power in interpretation, toward an assertion of power through opposition in criticism. This process is also based upon a continually widening concept of text, moving from a specific set of printed signs to the codes and modes of thought and value that enable those signs to bear meaning" (39).
The simple textual manipulations which Scholes goes on to suggest I feel the computer facilitates and may lead some students to a deeper understanding of a text. The major difference between what Scholes suggests and what I do is that I have all the students write their responses and exercises at computers equipped with word processing.
>Implications are here for both computer-assisted composition classrooms and literature classrooms. I found John Clifford's essay, "A Response Pedagogy for Noncanonical Literature" in the Spring 1986 issue of Reader particularly useful for understanding what may be going on. Clifford points out that a Reader-response theorist like Louise Rosenblatt is invaluable in helping instructors develop a pedagogy appropriate to undergraduates who have not yet been made to assimilate either a specific critical stance or a narrow view of literature. In The Reader, the Text, the Poem, for example, Rosenblatt reminds us of John Dewey and William James' insight that we select from an environment the stimuli to which we respond. And in texts that stimulus is not a given: readers create it through the prism of their own concerns. Personal associations will come forward if the instructor allows it, so will observations about the mimetic value of characters, the connotations of words, the implicit values, and the relevance and depth of its metaphors and symbols. All these possibilities and more will be noticed in a heterogeneous college classroom--if they are encouraged and nurtured. Once students are freed from the illusion that meaning is in texts, to be extracted by applying the right critical moves, they can select and organize their ideas more authentically, with decreased anxiety about correctness. Instead of worrying about particular responses, students can profit by substituting a healthy self-consciousness about the full context of their responses to a wide variety of texts (Clifford, 54).
The computer-assisted-composition students in my experiment are engaged in writing and thinking about their own writing and thinking. I feel much can be done by a teacher with a word processor to create files which encourage a class to engage in textual manipulations and reflection. The fluid text presented on the monitor allows the student to respond in ways impossible for paper and pencil. But more than that it presents a text which may change the way that we think about the text in front of us. It presents a way to manipulate texts by writing and reading between the lines, filling in the gaps, and changing perspectives at a rate close to the rate of our thought.
I have solicited BreadNet participants for additional data and am working with a local high school teacher to test the implications for her students. I presented a preliminary paper on this topic at the Computers and Language Teaching Conference in Duluth where Cynthia Selfe provided some corroboration of my work by sharing with me her unpublished essay, "Technology in the English Classroom: Computers through the Lens of Feminist Theory." Since then I have collected more data from university students and developed a statistical analysis of it to complement what is mostly an ethnographic study.
Sallyanne Fitzgerald, Peggy Mulvihill & David Warren--University of Missouri-St. Louis
Panel--Hypercomp: Placing a Hypertext Tool into the Hands of Basic Writers, Advanced Students, and Teachers
During the Winter 1990 semester, the Hypercomp Project has explored how a hypertext tool, Storyspace, differs in its usefulness for three distinct levels of students, as well as what unforeseen benefits and problems arise from the imposition of such a tool. This panel will present the reflections of faculty members involved in the project, which is still in progress at the time this abstract is being written.
The panel presentation will begin with a brief description of the hardware and layout of the computer laboratory, the software used and the methods for introducing the software, the kinds and numbers of students involved, and the frequency of class meetings.
Peggy Mulvihill, in a talk entitled "Storyspace: Places In the Mind," will discuss how this hypertext tool facilitated thinking for her class of advanced writers, specifically in the areas of invention, organization, and revision. In addition, she hopes to demonstrate some samples of student-created hypertexts. Sallyanne Fitzgerald will follow with "Thoughts on Getting Pre-Service Teachers to Consider Hypertext." Finally, David Warren will provide a spirited personal journey through the whole project in "'Placing A Hypertext Tool Into the Hands Of--Whoops! Those Were My Hands." His review of this experience will include an assessment of the impact of the hardware and software on the teaching of Basic Writing. The entire panel will offer some projections regarding possible future decisions as a result of what we discovered.
Marjorie Ford--Stanford University
Choreographing the Computer Classroom
In their recent article (November 1989) in Computers and Composition, "How Word Processing is Changing Our Teaching," Dawn and Raymond Rodrigues assert, "When teachers teach writing with computers, their teaching changes-... in ways that teachers themselves can't always predict, and in ways that early researchers (focusing on the effects of word processing on the quality of written products) were unable to imagine. "The Rodrigues' speak directly to my experiences when they say, "teachers can't predict" how their teaching will change in the computer classroom. My paper will describe how and why my teaching process changed in the computer classroom; then I will discuss four different approaches to choreographing classroom activities using the computer to facilitate thinking and writing activities that involve collaboration between the students themselves as well as their instructor. The paper will demonstrate how these collaborative activities encourage students to become active participants in their own learning process.
The first strategy covered will be collaborative class notes, a process that involves a student transcribing a class discussion conducted by the instructor; a printed copy of class notes can later be used by students working on other writing assignments or reflecting on what they are learning in class. The second strategy, collated group answers to discussion questions on readings, allows students to work together in small groups at the computers to shape answers to discussion questions and then to review and evaluate as one large group the answers from the various smaller groups. Strategy three, collaborative peer critiques, provides guidelines for directing transcribed large and small group critiques of peer writing. The final strategy, perspectives on collaborative class notes, creates three different records of a class discussion for students to read and evaluate in order to demonstrate that content and meaning are perceived and recorded in a unique way by each individual.
The strategies explored demonstrate the transformation that is taking place in the relationship between the instructor and the students in terms of who is actively participating in the writing and thinking during class activities in the networked computer classroom. The four strategies outlined support the idea that teaching writing in the computer classroom challenges our traditional pedagogies and encourages our creativity.
Alice Gasque & Nancy Zuercher--University of South Dakota
Writing the Future in the Maclab: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Presently the MacLab at the University of South Dakota is outfitted with 11 Mac Pluses, a 40-megabyte Mac SE dedicated as a network server, a 20 megabyte SE with an external drive dedicated to detecting viruses, one ImageWriter II, and one LaserWriter.The room is exclusively used for word processing and desktop publishing, both for classes and for walk-in students and faculty.
The room's floor plan was designed for writers rather than for computer scientists. Computers with extra space between them are located on the edges of the room. A round table and chairs in the middle of the room invite discussion and encourage collaborative work. All of the classes engage in process-oriented writing and peer editing and evaluation.
The panelists of the session both teach a university-wide required advanced writing course in the Maclab. They have been using word processing in composition courses for the last four years. They began with IBM-PC's and are now conversant with both systems, as well as Maclink.
Students in these classes often don't know the class requires word processing until they walk in the door for their first class. Almost none of them have been English majors, and few of them have done any serious essay writing since they were freshmen. Class size ranges from sixteen to twenty-seven this semester.
This session will explore the past, the present, and the future of writing in the Maclab. We want to tell you about the good, the bad, and the ugly in order to help make decisions for the future, given a limited budget. We expect to focus on the following issues:
Joanne E. Gates--Jacksonville State University
The Practice and Pedagogy of Shakespeare On-Line
This paper evaluates alternative systems for integrating higher-level computer skills into the humanities classroom with the use of Shakespeare as a core text. Both the ASCII-text files of the "Shakespeare on Disk" program and the NeXT computer, with its Digital Librarian function that includes the Complete Oxford Shakespeare, offer possibilities for stimulating computer aided learning in upper-level humanities courses. A Canadian firm plans to offer printed texts (from Macintosh format) and disk versions of the First Folio edition. Both acting companies and scholars interested in restoring the versions closest to the original encourage consultation with the Folio, but the computer scripts are not precisely accurate to the Folio spellings and page layout. Oxford also offers a version of Shakespeare which allows for searches and linking through Micro-OCP operations.
Composition instructors who have expended tremendous energies in introducing all entering freshman to the computer environment are interested a word processing system which has streamlined, simple commands. Even publishers of freshman handbooks have entered the market to provide stripped-down word processing software. Standard tasks such as windowing and text formatting are discouraged; thus objectives of the beginning level programs often conflict with the sophisticated needs of the advanced student.
The NeXT computer, with its Digital Librarian function that includes the Complete Oxford Shakespeare, makes "Shakespeare on Disk" archaic. NeXT can instantly access any passage in all of Shakespeare; Shakespeare on Disk is limited by the fact that, accessing its separate files (usually a file for each act), ranging in size from ten to twenty thousand characters, requires a sophisticated database system to search just one entire play. With sophisticated sound and graphics integration, laser printing, and a user friendly programming language, NeXT's potential has advantages that question our clinging to IBM and Macintosh based systems.
Shakespeare on Disk provides an incentive to link computers and humanities and provide upper level students with more of the advantages of computer technology. The program allows, for its 175-dollar price, unlimited educational copying of twenty Shakespeare plays ($350 for 37 plays). But to hand out disk copies of the plays and require students' use of files for the writing of their critical papers--albeit an important advantage--is only the most obvious of many instructional benefits. There are particular problems in integrating IBM-format, widely-used word processors, including Wordstar, WordPerfect, Norton Textra, and Notabene, with the ASCII files of Shakespeare on Disk. Shakespeare in computer format can teach the advantages of work with the concordance. The ease with which the computer makes this thorough and productive is obvious, but I stress that the program be used as a tool to implement students' own initiatives. Once linguistic links are discovered in the text, of course, we need to ask how they are significant. The programs can be used to evaluate the production values of Shakespeare. Students can annotate the text to demonstrate their comprehension of the production choices of an existing video or invent stage directions that show their creative approaches to a scene.
Before students can be comfortable with the capabilities of Shakespeare on-line, they need to understand search commands, block and copy routines, preferably with multiple windows, icon environments, and step-saving devices that make formatting and desktop publishing included In their computer skills. Although the study of Shakespeare is required for most humanities students and thus a way to reach the teachers of tomorrow, he is by no means the only author that should be so accessible. At the same time that we make use of existing technologies, we must question the priorities of our computer assisted composition programs.
Pamela Gay--State University of New York at Binghamton
Computers & Basic Writing: Toward a New Pedagogy
The emphasis of most studies of computers and basic writers in the 1980s was on the power of the computer to effect change; pedagogy was largely ignored. The computer was considered a neutral writing tool with a power of its own. The computer alone, we have learned, cannot empower basic writers. Writing instruction continues to play an important role in the development of writing abilities. After reviewing fifteen studies which report some effects of word processing on college basic writers, I will suggest research directions and call for the creation of a new pedagogy, not a pedagogy which adapts or adjusts to technology but a pedagogy which shapes how computers are used by basic writers. An examination of prior research can help us learn how to shape an environmental context which will empower basic writers to write their way into the future.
Ed Gibler & David Judkins--University of Houston
HyperCard in Freshman Composition: Developing an Understanding of Rhetorical Strategies
Students at the University of Houston in freshman English classes are required to write several essays that analyze the rhetorical styles or patterns in short contemporary essays. The object of this requirement is to make students focus their attention on the way in which the essay is written as opposed to the subject matter the author has chosen to deal with. The English faculty believes there are several advantages to this method, not the least of which is to help prepare students to write critical essays about literature which are required in the sophomore year.
Although the idea of writing a rhetorical analysis may sound good, in practice it is often very difficult for students to understand and perform assignments. Rather than writing about the style, tone, and persuasive techniques in the essay, they often either summarize the contents of the essay or give their own opinions on the subject matter. Thus when a new computer writing lab was installed for the use of English students the first attempted application was to assist students in the difficult process of writing rhetorical analyses.
There are, of course, off the shelf programs designed to help students write better papers, but our needs were very specific, so we did not think such programs would be helpful to us. Moreover, most writing programs are designed to improve the writer's style, to eliminate usage errors, and to vary vocabulary. We were interested in altering the way students thought about what they were reading and then articulate those reflections. With this goal we could not see how general or generic questions or comments would assist students in that goal. Finally, although we wanted the program to be very direct, we did not want it to be interactive. No matter what the student wrote in response to the computer's prompting, we wanted the student to be able to proceed.
Since a new freshman English text had just been adopted by the Freshman English Committee at the University, we selected four typical short essays from the text to build programs which were designed to take three or four hours to work through. This did not include reading the essay itself which was to be assigned the day before the lab session. At the end of the exercise each student should have produced a complete paper.
Our writing lab consists largely of Mac Plus machines networked in clusters of eighteen to twenty Mac SE's with twenty megabyte hard disks. The programs were written in Hypertalk, a versatile programming tool. The beauty of Hypertalk is that it is packaged with new Macs, is easy to use, and, of course there is very little expense involved.
The HyperCard stacks which the students saw on screen were of a split screen format. The top screen provides the instructor's prompts and guidance as well as tools for maneuvering through the exercise. The bottom screen is the student's work area or data entry screen. In essence, the students read the top screen and compose/edit using the bottom. The contents of the bottom screen follow them throughout the exercise, eliminating the need of "page flipping" back and forth.
At various points in the exercises, the students are prompted to examine their work and select portions of their finished product. This is accomplished paragraph by paragraph. The finished paragraphs are invisibly compiled and displayed as a whole at the end of the exercise. At this point the student may make global revisions or focus on formatting before turning in a copy of his/her work.
When students are satisfied with their work, they are asked for their student ID number, and a text file containing their final copy is saved to the network in a "limited access" location. The access limitations alleviated problems of accidental erasures and the comparing of work. The files are then collected and given to the instructor. The prompts that were written in the top half of the screens ask students to respond to a variety of requests and suggestions including pre-writing exercises, general questions which lead to introductory paragraphs, more specific thought provoking questions which, we hope, lead to substantive paragraphs in the body of the essay. Finally, prompts on the conclusion ask for more than a summary of what has been written, but look for broader implications or finally pinpoint the specific weakness or strength of the essay.
Hopefully, the programs then lead the student through the whole process of writing an essay., from the initial scratching down of words, through the organization of ideas, to writing a rough draft, and polishing a final draft. This requires that the student periodically be given a clean sheet of paper to start with again, but at the same time not completely lose the previous work. The text fields in HyperCard were used as a basic word processor which does allow one to copy text from one point to another. The presentation of this paper will include a demonstration of how the programming was done, and a short demonstration of one of the completed programs.
From an instructor's point of view there were advantages to the system we worked out beyond improving students' writing. First, this was an English class that substituted files for papers. One disk was sufficient for all the files for the entire term. Second, grading on screen was quicker than on paper. It is easier and quicker to read the screen than a student's handwritten paper. By setting up a series of macros which incorporate the most common error messages one uses, two key strokes can quickly produce a three for four word error message much faster than could have written a note on the student's paper. One can also put the error message exactly where one wants it in the text.
We believe students learned better with this method, though we must point out that there was no control group with which to compare my class. Clearly students spent a longer time writing their papers in a controlled environment; the presence of an illuminated screen as well as the computer promptings tended to maintain their concentration. Thus, they wrote much more on the essays than other students we had taught in the past. This additional writing was profitable because it allowed students to explore their own reactions before hastily committing themselves to a final draft.
Like any new effort, there is much more to be done and much more to be learned. Having gone through one class, we think some of the prompts should be revised. We think the computer orientation which we began with for the first two hours needs rethinking. Finally, we would like to design more of a progression in the development of skills through the programs than currently exists. But these are refinements to a process we found exciting as teachers and profitable for our students.
Patricia Goubil-Gambrell -- Iowa State University
Kay Halasek -- Ohio State University
Bob Boston -- Iowa State University
Panel--On the Fringes or at the Frontier: The Politics of Computer-Based Technical Writing Instruction
Though there is a great interest in rhetoric and composition studies in writing on the job and discourse communities, there seems to be little professional interest in the student population that most closely parallels these concerns. And though there is great interest in the use of computers to teach writing, there is little in directly applying computer-based writing instruction to the specific situation and needs of the technical writing classroom. This panel will address the issues that arise from this state of affairs. The three people that make up this proposed panel share a set of common assumptions:
Patricia Goubil-Gambrell, speaking on "Technical Writing: On the Fringes or at the Frontier," will address some of the historical reasons why technical writing has been viewed as being on the fringes of our discipline, ranging from Aristotle's preference for the artistic proofs to the techno-phobia and technical illiteracy in English departments. She will discuss some of the reasons why the technical writing course is poised on the frontier of developments in the discipline of rhetoric and composition.
The technical writing course is a setting in which the students do have expertise; they know more about their fields than the instructor. The pedagogy in such a class must effectively diffuse authority among all in the classroom--students and instructor--because of the different expert knowledge each possesses. This setting is a natural for a pedagogy that incorporates collaborative learning enhanced by the capabilities of computer-based writing instruction. Not only are the students accustomed to team-based projects and working with computers, they bring to the writing class knowledge about writing conventions and standards of their disciplines (often unarticulated, but that's where the instructor's expertise can come in, giving the students the concepts and language to talk about the communicative assumptions in their fields).
In terms of research interests in rhetoric and composition, the technical writing course enrolls upper division students who are in fields where writing will be integral parts of their jobs--engineering, science, social services. As we investigate writing in professional discourse communities, it is important that we also study the experiences of these contingent members, for their course work often attempts to simulate professional settings and problems.
Kay Halasek, discussing "Collaborative Writing Tasks in the Computer-Based Technical Writing Course," addresses the design and implementation of a series of collaborative writing assignments in an upper-division computer based technical writing course. She argues that collaboration must not be restricted to more traditional forms of peer editing or revising used in composition courses, for the computational setting offers several factors that together provide an atmosphere in which more complex forms of dialogic collaboration will flourish.
Bob Boston, "On the Fringe of the Chiphead Empire," observes that if we are on the fringe of our own discipline, we are most certainly on the extreme fringe of academic computing. Academic Computation Centers have worked for decades with people in engineering, mathematics, and the hard sciences, and we should not be surprised that they often fail to understand and to respond to our needs.(In fact, they may not recognize that we "need" computers at all.)
But the Computation Center can be an extremely powerful ally when we try to sell an idea to the college or university administration. The administrators generally tend to believe people from the Comp Center (Gresham's Law of Crap Glorification), and they seem to want to please the Comp Center whenever possible. Therefore, Bob discusses some strategies for making the Computation Center an ally rather than an adversary and for using that alliance to work more effectively with college and university administration.
In fact, scientific and technical writing courses can provide an excellent means of using these strategies, for such courses serve precisely the same student population with which the Comp Center is already working--the engineers and the scientists. Sharing that student population makes the gap between "them" and "us" much smaller, thus giving us easier access to the Chiphead Empire than our colleagues teaching other writing courses.
Robert Green--Harrisburg Area Community College
Future Cheap: Using Less-Expensive Technology to Achieve the Benefits of a Computer Network in the Teaching of Writing
The future of computers in the teaching of college-level writing lies in machine-based interactions among the human beings involved in the process of written communication. Computer enthusiasts who teach writing soon discover serious limitations in a technology that emphasizes an isolated student writer.
It is not likely that any writing teacher experienced in the integration of computers into the teaching and learning process would opt for a room full of stand-alone systems rather than some form of interconnection other things being equal, but for many of us in the community college and the small liberal arts college, the costs of establishing and maintaining a network facility are prohibitive.
Harrisburg Area Community College (Pennsylvania) has happened on a cheap alternative to network technology in the teaching of writing. Our Collaborative-Writing Computer Classroom /Laboratory, while not making use of network technology itself, can provide some significant benefits of networking at minimum cost.
Using an oversized classroom, we plastered most of the available wall space with screens (both dry-wipe and projection); procured 5 Apple lIe computers from the Chemistry Department (which was upgraded to Macintosh); weaseled funds for 5 printers, 5 overhead projectors and 5 PC-Viewers; grouped the desks around 5 projection stations; and opened for business in a room that is both frightening and exhilarating.
Though we use the room for some collaborative writing activities, its main work at present is collaborative criticism, a surprisingly effective extension of peer criticism done in group mode. Each group uses its own PC-Viewer to focus the effort.
Both the Collab and actual electronic networks that are used intensively to improve writing ability undoubtedly share many of the same problems. Both uses of computer technology demand independent, active learners; both are too rich for the teaching time we are given; to achieve full effectiveness, both may demand new definitions of teaching, and new (and improbable) structuring of the educational endeavor. Used to teach writing, a network is itself a virtual Collab lab. But as an actual space, the Collab may offer some potential benefits not available on a network. The small group projection system allows more channels for audience feed-back so that the experience for both the writer and reader is much richer. Also, the Collab environment provides a true concurrency of interaction among members of the group, something necessarily lacking on a network.
While there are special challenges and problems with the Collab Lab environment, as a space for teaching and learning, such a classroom offers significant benefits, certainly over the older classrooms, but also over the traditional computer lab, and possibly even over a networking facility. It is clear of course that the optimum answer to many of the problems today in the teaching of writing really is 'all of the above': I'd like my students to have their own computers; I'd like them to have free use of a network; and I'd like them to meet me (and one another) regularly in the Collaborative-Writing Computer Laboratory. I would especially like Collab Lab to also be at least a LAN facility: Local Area Network and PC-Viewers. But budget realities in community colleges and small four-year colleges both force and limit choices. Despite limited budgets however, we can afford at least some of the future now, even now.
Gail E. Hawisher--Purdue University
Teaching the Future: The Electronic Writing Class and the Traditions of Teaching
The technology of writing and then the technology of print have transformed much of the world from societies dependent upon the spoken word to individuals dependent upon the printed word. Technological changes from stylus and clay tablet through ink and paper to movable type forever altered the relationship of writers to the texts that they produce. Since the mass production of the first fully-assembled microcomputer in 1977, additional technological changes in writing have occurred, changes that influence not only the way we write but also, for many of us, the way we teach writing. By scrutinizing the traditions of teaching in American schools and the use of computers in writing classes during the late 20th century, this paper seeks to provide an historical perspective on the role of electronic technology in composition instruction.
The traditions of teaching are so embedded in our society that we often take them for granted and accept them as the status quo, simply as the way things are. Yet twenty years ago in Culture and Commitment, Margaret Mead argued that teaching changes as society changes and described three different cultural styles that accompany the degree of change that seems to mark a particular society. The first, the "postfigurative" style, characterizes a society in which change is largely imperceptible and adults hand down the necessary knowledge to children; the second, the "cofigurative" style, characterizes a society in which children learn primarily from their peers; and the third, a "prefigurative" style, occurs in a society where change is so rapid that adults are trying to prepare children for experiences the adults themselves have never had. Thus, in the prefigurative environment, both adults and children are teachers and learners together; authority structures change dramatically; and elders are not perceived to have the requisite knowledge that earlier societies attributed to them. In short, the prefigurative style marks a society in which learning is perceived to be socially constructed, with children actively engaged in the making of knowledge.
Many of us might argue that these are the ideas that prevail today: we believe that human beings learn best when they are part of a group, members of a community networked to many, actively constructing knowledge in transactions with others through conversations and through texts. In fact, Richard Lloyd Jones and Andrea Lunsford in The Coalition Conference: Democracy through Language describe this environment as "the interactive classroom" and present it as a model to classroom teachers. But while this interactive model may appear in the research literature, it is less common in today's classrooms where various older traditions of teaching are still evident even in electronic environments.
In this paper I attempt to assess how we arrived at different notions of learning and instruction by tracing American traditions of teaching throughout the past century. I look at the learning theories of B. F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky and show how they relate to David Reisman's categories of the dominant social character as presented in The Lonely Crowd. Then, turning to composition theory, I demonstrate how our view of teaching and of how students learn invariably shape our behavior in the classroom. Using James Berlin's categories for the rhetorics of "expressionism," "cognitive psychology," and "social epistemic," for example, suggests different visions of writing classes, visions that take various shapes in electronic classrooms. Moreover, as Fred Kemp has noted, certain types of software have already been developed to complement various teaching approaches and which reflect different theories of writing.
The metaphors we build to house our pedagogical knowledge exert powerful influence over us. By examining how composition instruction has always mirrored the society of which it is a part, I try to push our thinking into the future to envision new kinds of centers of learning. My argument throughout is threefold: first, that approaches to teaching are inextricably tied to the societies in which they exist; second, that societies change more rapidly than the dominant modes of teaching; and, third, that we must continue to reflect on current classroom practices so that we may shape the new electronic age of information. Without such critical reflection, we are likely to use electronic technology in ways that contribute neither to good teaching nor to good learning.
Michael E. Holcomb--University of North Texas
Computer-Based Literary Research: Implications of a Full-Text Database
Present computer technology makes possible the compilation of a database consisting of numerous literary texts. The computerization of a university library catalog is a familiar use of a database system; the speed and accuracy of a computer search, whether for title, author or subject, demonstrates the capability of the technology.
Databases now exist or are being assembled that are designed to contain not simply titles, but numerous, complete literary texts. An on-line, full-text database can provide scholars with unlimited access to original sources: printed books and authors' manuscripts, letters, diaries, sermons, prayers, and translations, all stored and accessed by computer.
The goal of this paper is three-fold: (1) to demonstrate to the literary scholar, including those with little background in computing, how invaluable a full-text database can be, combined with the other features of the computer; (2) to report, for the specialist in computer-aided literary studies and others, details of the inclusive full-text database of the Women Writers Project at Brown University that restores many neglected women writers to the canon; and (3) to demonstrate how the WWP's full-text database contributes to a synthesis between computing specialists and traditional literary scholars.
To accomplish this, I first describe the Women Writers Project's database in layman's terms, without sacrificing any technical details vital to the specialist; I then consider implications for the academic community--of the full-text database and related computing literary research--and discuss the importance of synthesis; additionally, I review the history of database use since the 1960s, and briefly consider the social implications of database technology.
The potential of the Women Writers Project's full-text database is exciting because it can accommodate a vast quantity of organized material, linked through the world-wide network BITNET, for analysis or printing.
Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Women Writers Project focuses on pre-Victorian women writers in English. The computer is essential for the compilation and analysis of the work of approximately 1000 women writers in English before 1830 (Brennan 20).
The WWP is encountering two sets of problems: 1) encoding issues, and 2) problems with software development. The encoding issue is critical because a large part of the task of creating a literary database is the systematic analysis of the material that is entered. This is possible only through the development of a representational scheme for the analysis. A text is more than a sequence of words. Drama has stage directions, character names, acts, and scenes, while poems and essays contain titles, introductions, text breaks and notes. All the details of structure and content are essential to the literary scholar. The database must contain indications of extra-textuality, but these mark-ups must not disturb the text itself.
Software development presents other problems. Most databases are set up as a fixed field. The WWP insists on having their database exist as a variable field. Information must be in chunks that are retrievable. Poetry can exist in the database as lines, but this will not work for a novel. Control of the texts is accomplished by a database management system (DBMS).
The WWP's full-text database, enormous in size and potential, can significantly affect future literary research--through the recovery of neglected works and through the ability of the computer to process data so efficiently. Ideally, it will contribute to a synthesis between computing specialists and scholars of literature--and will not aggravate their division, which I demonstrate exists. New database technologies, five or ten years from now, may bring about new or different solutions; but the work of the WWP in building this database with current technology will help motivate the development of the next generation of systems, and pose questions for future projects to address.
Bradley Hughes--University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Police Chief, the Judge, the District Attorney, and the Public Defender: Using Networked Writing to bring Professionals into an Undergraduate Course on Criminal Justice
Over the past few years networked applications have become some of the most popular and most successful new uses of computers in higher education. In our field, most of the attention has focused on applications in freshman composition courses (in which the network links students with each other, with their instructor, and sometimes with peers on other campuses) or in graduate seminars (in which the network links graduate students with experts from other universities). But there are other exciting possibilities as well. I would like to discuss ways we have used a computer network at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to bring outside experts into the conversation of an undergraduate course on criminal justice.
For the past three semesters we have used a computer network as part of a sociology course based on writing-to-learn principles. Some students in the class earn an extra credit for spending approximately an hour-and-a-half each week logged onto a computer network; on this network students write in response to weekly questions posed by the professor and participate in a written discussion about course material with a small group of peers. This year we have added outside voices to the discussion--professionals in the field of criminal justice, including a city police chief, a county judge, the district attorney, and the head of public defenders for the state. Logging on from their offices or homes for about an hour a week for three to four weeks, these professionals have brought important new dimensions to the course and especially to the students' discussions. They offer insights into the criminal justice system based on experience within that system, thus augmenting the theory, history, and research presented in the course. They help students view the process of criminal justice from multiple perspectives. The professionals answer students' questions, and they reciprocate by posing difficult questions, based on their own experience, for students to wrestle with. This has all made for a provocative, fun, and educational dialogue, one which has met with an enthusiastic response from both students and professionals.
Along with these exciting opportunities for using a computer network in a writing-across-the-curriculum course go certain pedagogical challenges, and it is these I would like to focus on in my presentation. Drawing upon the small body of literature about protocol and pedagogy in computer conferencing and illustrating my points with examples from this course, I would like to discuss how to
Henry Jankiewicz & John Laudun--Syracuse University
Me Editor, You Editor: Desktop Publishing in the Classroom
This collaborative presentation focuses on theoretical and practical perspectives gained from our extended experience collaboratively teaching what could essentially be termed a desktop publishing course based on an extensive research project. For the purpose of making our experience, and the pedagogical theory that has informed it and been informed by it, as clear as possible, we intend to divide the presentation into halves, focusing on the two types of authority present in the classroom: that of the instructor and that of the student.
One presenter would like to address the shifts that take place in the stance of the instructor, when computing in general and desktop publishing in particular are introduced to the writing classroom. A prominent model in computer and writing studies has been to focus on the computer as the uncontrolled variable in the writing classroom, an essential change that stands at the interface between writer and text. Such an approach ignores the impact that computer capabilities have on pedagogy; in effect, the entire environment of student-teacher expectations shifts to accommodate new possibilities in instruction. An excellent example of this is desktop publishing. The penetration of microcomputers into the commercial print world, the advent of small, computer-based printshops, and the arrival of accessible computer workstations on college campuses have created a "real world" publishing environment that can now viably include--in fact, dissolve--the writing classroom. The simple desktop publishing capabilities of Microsoft Word 4.0 have allowed our students to perceive their work as a functional artifact for use by a real readership, as opposed to the pseudo-audience that has been a figment of the traditional classroom, where students seldom if ever write for extramural publication. This tighter juncture of the student writer's purpose and the real audience essentially shifts the role of instructor as an intervening authority. Considerations such as these have not yet been extensively examined as computer effects on writing.
The other presenter would like to address shifts in the students' authority over text that result from both desktop publishing and the environment of the computer classroom. Both involve a publicizing of text in new forms: desktop publishing in the form of publication possibly to be tested by readers outside the classroom, and the computer classroom by raising the text vertically for inspection, where both the roaming instructor and other students may look over the writer's shoulder (or be invited to write commentary in copies of other students' files). Conversely, as the text itself becomes more liable to social inspection or alteration, the individual writer may become more invested in it and exercise more authority over the outcome, especially in a situation such as ours, where students may initiate their own projects and develop them via some negotiation with instructors and advice from staff consultants. Since the true and felt assessment of their work comes from the audience for which their publications are intended, and since student writers may be more knowledgeable about a particular context than the instructors, the writers find it essential to recast their relationship to the authority of the teacher in more directive ways.
Feroza Jussawalla--University of Texas, El Paso
Talking across Computers: Computers in the Speech Class
In my composition courses I have routinely used the Time or Newsweek writing programs as much as a means of heightening student awareness about social issues, as also a means of providing them with reading matter that is new and interesting. This current issues approach also provides students with material to discuss and debate for their persuasive writing or speaking assignments. When Time magazine announced that participants in the Time writing program would be provided with a computerized "Cover Maker" quiz, I decided to request the use of computers for my basic "written and spoken communication" class.
This class is a six hour semester long course in which students present their persuasive essays to the class as an exercise in persuasive speaking and upon getting feedback from the class about factors they may not have been completely persuasive about, they revise and rewrite their speeches as essays. As a result of registering the class in the computer lab, I rewrote and redesigned my syllabus to include preparation on computer of student speeches, proposals for the topics they wished to present in class as well as their persuasive essays themselves. The use of the computers and in particular the "Cover Maker" quiz made a radical difference in the choice of topics and the social and political issues that the students got involved in. I would like to argue that it was the involvement with the computers that caused students to become involved in the socio-political issues. Taking their reading quizzes on computers, the students were more motivated to do the readings completely and thoroughly. The computers proved to be the prime motivating force. As such, the computers became a means of empowering students not only in terms of basic skills but also in dealing with their contexts of situation.
Since this class was held the first semester that the computer lab was in operation, in order to test the effects of computers on our writing program, comparative studies were set up for each class held in the computer lab. An identical written and spoken communications class was taught in the routine fashion using Time magazine as the reader for the class but not using the computer lab. The two classes were compared in terms of reading improvement on the Nelson Denney Reading test as also on the Time Current Events Quiz prepared and sent out by Time Magazine once at the beginning of the semester and once at the end of the semester. This was a handscored test that both classes took, but the class registered in the computer lab took the weekly Time quizzes on computer discs. If they progressed satisfactorily through the "Weekly Time Quiz," the Cover Maker quiz was automatically booted onto their screen. Students involved with taking the Cover Maker Quiz made a definite attempt to read through the magazine carefully. Even as they were taking the quiz, they learned about reading various parts of a magazine article such as the captions under the photographs, the descriptions of charts and all the various parts of a text in which historical or factual information was embedded. In effect, the computers contributed to their "public literacy." Students in the computer-assisted class progressed to the 13th-15th grade reading level on the Nelson Denney Reading tests, whereas the students in the non-computer assisted class progressed only to the 11th or 12th grades. (Most students in both classes started at the 9th grade reading level.) As a result of reading each magazine issue more completely, in their writing students in the computer-assisted class were more likely to engage with important social and political issues on a more abstract level. These students showed themselves much more willing to engage in public discourse.
Karla Saari Kitalong--Michigan Technological University
Entering the Discourse Community: Mediating Novice Computer Users’ Access to Computing Expertise
Composition and communication specialists have valuable information to share, not only with colleagues in their own professions, but with professionals in other disciplines as well. This paper shows how discourse community research conducted by composition and communication scholars can be used to facilitate the computer literacy acquisition process of novice computer users, particularly those who experience extreme cognitive dissonance when encountering computers.
Computer literacy is generally regarded by Americans as a necessary and desirable part of a standard education. However, computer literacy is not always easy to acquire. In this paper, I argue that the difficulties experienced by some novice computer users occur in part because expert members of computing communities appropriate and perpetuate inadequate assumptions about what constitutes (or should constitute) computer literacy. Such assumptions, although linguistically impoverished and not contextually grounded, are nevertheless difficult to counter because they are based on linear learning models that have become institutionalized in Western society.
However, applying discourse community research findings to computing contexts suggests a redefinition of computer literacy that foregrounds context, language, and power. This paper uses discourse community concepts to propose a view of computer literacy acquisition, not as an absolute novice-to-expert continuum, but as an on-going relationship among novices, experts, and “mediators.”
In computing communities, the role of the “mediator” is a natural one for technical writers, teachers of computer literacy, and others engaged in the task of facilitating communication between people and computers. Like other expert computer users, “mediators” understand the language of computing and can communicate effectively with computers. Unlike many other computing experts, however, “mediators” must also be able to communicate with other people about computers. This paper advocates that computing experts interested in facilitating the computer literacy of novice computer users begin to think of themselves as “mediators”; in other words, that they adopt a sociolinguistic perspective on computer literacy acquisition that emphasizes the role of language as a dynamic social and political force in computing communities, supplementing the more traditional view of language as a “conduit” for dispersing information about computers. By adopting such a stance, members of computing communities can enhance their effectiveness in dealing with some novice members’ computer literacy acquisition problems.
Rosemary Kowalski & Patrick Slattery--University of Michigan
The Revising Processes of Beginning and Advanced College Students Writing with Computers and with Pen and Paper
Our study, which we began in the fall of 1989 and will complete in the winter of 1991, holds instructor and assignment impact constant. We focus on four sections of freshman composition and four sections of advanced composition. Two experienced composition teachers teach two freshman-level courses (one in the computer classroom and one in a traditional setting) and two upper-level courses (one in the computer lab and one in a traditional classroom). From the students in these eight classes, we collect a variety of data.
First, each student completes a pre- and post-course questionnaire that focuses on writing background, experience with computers, composing behavior, and attitudes toward writing and computers. Second, each student submits his or her first and last drafts of the final assignment common to all courses--a movie review that calls for descriptive, narrative, analytical, and argumentative writing skills. Students in the computer sections complete this assignment using only the computer, students in the traditional sections using only pen and paper. Unlike most other studies of writing with computers, all the students complete their assignments outside of class under normal, college writing conditions. After the drafts written with pen and paper are typed to eliminate format bias, trained raters score all the papers with the measurement tool our university uses to evaluate placement essays. Finally, on the day students submit their movie reviews, they complete a writing report describing the process in which they wrote their essays.
With these data, we compare the revising strategies of inexperienced students writing with computers and with pen and paper, of experienced students writing with computers and with pen and paper, and of inexperienced and experienced students writing with computers.
Our paper presents preliminary findings of this study. From the responses to our questionnaire, we learned that the experienced college writers had written substantially more academic essays, but that the inexperienced writers had used computers to write papers for a longer period of time. Furthermore, the experienced college writers found writing and revising more enjoyable and interesting than the inexperienced writers and had more positive perceptions of themselves as writers. However, the inexperienced writers, perhaps because they had been using computers for word processing longer, felt more comfortable using computers to write papers and enjoyed using computers more. From the writing reports we learned that the inexperienced writers tended to use the computer simply to type their papers and to focus on mechanical errors whereas the experienced writers used the computer to generate rough draft prose and to focus on content and organization before turning to the more superficial elements of writing.
D. Midian Kurland--Center for Learning Technology
Computer-Supported Management of Networked Writing Environments
As networks become established in schools, and as teachers begin to integrate the full-time use of application programs, such as word processors and outliners, into their writing curriculum, the need arises for better ways to manage the quantity and complexity of information generated by students' use of such tools. Lack of appropriately designed monitoring and commenting tools poses a serious problem for teachers, and creates a potential hindrance to the full-scale use of networks and computer-based writing programs.
In the pre-computer era, the task of monitoring student writing was accomplished by having students place their work into a manilla folder by the teacher's desk. The problem teachers face now in the electronic classroom is there is no simple way to monitor what students are doing with various application programs other than by going around from station to station and looking over each student's shoulder, or requiring that every student print out all the texts, outlines, notes, etc. they produced during the day. Since printers are often a scarce resource in schools, as students do more and more of their work on the computer, the printer bottleneck can become a serious problem. Further, as students come to do larger projects and to employ a wider range of programs from word processors and outliners to database managers and hypertext systems, capturing a work-in-progress on paper becomes increasingly problematic. Finally, as more teachers adopt a process writing orientation and base assessment on student writing portfolios, they confront the challenge of tracking multiple drafts of multiple texts from multiple students working alone and in groups. Given this situation, teachers can either fall back on the "stop and print it out" strategy, or they can limit students' use of the computer in order to limit the quantity and complexity of the material being generated. Clearly, neither of these responses is desirable.
Software developers have been remarkably successful at creating programs that motivate more and better writing on the part of students. However, developers have not been as attentive to developing programs that help teachers manage the quantity or complexity of text that results from students' use of computer-based writing tools. Nor have tools been developed that help teachers track, comment on, evaluate, or archive the varied sorts of products generated by electronic writing tools in the classroom.
This paper discusses problems current writing technologies pose for classroom teachers, particularly teachers who are trying to implement a curriculum with a process writing orientation. The paper then goes on to describe TextBrowser, an experimental text management system, currently under development, designed to help writing teachers (and writing researchers) take better advantage of the full range of existing computer-based writing tools. TextBrowser exploits networked environments in which Apple II's and/or Macintoshes are connected to a file server and to a Macintosh on the teacher's desk. Unlike existing computer management systems, the program makes no attempt to track right and wrong answers, time-on-task, lessons completed, or similar quantitative measures. Such information simply has no meaning in an application-oriented networked environment in which the projects students pursue and the tools they choose to employ are not preordained by the curriculum. Instead, TextBrowser provides efficient electronic analogs to traditional methods teachers have devised for keeping track of assignments, marking up student papers, giving feedback, recording and tracking student performance, and maintaining portfolios of student work.
TextBrowser works with existing commercial software so that teachers can review texts produced with the writing programs they (or their student) may already be using (e.g., MacWrite, Word, or More II on the Mac, AppleWorks, Wordbench, or the Bank Street Writer on an Apple II). Regardless of what program students use to generate their texts, teachers can examine the texts with TextBrowser. In addition to letting teachers view student texts on screen, TextBrowser includes a powerful set of structured editing and annotating tools that enable teachers to mark corrections in student papers and insert suggestions and comments. In order for teachers to know what they are looking at,as they go over student papers, TextBrowser maintains a complete database of the teachers' assignments. In order to know whose text is being looked at, TextBrowser maintains a complete student database. In order to keep track of what the teacher has seen and what comments, corrections, or grades were placed into the text, TextBrowser maintains a detailed record of every student text that passes through the system.. TextBrowser also helps the teachers prepare reports summarizing student and/or class performance over time for any subset of assignments or assignment types. Finally, TextBrowser creates portfolios of student work from which the teachers can extract texts or portions of texts that they want to review or base writing activities around (e.g., "Show me all of paragraphs from Billy Smith's book reports in which I indicated there were sentence fragments or run on sentences"). In short, TextBrowser takes the place of the traditional teacher's red pen, assignment log, gradebook, class list and completed assignments folder.
Julie A. Launhardt--Brown University
The Presentation of Hypermedia Course Materials
At Brown University, a hypermedia software package called IRIS Intermedia has been used in teaching undergraduate and graduate courses since 1986. Intermedia was created at Brown University's Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS). Recent research at IRIS and elsewhere has shown that hypermedia can be a valuable educational tool, but questions about learning to use it effectively remain unanswered.
Two of the courses at Brown which have made extensive use of Intermedia are a Plant Cell Biology course taught by Professor Peter Heywood, and a survey of English Literature taught by Professor George P. Landow. Through observation of these professors and their students as they use hypermedia tools, and through research at IRIS, we have begun to reach some conclusions about how information in a hypermedia system should be presented and how it is perceived.
A computer screen is in many obvious ways entirely unlike a book, and yet most authors who prepare materials on-line continue to format these materials as though they are to be included in papers or books, in many cases with the declared intention of printing the materials and using the hard copy.We have become naturally book oriented, especially in the university world, and doubt the value of creating materials for computer screen presentation. And yet one of the benefits of a hypermedia system is that it offers authors and users the ability to link information together in meaningful ways, in ways that are not necessarily sequential. When the materials are printed, the user forces a linear sequence onto something that is by design non-linear. Authors of hypermedia materials need to begin designing their collections with an eye to a different type of presentation.
I will sketch out our conclusions as to how hypermedia materials should be presented, through a discussion of the hypermedia materials first created by Professors Heywood and Landow, augmented by descriptions of how we at IRIS edit such materials for professional presentation. I've been involved in editing subsets of both the Plant Cell Biology materials and the English Literature materials, and it has become clear while doing this work that there are certain common design principles that should be adhered to. These include:
Concrete examples from the original course materials and our edited subsets will be provided as illustrations of these principles.
Shirley W. Logan--University of Maryland
Teaching Writing Across the Wires: An Audiographic Course in Technical Writing
One section of the undergraduate technical writing course at the University College Campus of the University of Maryland is offered simultaneously at four sites scattered across the state of Maryland. The sites are Aberdeen Proving Ground, Annapolis, Shady Grove, and the home site, College Park. These sites are linked through telephone lines which transmit voice and signals. Other classroom equipment includes a video monitor, microphones, a telephone convener, a graphics tablet and a video cassette player. The instructor wears a headset microphone, thereby freeing her hands to shuffle papers and to use the graphics tablet as a blackboard or as a way of inserting comments into previously prepared text screens.
The fact that almost half of the students are located in remote sites and the reality that teacher and student never meet present an unusual set of problems for the writing classroom and for a very interactive writing teacher. I propose to present a talk which addresses some of the following issues associated with such an arrangement as they present themselves in the context of the writing classroom:
I am teaching this course currently, but will have ample opportunity to reflect on these issues during semester break. The crucial question for me is whether this is a feasible way to teach writing? I would like to present a talk in May which offers reflections based on my semester--and possibly my year's experience.
Monique Loubert--Quebec ENFI Project, Canada
Claude Langevin--Laval University, Canada
The First French ENFI-PROJECT
In the inter-twining fields of the following topics:
we, from Quebec City, are proposing a collaborative paper on semi-experimental research on the improvement of deaf French teenagers' attitudes towards and abilities in writing. These students are in Grades 9, 10 and 11 at Charlesbourg Secondary school in Quebec City, and they presently rank from grade 3 to grade 8 as far as their reading and writing are concerned. They come to the ENFI-lab in groups of 2, 3 or 6 with their respective teachers, for one or two sessions per week, each session lasting 75 minutes, as all lessons do at these levels.
We are applying as much as possible the same research structure that was and is still used, first at Gallaudet University, then at the five consortium sites which are doing research both with deaf and hearing students, but in English and mostly at University levels, although we know of some research going on at elementary levels.
The schoolboard of Charlesbourg, which is the fund-manager, has received grants both from APO QUEBEC (A Research Center on Computer Aided Instruction) and the MEQ (the Ministry of Education of Quebec) for two thirds of the whole budget for the research, the schoolboard having to vouch for the remaining third.
The main objectives of the research are to study the impact of these ENFI sessions both on the writing abilities of the students and on the teachers' pedagogical beliefs and strategies. The semi-experimental aspect of the research involves pre and post testing at the students' level, while the action aspect addresses the teachers' attitudes towards the ENFI approach, the curriculum and the network-based pedagogy, and the day-by-day writing performance of the students, these being the bases for a doctoral thesis on the possible changes in their writing abilities during and after a year-long ENFI immersion.
At Austin, we would like to present this research project to teachers of deaf students both in French and in English. We would also like to make a demonstration through a videocassette and a demo-disc on a computer for those interested.
Margaret-Rose Marek--Texas Christian University
Connections: A Systems Approach for Learners
In both public and private colleges and universities students preparing for professional life need more help than they are getting at the moment. While public education goes through major revision and growing pains, what is needed is a systems approach to higher education--a systems approach to learning with a design focused on interactive modules adapted to different learning styles and needs. The program must be performance and technology based, individualized and learner controlled, with on-demand instant access. Corporate education programs like these have shown real results: reduced training time, increased retention, a learning curve that shows higher gains in shorter times. All we know about cognitive and learning styles, self-efficacy beliefs, relieving test/performance anxiety, and computer-managed instruction could be synthesized into a systems approach program that might be used at the university level to "write the future."
Cognitive psychology tells us that successful learners monitor and direct their own learning through skills of rehearsal, elaboration, organization, and metacognition. First we process information, then we learn. Yet often we lose sight of the fact that people process information differently. If we let students in on what we know about cognitive and learning styles, and then design knowledge-based learning software in modules which allow for differences in cognitive and learning styles, we could really teach for learning through computer-based pedagogies in learning centers/writing centers with the greatest impact for good.
Self-efficacy is basically people's judgment about their capabilities to organize and successfully perform a given task or behavior. While research remains to be done on whether intervening in the self-efficacy beliefs of students will increase their success, it seems to me students with low S-E beliefs feel anxious in writing classes because they have received poor test or theme grades.
Computer Managed Instruction (CMI) could substitute power tests with unlimited time periods for the so-called timed tests; with computer-based pedagogy, it becomes possible to let learners manage timing of tasks. We could put writing lesson modules on disks or network so that learners could take them home or work the modules when they need them. And we could design software programs adapted for differences in learning styles which would not only train students more efficiently and effectively but could also help improve students' self-efficacy beliefs. Then through CMI, performance can be graded and transmitted to the instructor by modem or down loaded directly from students' diskettes. This isn't far-fetched; the necessary technology is available right now to make this reality. All we have to do is be willing to use it.
Michael Steven Marx--Skidmore College
From Margin to Mainstream: Applying Techniques of Composing with Computers to the Teaching of Literature
In her 1989 presentation at the Fifth Conference on Computers and Writing, Cynthia Selfe located the field of computers and composition on the margin of English Studies. Composition has long been a marginalized area of English studies, and despite the advances and improvements in technology and the increased use of computers in college writing classes, computers and composition remains on the edge of this marginalized field. If we are to write computers into the future of English studies and English departments we must introduce the techniques developed for using computers to teach composition into the mainstream activity of English studies: analysis of literary texts.
During the 1980s, word processing integrated naturally with the teaching of writing because computers give flexibility to a written text and complement the recursiveness of the writing process. In contrast, the static nature of a work of literature seems to resist any rationale for introducing computers into the study of literature. However, computer techniques commonly used to teach writing to students can transfer a kind of flexibility to a work of literature; they can open up the text for close analysis of authorial style as well as how writers create meaning through style.
This paper will use passages from the New Testament and Montaigne's Essays to discuss and demonstrate how techniques used to teach composition with computers can be used for teaching stylistic analysis of literature. The techniques presented will include "exploding the text" to examine variety, rhythm, and effect in sentence length and sentence patterns; "search and replace" functions to highlight repetition and word choice; and split screen "windows" to juxtapose passages to trace shifts in motifs and uncover meaning the sujet gives to the fabula of a text.
Bringing the flexibility computers give to texts to the classroom study of a work of literature requires little special technology: a microcomputer, word processing software, and an LCD overhead projection system. Initially, the literary text needs to be transferred to a word processing program file. This paper will briefly examine how computer technology now facilitates this process, allowing teachers to have selections from a work of literature on diskette without having to type it. A text scanner such as the Dest PC Scan 2000 or the Calera TrueScan makes transferring hard copy to a computer file possible. Scanners can prepare texts for most word processing programs such as WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and MacWrite. Once a text is in this format, instructors can then apply the capabilities of their word processing program to the text and present this to the class by projecting it onto a screen with a LCD PC viewer.
Charles Moran, Cynthia Selfe, Nancy Kaplan & Paul LeBlanc
Panel--Computer-based Systems for Writing
We are proposing a four-person panel that will explore computer-based systems for writing, particularly those that emphasize networking and social collaboration. The panel addresses the topic at a number of levels. Charles Moran will look at the altered behaviors of writers and readers collaborating on real-time conversation programs. Cynthia Selfe will use transcripts from a BITNET on-line conference (Megabyte University) to test the claims often made for computer-based conferences. Nancy Kaplan will examine two CAC software projects and the political forces that helped to shape and also to circumscribe their existence. Paul LeBlanc will look at the ascendency of cognitively based models of CAC software design and what that means for other theoretical approaches to writing, especially the social constructivist approach.
Charles Moran
I'd like to do something on the "author" in the new text environment we work in. It seems to me that "authoring," seen as expression, is an inherently gratifying activity, and that this activity has become easier now. Evidence: testimony that people "like" writing on computers. "Writing," seen as "speaking" or "saying," has been made available to people--at least those who have access to word-processors and those who can type. And voice-access will eventually come along, making "writing" even easier. All we'll have to do is sidle up to a machine and begin to speak.
Other aspects of writing, however, may tend to slip from the center of a writer's attention. There's some evidence that writers report "reading" difficulties on-screen; there's evidence that writers have trouble "seeing" their work whole on-screen. It seems as if production of text has become easier--that there's lots of energy at the point of utterance, and that joy in production may make it more difficult for the writer to think in terms of accommodating the text to an "other," a reader. If this is the case, it will discourage readers from reading.
From what I've observed on networks--such as Interchange and Megabyte University--there's lots of writing going on, but not much reading. We'll take a word or phrase in someone's text and use that as a springboard for our own text, for our own performance. Of course that's what literary criticism does--but here it happens faster, quicker. Is this because we have no conventions yet to govern the production and reception of screen-text? Or is it that screen-reading is harder for us than print-reading? Or is it that texts generated on-screen are so writer-based that we don't want to read them?
If any of this is true, then the danger of "computers" is not at all the loss of our individuality, but the dimming of our sense of an "other." We can speak, but can we listen? We can write, but can we read?
Cynthia L. Selfe
Computer-Based Forums for Academic Discourse:Testing the Claims for Computer Conferences
Our profession's interest in the social construction of knowledge and discourse has sparked much of the recent work on computer-based systems for English classes, especially that work focusing on computer-based conferences and their value in facilitating collaborative, reduced-risk, cooperative group conversations and explorations among participants (Daiute 1985; Rodrigues 1985; Eldred 1987; Kemp 1989; Parlett 1989; Slatin 1989; Taylor 1989).
This paper analyzes the discourse from one such computer-based conference in light of the following claims that have been made about conferences:
C1 Computer-based conversations encourage more people to participate in group discussions and efforts than do similarly constructed face-to-face meetings (Fersko-Weiss 1985; Kiesler et al 1984; Pfaffenberger 1986; Pullinger 1986; Spitzer 1988).
C2 Computer conferences encourage different, more egalitarian, patterns of information exchange among writers and readers than do face-to-face conversations (Cooper and Selfe 1989; Keisler et al. 1984; Faigley 1989; Spitzer 1986; Sproull and Kiesler 1986).
C3 Computer-based conferences operate under different constraints, expectations, and values than do traditional face-to-face forums (Kiesler, Zubrow, Moses, and Geller 1985; Cooper and Selfe 1989).
If these claims made for computer-based conferences are true, linguistic evidence should be observable in individual on-line conferences. The paper will examine one on-line conference, Megabyte University held on Bitnet, that serves as a forum for teachers of English composition who have an interest in computer technology. This conference, which has more than 56 recognized participants, has been operating continuously since March 1989 when it was conceived by Fred Kemp (Texas Tech University) as a follow-up to the 1989 CCCC Conference in Seattle.
Because the use of pseudonyms has been considered an important variable in computer-based conference behavior, the paper will examine the conversation of Megabyte for a twenty-eight day period during which participants signed their "real names" to entries and a twenty-eight day period during which many participants used pseudonyms to sign their entries.
Among the questions the study will attempt to answer are the following (arranged by claim):
C1 Computers and computer networks can help us invite more people into active discussions than we can through traditional face-to-face discussions.
Q1 How many people, of the 56 participants, engage in discussion within the on-line conference?
Q2 How many opportunities do these participants have to talk within more traditional face-to-face forums such as at professional academic conferences?
Q3 Does this conversation serve as a forum for the larger discourse community of computer and composition specialists? If so, what characteristics does this forum have? What assumptions shared by the discourse community does the forum reflect?
C2 Computer conferences encourage different patterns of information exchange among writers and readers than do face-to-face conversations.
Q4 How often do on-line conferees enter the discussion?
Q5 What types of conversational responses are characteristic of the on-line conference?
Q6 What characteristics do various types of conversational responses have in this on-line conversation?
Q7 Are there certain patterns of responses evident within the on-line conference?
Q8 How do responses and patterns of responses compare to those members engage in at face-to-face meetings?
Q9 How are topics introduced, maintained, and terminated within this conversation?
C3 Computer-based conferences provide a "reduced-risk" environment in which writers and readers can explore ideas, test opinions, try out arguments, rehearse writing. These forums operate under different constraints, expectations, and values than do traditional face- to-face forums.
Q10 What is the purpose of this on-line conference?
Q11 What are the values inherent in this on-line conference?
Q12 How are these values evidenced in the conversation.of members?
Q13 How are members encouraged to engage in valued activities?
Q14 How are members discouraged from engaging in non-valued activities?
Q15 Who holds power within the on-line conference?
Q16 How is power evidenced within the conference?
Q17 What results does the exercise of power have on the on-line conversation?
Q18 Does the use of pseudonyms encourage more equal participation among traditionally marginalized groups (e.g. women or gays ) or provide a means of introducing subjects that may not otherwise get addressed?
The answers to these questions and others will be examined in light of the claims computers and composition specialists have made about computer-based conferences and their applications in our classrooms.
Nancy Kaplan
The Web of Computing: Social Network, Political Snare
Historians of composition studies concern themselves with continuities and discontinuities in theories of writing, reading and instruction. Those of us grappling with the transforming potential of electronic textuality, or more broadly digitality, have tended to locate ourselves chiefly in relation to that history: we examine the opportunities and stresses electronic media create within the framework established by the theorists and retold by the historians. So far, however, we have been little concerned with another history, another framework, within which we work. As long as the tools of our trade remained pens, paper, and books, few bothered to ask where the textbooks and teaching instantiations of our theory came from: they came from us, from teachers and professors. Not so with hardware and software, objects which are dense concretions of many separate tools and which can be designed, executed and disseminated only with the collusion of many institutions--economic, social and even political.
In this paper I propose to examine the economic, social and political environment in which some nationally recognized digital writing systems have been and are being created. Basing my discussion on LeBlanc's array of design models, I will outline the web of interactions which have shaped and constrained the life cycle of two projects, one from the "small team" model and one from the "research team" model. I will argue that the academic institutions and the capitalist structures within which the developers work have decisively circumscribed the life cycle of these projects without regard for their value as pedagogical tools. These projects illustrate, in two quite different environments, our dependence--indeed the sensitive dependence--on initial and surrounding conditions. Such an analysis, then, may shed some light on hidden forces driving the design and viability of our work.
Paul LeBlanc
John Smith, the keynote speaker of the 1989 Computers and Writing Conference, has written that cognitive models for composition have become "the standard model" for composition theorists. While he obviously overstates the point, there is much evidence to suggest that cognitive theory is privileged in CAC software design efforts. Cognitive-based research design teams like Smith's, or those of researchers like Chris Neuwirth at CMU and Earl Woodruff at the Center for Applied Cognitive Sciences, are better supported, rewarded, and recognized than any other CAC software developers working in any other model of software development. Indeed, one of the central arguments in this paper is that this trend is making cognitive models of writing central in CAC software design and that such a fact has far reaching implications for the field of Composition generally.
However, the rise of social constructivist theory and computer networking has set up a different dynamic in CAC program design. People are genuinely excited about the theoretical and pedagogical possibilities presented in such developments as real-time conversation programs and shared community databases. Moreover, there have been calls for a reconciliation between context and cognition, voiced most notably by Linda Flower in her recent CCC article on "Cognition, Context, and Theory Building."
In this paper, based on my recently completed dissertation research, I will explore the tension between competing theories of writing in CAC software design. I will argue that:
Margaret Morrison & Linda Carroll--University of Texas at Arlington
Mac and IBM: Is there a Gender-Based Subtext that Distinguishes the Variations in Users' Attitudes
In a recent electronic mail poll at the University of Texas at Arlington that surveyed students on whether they preferred Macs or IBMs, it became apparent that some gender-based assumptions about the machines themselves and how they function seem to determine students' preferences. As teachers of writing, we are suggesting that these gender-based assumptions could hamper and/or enhance the writing of some students--depending upon what machines a university has available for students to use and what the students' attitudes toward those machines actually are.
The UTA survey, conducted informally by Michael Ottaviano, a computer literacy student, elicited 36 responses to the question: "Mac or IBM: Which Do You Prefer?" The responses varied considerably, but we were interested in the subtexts of those responses. In particular, we were interested in what those responses were suggesting about the respondees' attitudes toward Macintoshes and IBMs, or what perspectives the respondees were projecting onto machines that have become a part of our culture. We were particularly interested in ferreting out gender-based attitudes that might affect students' comfort or discomfort, ease or unease in writing on particular machines. In addition. since playfulness or taking a playful attitude is especially important in writing, particularly in the early stages of the writing process when students must overcome their anxiety about mess and chaos, we asked ourselves whether gender-based attitudes toward the Mac and IBM might hinder invention or get in the way of that playfulness.
In the computer literacy class, from which responses were solicited, students had been introduced to both the Mac and the IBM. It is not clear from the survey what percentage of students were already familiar with computers before they took the class, but an overwhelming majority of them preferred Macintoshes: 27 for the Mac; 3 for both; 6 for IBM.
The subtexts of the responses, however, suggest some interesting things: To the IBM users, the Mac suggested: toys (Mac smile = objectionable)--not businesslike; for use by dummies, women, and "kiddos"; too pretty. The Mac users, however, preferred: the ease of the Mac's use--rapid to learn, rapid to use--user friendly; its funness to use, even when the writer was working on school projects (and even though play is not often associated with writing--i.e., the assumption is that one ought to feel guilty about having fun at work--an attitude of the largely male, Puritan work ethic); its freeing of the mind for concentration on the text, instead of on the system or on the commands, thus allowing the user to concentrate on the task at hand; its emphasis on learning actions, rather than commands; its visual qualities--and its apparent focus on wholes, rather than on details. In general, those students who preferred the Mac seemed to associate it with the playful ranging of the imagination, a certain looseness, a lack of fear (important in first-time computer users), an ease of manipulation. The machine seemed to be more for the masses, less elitist. And, interestingly, some women implied that they could use the Mac without having to have to suggest that they were terribly smart about computers, without having to have to suggest that they could be masterful with anything mechanical.
In contrast, those who preferred the IBM and defended their preference used words that suggested power, mastery of programming details (for detail-oriented people), pride in the machine's complexity and difficulty to use (at least initially, until one had mastered the commands). The IBM users viewed their machine as one they could have much more control over than the Mac, once they mastered its systems; it was a much more professional, business-like machine, a machine for programmers and accountants, not a machine they particularly associated with creativity, not a "pretty" machine, not a machine for "kiddos"--to some, a decidedly macho machine, a machine for the boys who know how to deal with mechanical things.
We do not intend to be essentialist in any way in analyzing these responses, and we are keenly aware of the essentializing. Both of us use Macs and IBMs, each for different reasons and for different purposes. In fact, we were surprised by the gender suggestions in the responses perhaps because we have used both machines without having thought much about the underlying, in part culturally-determined perceptions of the machines and how those perceptions/projections could affect the use of the machines in writing. We look closely at those perceptions/projections in our paper.
Stuart Moulthrop--Yale University
Terence Harpold--University of Pennsylvania
John McDaid--New York Institute of Technology
Panel--Hypertext and the "Social Space" of Writing
Paper 1: What Kind of Idea is Hypertext?
Paper 2: The Grotesque Corpus: Hypertext as Carnival
Paper 3: Hypermedia Composition and Consciousness
DESCRIPTION: In differentiating "the Text" (protean, polyvocalic, open) from "the work" (a reified bound volume or authorized canon), Roland Barthes described the domain of the Text as a "social space" in which no reader or writer was privileged as "judge, analyst, confessor, or decoder." The technologies of electronic writing are now translating into practice the theoretical speculations of the seventies and eighties. Barthes' "Text" comes into material being in the form of distributed, poly-linear,interactive communications - hypertext and hypermedia. But with the coming of these new technologies we find ourselves projected into Barthes' egalitarian (or antinomian) "social space" -a space which we must explore if, as Richard Lanham recently suggested, we wish to learn "how the humanities humanize" at century's end. The three papers presented in this session focus on the social and academic milieu of advanced electronic textuality. They may be considered either as variations on a theme or as nested inquiries. "What Kind of Idea is Hypertext?" discusses the likely impact of hypertext teaching resources in literary and humanistic studies in the near term. "The Grotesque Corpus: Hypertext as Carnival," drawing in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, broadens the focus to consider the place of hypertextual discourse within a larger matrix of social relations. "Hypermedia Composition and Consciousness" offers the broadest and most speculative view, relating the development of hypermedia to a general transformation of social consciousness. We hope this session will open debate and discussion about the nature and consequences of electronic literacy, giving us all a chance to reflect on what sort of brave new world we're rushing off toward.
Stuart Moulthrop--Yale University
Paper 1: What Kind of Idea is Hypertext?
In his Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie explains that any new vision is met with two crucial questions, the first being, "What kind of idea are you?" It is time to put that question to hypertext. Is hypertext the kind of idea that conforms and adapts, or is it a competitive and destabilizing force? Do hypertextual materials have a place in the teaching of conventional literature? Does reading hypertext make students better readers of canonical texts? Or will a pedagogy based on such materials interfere with the benefits and pleasures of traditional literary study? In this paper I offer speculations on these questions based on several recent experiments with hypertext in literature and writing courses. On the way to a general proposition about the likely place of hypertext in future academic discourse, I propose several observations:
(1) Hypertext can enrich a student's encounter with conventional texts. The instance here is "Hyperbola," a HyperCard stack created as a resource for an advanced seminar reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Users of the stack created annotations, illustrations, maps, diagrams, and hypertext links. They also engaged in query-and-response dialogues conducted within the hypertext structure. I will argue that "Hyperbola" helped students master the complexities of Pynchon's notoriously difficult text. But more important, the stack project gave students material support for collaborative interpretation, opening new possibilities for critical discourse. My presentation will also discuss the students' work on traditional essays on Pynchon and how these essays may have been affected by the hypertext experience.
(2)Hypertext does encourage "stronger" reading. The idea of a "strong" reading comes in this instance not from Harold Bloom but from Karl Smith, a freshman in an English course who evolved the term independently to describe the interpretive activity demanded by a hypertextual pastiche of Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths." Karl's reading, created in the form of an independent hypertext "budded" off the parent network and copiously linked into its structure, suggests that hypertext may serve as much more than an auxiliary tool. He argues that hypertexts are valuable to the extent that they allow a reader to engage more of his or her literary "repertoire," multiplying and supporting connections between ideas. Significantly, however, Karl locates authority over the repertoire not in any textual or cultural apparatus, but entirely in the mind of the reader. In his view the hypertext no longer "belongs" to the canon or the English department or even to its superscribed author. The reader is free to question, modify, or expand the literary object. Karl's idea of readership echoes Roland Barthes' notion of a reader who is not a consumer but a producer of the text. But this proposition suggests that hypertext may not always serve the interests of conventional pedagogies.
(3)Hypertext renders conventional literature problematic. In an especially significant part of his commentary Karl takes up the question of hypertext's relationship to existing literary practice, especially the laws governing copyright and intellectual property. He suggests that hypertext presents a radical alternative to present literary institutions. Though he is deeply ambivalent about this change, he acknowledges that the volatile, mutable world of hypertext is fundamentally at odds with the stable and hierarchical universe of conventional writing. This opposition is further reflected in a project developed by two other students, Larry Berger and Gavin Edwards - a "competitive hyperfiction" in which the two writers, after agreeing on a simple rule set, began producing diverse variations on a story idea. Their work was then made available to a group of readers whose preference for one author's nodes over the other's was to decide the literary "match." In light of Karl's interpretation of hypertext as a radical alternative, Larry and Gavin's experiment seems especially significant, suggesting fresh social conventions for a new literary form. But do these new conventions simply re-instantiate the old order? Will a community of reader-arbiters (whether in this experiment or in Nelson's "Xanadu") have the same effect on literary discourse as the present system of authorities and expert judges? The evidence suggests that they will not - as Karl observes, the text remains open and diverse--heteroglossic or as postmodern theory would have it, "heterotopic" (Brian McHale)
(4) Inconclusive conclusion: the relationship of hypertext to the book is dialectical. Frederic Jameson has written that the great project of art in the next century should be the creation of an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping," a pedagogical, politicized art which will enable citizens of the late-late capitalist state to perceive their true positions in matrices of authority and power. Hypertext may be an important stage in this evolution. Our early encounters with the new form suggest that, at minimum, hypertext does enable readers to gain a fresh perspective on reading and writing. Hypertext probably cannot be the kind of idea that reforms the old order from within - it belongs in its own "social space," where its relationship to conventional text will always be uneasy and antithetical.
Terence Harpold--University of Pennsylvania
Paper 2: The Grotesque Corpus: Hypertext as Carnival
1. Bakhtin: The grotesque body and the carnival
The title of my paper is drawn from Mikhail Bakhtin's classic study of the works of Francois Rabelais and European popular culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The significance of Bakhtin's book for the study of hypertext as a discursive, narrative and social practice lies in his analysis of the signal importance of Rabelais' popular sources. These sources are irreverent, anarchic and renovative; Bakhtin opposes them to the hierarchical, static and moribund discourse of the ruling political and intellectual classes of the Middle Ages. Bakhtin views the elements of this opposition through the figures of 1) the "grotesque body," conceived broadly as a biological and social metaphor, and 2) the "carnival," as a ritual of social and political transformation.
Bakhtin traces Rabelais' use of the grotesque to the early Western visual arts that are known technically as "grotesque." These are characterized by playful monstrosities and fantastic transformations of human, vegetable and animal forms. Grotesque art, argues Bakhtin, subverts authoritative practices by violating their representational norms in aggressively playful forms. Rabelais' fiction marks a crucial moment in this subversion of authoritative discourse because it internalizes the extremes of the grotesque, returning the political conflicts to the architecture and functions of the human body.
Bakhtin contends that these conflicts are externalized in the popular rituals of the carnival celebrations of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. In the carnival, political hierarchies are suspended, albeit briefly, in rituals that deploy the political significance of the grotesque body within the arena of the social body. During carnival, the old order is inverted: the ruler is ritually deposed, the dunce-king rules for a day, no social, religious or ethical law is enforceable--social discourse is transformed into an anarchic process that exceeds all attempts to define or circumscribe it. The venue of the carnival, the public place, is the scene where meaning is created in forms that are not possible in the privacy of the closed chambers of Kings or scholars.
2. The public space of hypertext; the grotesque corpus
Bakhtin's analysis of the Rabelaisian grotesque can, I believe, be applied in an illuminating way to the study of hypertexts. The more enthusiastic proponents of hypertext commonly envision great communities of shared information distributed in complex networks of interlinked documents. The hyperspace in which this information is deployed is conceived to be a radically public forum, an electronic version of the Renaissance public space in which the carnival was acted out. I'd like to leave aside for the moment the question of the plausibility of these utopian visions of the hypertextual future, and focus on the elementary structures of anarchy that operate in the interstices of the hypertextual web. If we look at the links in a hypertext, it is arguably a more structured discursive form than other kinds of texts: much of the effort expended by developers of hypertext systems has been devoted to providing the user with tools to isolate threads in the chaotic webs that are possible in very complex hypertexts. If, however, we look at the gaps that sustain and are sustained by those links, we see that the semiological, narrative and political hierarchies of hypertextual discourse are uniquely unstable: the need for navigational tools exists because of the fundamental looseness of association (refutation, corroboration, etc.) from which hypertexts are constructed. This instability holds true in the smallest linearly-linked systems; it becomes positively vertigo-inducing in systems like Nelson's "Xanadu," where much more is happening at any one time in the web than can possibly be imagined by those who are participating in it. We can talk of a hypertextual corpus, but it exists in a decentered and dynamic form. The elements that describe it include not only the categories of author, genre, period, etc., that define a conventional literary corpus, but also the threads between, across, within and apart from those, categories that exceed metaphors of category. Hypertextual discourse is more than a conversation of discrete voices; it is an explicit form of what Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia," the dynamic and material interpenetration of multiple discourses. The hypertextual corpus is a grotesque corpus--"grotesque" in a specifically Bakhtinian sense--in which canonical lines of discursive authority are broken up and deployed against themselves in an excess of signification.
3. The politics of excess; hypertext as carnival
Clearly, the excesses of hypertexts have a political dimension. I'm skeptical of utopian visions of open information exchange, where institutional boundaries collapse, and each person can participate in the ongoing creation of a universal web--where everyone can, in effect, be dunce-king for a day. If we are to theorize about what happens to discourse in hypertext systems, we need to take into account the effects of the unique semiological and narrative instability of these systems. We need to describe how that instability reveals the tenuous authorities (pedagogical, generic, linguistic, etc.) that inform the structures of social discourse. Many will argue that, in fact, none of what goes on in hypertexts is new, that the instabilities I've described are only computer-enabled extensions of principles of intertextuality that exist at the core of all texts. I would agree with this, but would add that, whether or not hypertext is a unique kind of text is less important than how it facilitates the recognition of existing (or the creation of further) intertextual relations. The instabilities of hypertexts define a public place in which heteroglossia is sustained in a uniquely material and openly social form. They reveal the carnival at the center of all signifying practice.
John McDaid--New York Institute of Technology
Paper 3: Hypermedia composition and consciousness
This paper will complement the first two presentations by advancing a media-theoretical framework from which to understand hypermedia. Drawing on the work of McLuhan, Ong, and Postman, hypermedia will be explored as a stage in the evolution of communication media like orality and literacy. McLuhan held that the truly electronic forms of communication (unlike broadcast media) were inclusive and nonlinear. I believe it is no accident that ideas of a recursive universe, fractal geometries, chaos theory, and Roger Penrose's proposed link between quantum gravity and consciousness should surface in a culture undergoing the shift to this digital communications paradigm. Examples from a wide range of disciplines will be linked in a first pass at a hypermedia ecology, and the ramifications for the consciousness of the users and the shape of culture will be speculatively discussed.
Webster W. Newbold, Linda Hanson Meeker & Rebecca Rickly--Ball State University
Panel--Community-Building in the Networked Classroom
How are communities of writers established in college classrooms, and what are these communities like? These questions are addressed by the following teachers from Ball State University who have been teaching writing and conducting research in a networked computer classroom equipped with an integrated group of programs and utilities that support the various processes of writing (the Daedalus Instructional System). The features of this type of computing environment and its ability to assist in developing cohesiveness and purpose among student writers are the focal points of the following presentations.
The first speaker proposes to talk about "Nurturing Community in Freshman Composition Classes," which looks at how teaching strategies in LAN-based composition classrooms are interrelated with the technology and what approaches might be successful in bringing the class to consciousness of itself as a group of writers. The second speaker looks at how community can be built through discussion of literary works in "The Literature Connection." The final speaker presents "The Electronic Voice: Empowering Women in the Writing Classroom," a research hypothesis on women's participation in group discussion based on her interest in women's comparative roles in conventional and networked computer classrooms.
Webster W. Newbold--Ball State University
Paper 1: Nurturing Community in Freshman Composition Classes
Local area networks have been credited with the capability to support and build community consciousness within composition classes using them.But how does this process take place, if it indeed does? What strategies should the instructor use to instantiate a discourse community? Recent experience in a LAN- based computer classroom suggests some answers to these questions.
First, LAN structure needs to be considered. Networking individual pc's for central access to word processors, printers, and even invention or revision programs will not necessarily create a conscious community within the class. The software system that students use for various applications should include utilities that make user to user communication for file sharing, e-mail, and conferencing easy and quick. On-line or real-time conferencing especially can bring a group together for common discourse. In recent composition classes, we have held several class-wide real-time discussions; some were instructor-directed but others sprang up spontaneously from among the students.
Transcripts and student surveys suggest that this technology helps build a sense of relatedness among students more quickly than conventional classroom discussion, and it also seems to encourage wider participation from marginal class members.
Writing tasks that create the need to cooperate are essential to building a discourse community. Networked small group exercises in real time, such as creating and revising sentences or passages to discover various language options, are one type of activity. Another is on-line revision, where students read and comment on each other's texts. In all such tasks, the community takes the form of a real audience, whose praise or criticism becomes part of each individual's view of his or her writing task. Survey responses show that students value the opinions of their peers, and that real-time conferencing helps them relate to their peers in a more satisfying way. Finally, and probably most importantly, community formation depends on creative leadership from the teacher, both in planning beforehand and during class sessions. Essay assignments may be organized around subject areas that sub-groups stay with for some time, making them better informed and better able to converse on the given subject. The foundation for revision must also be laid beforehand so that students know how to be productive critics when the time comes to review peers' work on-line (this instruction itself can take place on-line with the revision of a practice essay). During on-line class sessions, "creative leadership" often means that the teacher should fade from view and only participate electronically if at all. Student survey results (as well as my own and colleagues' personal impressions) strongly support the notion that the classroom community promotes a democratic learning environment; successful teachers (like Lech Walesa) stay artfully in the background and do not appear as heads of state.
Linda Hanson Meeker--Ball State University
Paper 2: The Literature Connection: Collaborative Learning in a Literature Survey Class
Literature survey classes typically present conflicts between "coverage" and "depth" for teachers and students alike. This paper presents alternatives to the lecture/discussion pedagogy typically adopted for such classes, alternatives that rely on technology to help resolve that conflict and enhance the learning experiences of both teacher and student.
As a writing teacher and a writer, I am aware that writing plays a significant role in our learning. In a literature survey class, however, writing is typically required for assessment rather than learning purposes--quizzes, essay exams, a paper or two. To improve the writing performances for assessment and to motivate students to read regularly, I have used two methods: ungraded reading journals and ungraded written responses to a single focused question at the beginning of each class period. Having already focused and articulated their responses, students are eager to participate in discussion, and they naturally forge a community of learners. My occasionally asking that individuals share excerpts from their reading journals with their peers has expanded that sense of community.
The primary factor limiting the effectiveness of those two methods, was class time: I felt compelled to "cover" a certain amount of material during the term and to provide the students concepts with which they could synthesize the vast range of material. My own role as traditional authority conflicted with the communal model I was attempting to foster. I found myself having to curtail discussion and limit time for sharing excerpts from their reading journals.
To resolve the conflict between "coverage" and "depth" and to forge a community of learners in the classroom, this past fall I decided to incorporate networked computers into a British Literature survey 1789-present. We do not meet regularly in the computer classroom, but students were required to make at least three entries a week on the network. I did not take time at the beginning of class for students to write before discussion, but have provided them a series of focused questions- -on broad issues as well as specific works--to which they responded on a real-time conferencing communication system (Daedalus Interchange). The students' responses were available to one another immediately, and all responses remained in the file for review, additional comments, and rebuttal. Once I closed the real-time conferencing session, students could still add or challenge views in the file through a more conventional e-mail system (Daedalus' Contact). The collaborative learning prompted better exams and better, more focused discussion in class while also motivating students to keep up on their extensive reading. Student evaluation of the collaborative learning experience affirmed its effectiveness.
Rebecca Rickly--Ball State University
Paper 3: The Electronic Voice: Empowering Women in the Writing Classroom
Traditionally, women have found it difficult to achieve a voice in the university setting. It is conceivable that a woman might be hesitant to speak out in a conventional oral classroom discussion for a variety of reasons. For example, fear of not meeting the instructor's standards, as well as fear of sounding inadequate before peers, might frighten a woman into silence. But what if some of the immediate, physical, fear-producing elements were taken away? What if a woman were able to make herself heard without speaking?
At Ball State University, our new Daedalus Instructional System allows students to engage in an entirely electronic classroom discussion. In a preliminary study at Ball State University conducted among instructors using both conventional and electronic discussions in their classrooms, the following pattern has emerged: students seem to participate on a more equal basis when using the Interchange program, a real-time conferencing program, during electronic classroom discussions, than they do in traditional oral classroom discussions. In order to explore further the implications of these findings, I am currently conducting a study in which three instructors alternate their classes between oral and electronic classroom discussions.
The implications of the more multilateral participation of students using the electronic medium are numerous. One area I would like to probe further is that of women's voices in the writing classroom. Studies such as those conducted by Belenkey, et al, Gilligan, and Chodorow have explored the concepts of voice and silence among women. For my presentation, I will be looking at some of these ideas as they apply to the composition classroom, examining the following questions: Do women have a voice in the traditional composition class? Are women's voices acknowledged in the composition classroom? How does technology affect the way women are heard or silenced? In particular, I will present analyses of transcripts and electronic discussions, as well as semester-long patterns of classroom participation via electronic discussions.
I believe that the electronic classroom discussions, incorporated into the regular freshman writing program, will encourage women to "speak out" more often, giving them a sense of confidence in their individual voices. Already we have seen evidence that the electronic discussion allows for a more equal interchange between members of a classroom community. As women participate more fully in the discourse community of the classroom, they are more likely to become empowered by their voice, and less likely to become silenced, both in and out of the context of the classroom.
Robert G. Noreen--California State University
From Text to Hypertext: Designing Hypertext for the Computer Writing Laboratory
The introduction of computer technology into our writing classrooms has not been universally cheered, despite the enthusiasm of diehard aficionados. Many instructors are bewildered, if not actually frightened, by the dazzling array of software that is now available for writing with computers: word processing programs, both simple and complex, style analyzers, grammar checkers, on-line dictionaries and handbooks, information databases--to mention just a few. The fear may well stem from the lack of a clearly understood rationale or a theoretical base for using all of these aids in the production of student writing. This paper argues that, properly understood and appropriately deployed, these ancillary programs can become a catalyst for a new revolution in the teaching of writing, a revolution that will be based primarily upon a new conception of text.
One of the most significant changes wrought by introducing computers into our writing classrooms has been in our students' understanding of what constitutes text. This paper argues that the computer has radically altered our thinking about what text is, about how it can be manipulated, revised, stored and retrieved, further developed, analyzed, extended, and, finally, published.
The basis for this change comes from what I call an increased interaction between text and hypertext during the writing process. Hypertext refers to the layering of text; behind the surface text--the text that we first read or encounter--lie other supporting or related texts which can be accessed with the click of a mouse. (We use this concept in literary criticism when we ask what is the subtext here, or what is the context. In a literature class, we access the subtext through discussion, looking at footnotes or doing research; in a typical HyperCard program, we access the subtext by clicking on a button.) In our writing classes, we need to encourage the interaction between text and hypertext.
Those responsible for setting up computer writing labs should therefore keep the hypertext model of text-with-layered-subtexts in mind. In the computer writing lab, though, a hypertext model works somewhat differently from the Apple HyperCard programs we've seen. In the writing lab, the surface text is not a given; it is the text that the student creates--his or her essay or research paper. We should therefore design our computer laboratories and our teaching strategies around the relationship between an invisible surface text--the uncreated student text--and the potential hypertext that a student can access as he or she is creating the text of his or her paper. The computer offers us the opportunity to create a powerful, multi-layered subtext that will not get in the way of the surface text, but which can be accessed as the student needs it.
Those of us who set up computer writing laboratories have the responsibility of preparing an adequate hypertext system. What should this hypertext look like? What should be behind the "buttons" that students push? This paper describes several models of increasing sophistication, including a model that encourages research by use of a CD-ROM and on-line databases. The paper concludes by stressing that we must design computer writing labs which ensure that the student remains in control of the writing process. We must guard against the possibility that computer software or the computer itself may control the student, either by being too confusing and complex, or by forcing the student through hoops he or she has no need to go through. Our goal should be to provide the means for students to become independent learners, independent thinkers, and to be responsible for their own creative activity. A computer lab, properly set up with a rich array of hypertexts, can empower our students to make complex choices and independent judgments as they develop their own texts.
Joel Nydahl--Babson College
The Latent Content of Word Processing and CAI Software: How Our Students "See" Writing
Two recent works, Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing by Michael Heim and "Student Writing: Can the Machine Maim the Message?" by Marcia Peoples Halio, raise intriguing questions--questions those of us using word processing to teach writing ought to be asking--about what happens in writers' minds as they use computerized writing tools.
Using some of the techniques of semiotics, this paper asks questions about the latent content of writing and takes the position that the latent content is very different between writing produced by pen, typewriter, and printing press and writing produced on a computer.
Heim asks us to ask what the philosophical significance of word processing and CAI software is for our students. Especially intriguing is his speculation that "thought itself change[s] if the mind works with symbols under different conditions." Heim encourages us to ask what the manipulation of exteriorized thought by CAI software might mean to inexperienced writers.
Does (or can) CAI software affect either the quality of thought or the kinds of thoughts thought by inexperienced writers? Are inexperienced writers who use CAI software likely to be intimidated by the programs? Will they be inclined to surrender control to external authority? To strike out on their own when faced with a writing problem? To feel dependent on the programs? Does CAI software stultify or enhance writers' imaginations? Does it encourage or discourage them to take chances?
The goal of writing teachers ought to be to enable inexperienced writers to take over their own instruction in writing; to strike out on their own when faced with writing problems; to exercise control over their own thoughts; and to interact with the texts they've created. Writing teachers using computers in the classroom should not put tools in students' hands that help detach responsibility from self, that intimidate, or that encourage surrendering control to external authority.
One of the hidden potentials of many word processors--macros specifically written for individual composition classes--can make word processors the center of writing instruction in computerized writing classes. In conjunction with informed instruction, word processors can enable even inexperienced writers to be the initiators of the text manipulations designed to encourage revisions.
John O'Connor--George Mason University
What Happens Later: A Review of the Writing Habits of Students Taught to Write with Computers
Issues of evaluation continue to trouble computer-based writing programs and instructors. Those of us working in this field "know" there is a difference in the writing composed with a computer, and many of us feel that that composition is better. But it has been difficult to prove those feelings. Instead, we have tried to modify the purpose or focus of evaluation. We point, for example, to the limits of a one semester time frame and the power of the variables when the classroom environment changes so dramatically. However, in a university setting, we can at least extend the time frame for evaluating a writer--what are the effects of learning word processing, especially for inexperienced writers, years later?
At George Mason we taught our first composition classes in a computer classroom four years ago (fall 1986). Eighty-four freshmen in four sections worked regularly with IBM-compatible, stand-alone PCs. The amount of writing done in class on the computer, the kinds of writing, and the amount of peer-editing and collaboration varied from section to section as we experimented with how computers fit into a composition course. In the same semester another 120 freshman started in an alternative general education program (PAGE) that featured writing across the curriculum. They too were introduced to word processing, in a course titled Computers in Contemporary Society, but were given no formal writing instruction. They were also taught other PC application programs (databases, statistical packages and graphics), the rudiments of Pascal, and discussed some of the social issues of computing (for example, evolution and artificial intelligence). The remainder of the freshman class--about 1400 students--took a standard composition class. All students can use the computer labs on campus (about 100 PCs not reserved for classes) and can check out various word processing programs.
I have surveyed fifty students from each group, asking them a series of closed, "objective" and open-ended, "subjective" questions. The objective part provided information on retention rates, grade point averages, choice of major an college, the number and kinds of writing assignments, and whether writing is required on the job (if the student has one). Some of the students have been selected for more elaborate case-studies. These students are volunteers who are asked to describe their writing experience and habits in college and their use of computers and word processing since their freshman year. My major interests are the attitude of the computer writers toward their writing and changes in their writing process as they become more proficient as authors of academic prose.
The value of such a study is to examine the longer-term impact of instruction in computers and the use of word processing. We have no hopes or intention of saying which course was better. Instead we want to learn what difference word processing has made for individual students and possibly formulate lessons that can be applied to our current computer-based composition classes.
Among the initial findings are some very basic, maybe obvious, discoveries:
Some other possible results, primarily about writing habits and students' perceptions of their writing with a computer (#3 & 7), will be presented in the talk, but since they are so tentative I do not want to give them the authority of a published abstract.
In general, the experience has been humbling for me. The students in computer writing sections have habits, which they probably developed in their writing class, that I believe are good for them. However, many students develop these habits without any instruction. Computer access, not word processing skills or a computer writing course, is the dividing line between the haves and have nots.
Judy Pearce, Yitna Firdyiwek, Laura Muzzi & Laura Teich--The American University
On-Line Peer Review by Novice Student Writers
THE ISSUE: Peer review has become a standard technique in the teaching of writing, and now computer technology makes it possible for students to do peer-review on-line as well as on hard copy. With the increasing number of local area networks (LANs) , more composition classes can use the network as either a primary learning environment or as an important supplement to more traditional methodologies. Because files can be easily created and stored on the LAN, student writing is readily available for peer review. And word processing programs have features which can facilitate peer review. For example, WordPerfect 5.0 has a comment feature which makes it simple to enter comments on a peer's paper. This study examines the issue of computer generated peer review comments by comparing the quality and quantity of such comments to peer review comments handwritten on a hard copy of the essay.
HYPOTHESES: Students doing peer review on-line will focus on surface level changes rather than the substantive aspects of sound writing such as logic, development, content, and structure. Student comments generated on-line may be longer and there may be more of them. Also, students doing peer review on a computer will be more candid and direct than students doing peer review on a paper copy.
METHODOLOGY: Student peer review comments were collected from 40 students in two first-semester college writing classes taught by the same instructor at a mid-sized private university. All students are familiar with WordPerfect 5.0 and have been word processing all writing done outside of class using either WordPerfect or their own systems. They have also participated in peer review activities using paper copies. In this particular study, each student made peer review comments on two papers which were comparable in tone, content, development, mechanics, and RightWriter scores. One was a typed paper on which students made handwritten comments. The other was a paper in a computer file on which students commented using the comment feature of WordPerfect 5.0. Papers and conditions were counterbalanced; students worked on papers and in conditions in different orders. The time spent in both peer review tasks was also noted. All student comments, both handwritten and on computer, were transcribed by the same person. Each paper will be rated by three college writing instructors using criteria developed from an analysis of the two papers. First, each rater will analyze both papers in two areas: mechanics and substance. Mechanics includes grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Substance relates to ideas, structure, development, and logic, the generally accepted qualities of sound writing. Then, raters will reach consensus on the specific criteria to be used in the evaluation. Each rater will then evaluate each paper. A naturalistic evaluation of substantive level comments will also be conducted. A frequency count of surface level comments and substantive comments will be obtained. After these analyses are completed, the original computer files and original hard copy papers will be analyzed for specificity of placement of comments.
Richard Penticoff & Dana Harrington
Panel--The Networked Computer Classroom as Social Practice: Problems and Promises
Richard Penticoff--University of Texas at Austin
Is The Networked Computer Classroom A Discourse Community?
Current discussions of computers and writing often hail the networked computer classroom as the place where writing as a cooperative, democratic, social practice finds its ultimate fulfillment. For those Rhetoric/Composition theorists who advocate writing as a social practice, the networked computer classroom would seem to be an ideal laboratory in which to test out these assumptions. Such a classroom facilitates social exchanges among participants (through the network and the software that takes advantage of network capabilities) and offers researchers relatively easy access to these exchanges (since the very technology which generates data--word processing files, Interchange transcripts, etc.--can also capture and store it as well). But to claim the networked computer classroom as as a paradigm of cooperative social interaction, akin to Bruffee's notion of a discourse community constituted by conversation, is to make some assumptions about the social and its characteristic relations and modes of interaction that ultimately don't hold up.
This paper will explore the fruitfulness of the metaphor 'discourse community' by looking at a transcript of an Interchange session produced by a class of summer provisional admissions students. We will look at the ways that the students (5 females) construct themselves discursively as academics and as proto-feminists. But we will also look at some ways that the computers construct these students non-discursively as disciplined members of a bureaucratic society. My hypothesis is that these non-discursive relations tend to counteract the "empowered" selves the women construct through their Interchange "conversation." While there is much to be excited about in the kind of exchange that a computer network and software such as Interchange make possible, we need to realize that social conflict and constraints do not disappear. Nor will dialogue and conversation alone easily overcome these constraints.
Dana Harrington--University of Texas
Reconceptualizing "Conversation" in the Computer-based Classroom
Interchange is a "live" or "real-time" communications program which enables students and instructors to engage in text-based class discussion over the computer network and results in the production of a printed transcript. The unique character of Interchange allows us to explore some interesting questions about the nature of "conversation" in the classroom relevant to contemporary debates about subjectivity and about how students learn to write. Kenneth Bruffee, for example, uses the metaphor of "conversation" to refer both to the actual discussion that goes on in a classroom and to the discourse of the academic community. According to Bruffee, students "internalize" the conventions of academic writing by conversing with each other in the classroom so that when they write, they simply "reexternalize" the "conversation" of the academic community. Our job in the classroom, according to Bruffee, is to facilitate oral conversation so that students will then transfer it into written conversation in their papers. His notion of "conversation," then, implies that there is no difference between what students say and write in class and the conventions of academic discourse. But does our actual experience with students in the classroom verify his claims?
If we treat Interchange sessions as a kind of informal conversation, we can examine some of Bruffee's claims about "conversation," as well as explore some of the consequences of these claims and the teaching practices they support. In my paper, I want to start by examining what counts as "conversation" for Bruffee and then compare his definition with Interchange transcripts which appear to contradict his conceptualization of what constitutes "conversation" among peers. I then want to explore the possible reasons why his definition doesn't hold up in the classroom by specifically addressing how factors such as ethnicity, gender, and class effect how we engage in conversation. As a way of applying what we have learned from Interchange discussions, I would like to end with some suggestions of how we might incorporate Interchange texts into our formal writing assignments in ways which could more constructively contribute to our social objectives in the computerized classroom.
Phyllis C. Pickens--Ramapo College of New Jersey
Word Processing and Writing in the College Seminar: Faculty Development
This presentation will address Ramapo College of New Jersey faculty development for the nationally-acclaimed College Seminar program, a course designed to orient first-year students to college life and raise retention rates through reinforcing academic skills. It will include an overview of the Seminar curriculum; rationale for integrating word processing; faculty training design, implementation, and response; and faculty and student evaluation.
The College Seminar is designed to orient students to college life and raise retention rates through reinforcing academic skills. All full-time entering freshman must enroll. The curriculum stresses writing; all sections require at least six writing assignments, one of which is a research paper.
The twenty-four faculty are divided between full-time instructors from all disciplines and professional staff who work in a variety of college positions. Faculty participate in a week of training in May and in weekly curriculum meetings during the semester.
In 1987 and 1988, Seminar students and faculty responded enthusiastically to a pilot project using word processing. Faculty observed that academically-underprepared students reported even more substantial satisfaction and returned to the academic computing classroom to complete other writing assignments. Several Seminar instructors collaborated to write a grant proposal to establish an academic computing facility to integrate word processing in the Seminar curriculum and to train instructors who would experience a number of learning activities on which they could draw to develop their course materials. The grant was funded in September, 1988, and fully implemented in the fall semester, 1989.
The grant proposed to train six faculty in January, six more in May of 1989, and another twelve in the second grant year. Instead, nineteen faculty registered for the January three-day workshop; the May training included two sessions for all instructors; six additional faculty received training in August.
To help faculty understand that word processing was a tool for writers they could integrate into the existing curriculum, facilitators designed the initial January sessions around typical Seminar assignments: instructors would learn to use word processing as they wrote Seminar papers. The facilitators also worked with a consultant to integrate his presentation on composition theory and word processing, pedagogical considerations, and complementary software. They provided copies of relevant articles from professional journals and a bibliography of texts and additional articles pertinent to writing and word processing.
Seminar faculty, English composition instructors, and librarians gave the workshop outstanding evaluations. From their deliberations came several guides for learning activities and proposals for more interaction among the Seminar faculty, English instructors, and librarians. Subsequent training has built upon the initial workshop with similar participant responses.
The presenter will provide copies of a College Seminar course description, typical syllabus, and writing assignments; training materials including workshop schedule and guides for learning activities; and training and course evaluation results.
Evelyn J. Posey--The University of Texas, El Paso
The Academic Development Center: Redefining the Future of Developmental Education
In response to the Texas Academic Skills Program, The University of Texas at El Paso has designed an innovative, creative program to help students prepare for university level courses, as well as to pass the TASP exam. The computer is used in a myriad of ways--most obviously, to support developmental writing instruction, but also to encourage writing to learn in the developmental reading and mathematics curriculum, to administer the program, and to reach high school students preparing for the TASP exam.
The Academic Development Center computer-supported developmental writing curriculum is designed to make maximum use of the computer to create a student-centered classroom that enhances the writing process, subordinates skills to content, establishes dialogues between students and instructor, and replaces the didactic lecture with collaborative inquiry. The course design and computer software support the students' efforts to produce better writing.
Because The Academic Development Center provides UT El Paso students with the opportunity to develop competency in mathematics and reading, as well as writing, we have the opportunity to use computer-supported writing in each of these disciplines. University faculty from related academic departments oversee instruction in the center and regularly share ideas; as a result, we have a truly interdisciplinary program, with computer-supported writing now used in mathematics and reading. For instance, students in the developmental mathematics classes keep learning journals and work in small group collaboration--strategies that they have adopted from the writing curriculum.
In addition to using the computer to support instruction, center staff are currently developing an instructional management system for testing, reporting, and evaluation. When completed, students will take on-line diagnostic tests, receive individualized instructional plans, and be assigned resources specifically suited to their needs.
So that future freshmen have the basic skills they need before enrolling at the university, center staff also work collaboratively with local school districts to discuss ways to best meet the needs of entering students and to provide interested high school students with the opportunity to take an on-line campus version of the TASP. Results can then be used to counsel them on ways to prepare for college courses while still in high school.
The newly established Academic Development Center is one of only a few International Business Machine (IBM) pilot sites in the country. This ongoing research and development project is specifically designed to evaluate the use of computers in all aspects of developmental education. As a result of this project, we hope to redefine developmental education with computers and writing as integral parts of that definition.
Tom Reynolds--UW-Madison
Curtis Bonk--West Virginia University
A Window on Writing: The Usefulness of Keystroke Mapping to Monitor Writing Progress
This paper describes how word-processing microcomputers were used for gathering writing process data. Current process-tracing and input-output research methods frequently rely on protocols, interviews, audio and visual records, and written products to assess the success of writing efforts. Recently, some researchers have recorded and classified keystrokes to trace computerized composing activities. However, these studies used adjunct programs to capture and replay keystrokes. Drawing on this previous research, two studies were carried out using similar schemes for classifying writing operations but different methods of data collection.
All keystrokes in both studies were recorded using the macro capabilities of a word- processing program (WordPerfect). Because all keystrokes were first recorded then slowly replayed for classification, there was no need to make inferences as to what operations were performed to bring about compositional changes. Researchers meticulously observed each individual's writing unfold and classified operations with regard to their value to the compositional-revisionary process.
Observing and analyzing mapped keystrokes produced mixed findings. Data from the two experiments supported the lack of association between surface-level operations and writing quality but did not sustain expected correspondence between meaningful operations and product quality. Many discrepancies were linked to incomplete or inaccurate scoring. No distinction was made between operations that occurred in-process (on the present line) and post-process (off the present line); nor were operations tracked temporally or classified as to their strategic influence on the text. Future research efforts may need to alter present composing process classification schemes.
Donald Ross--University of Minnesota
A Computer-Based Technical Writing Course Using HyperCard
The University of Minnesota has a required technical writing course which is designed for juniors and seniors in our engineering school. The main point of the course is to give students a wide variety of assignment types, from short memos to full-fledged, formal reports. Student writing is collected at various stages of completion, from very rough notes and drafts, to full drafts which just need slight revision, to final, polished texts. The course has a tradition of having most major writing assignments written in groups of 3 to 5 students, with group members collaborating in the research, drafting, and editing processes. We are just beginning to put greater emphasis on the role of graphics in the technical communication process.
As part of an on-going project, I have translated some of the features of the course into the computer-based medium, in this case, HyperCard for the Macintosh. The technical writing course I will describe has a top-level stack which branches out to each week's writing activities and assignments. One advantage of this organization is that the first activity of one week can be a commentary or reaction to the previous week's work--a sample student memo, a check list of alternative ways the assignment might have been done, or suggestions for revision before work is turned in.
The major assignments for the course are supported with other stacks, the most elaborate of which is one which organizes technical memos, journal articles, and reports. Most documents of this sort have a "standard" organization, with specified sections coming in a set sequence. Technical writing teachers and textbooks typically recommend that such documents be drafted from the middle sections outward toward the introduction and conclusion. Once the student specifies the type of report and its general purpose (through two menus), another menu presents the various sections which the writer can work on in any order. The screen for each section has three to five pop up windows with advice on the section's rhetorical purpose, paragraph rhythm, or typical contents. After the document is drafted, its sections are assembled in the proper order, and the draft is ready for printing and final revision.
Additional support exercises are available for audience analysis and prompted revision of drafted reports. These, along with the report organizer, are called into play at key times during the course.
In parallel with the main course, each week has a brief memo assignment based on a simulated case which moves a fictional product from research and development through production to marketing. The main function of these exercises is for students to write brief memos under the sort of time pressures which they can expect on the job. Aside from introducing some playfulness into the course, this is a vehicle for the students to experiment with the considerable graphic capabilities of HyperCard.
One of my goals in this project is to illustrate ways that the computer can be used to present a full series of writing assignments for a course, while attending to typical issues of prewriting and editing. This project explores the degree to which we can (or should) specify the form and content of assignments, and the advantages of providing on-screen suggestions and examples. Many of these issues have been previously illustrated on expensive computing systems, such as those available at Carnegie-Mellon and Brown universities. By translating the ideas to a "low-budget" environment, it may be possible for teachers in different settings to try them out.
Richard Sammons & Susan Wagman--San Francisco State University
Setting Up a Computer Lab
1. During the 1989-90 academic year San Francisco State University received $2,364,000 in state lottery revenue, $228,000 of which was allocated for the creation and upgrading of faculty workstations. An additional $542,000 has been allocated from the 1989-90 general funds for student workstations. Since 1986 SFSU has installed 1,092 student workstations, about 2/3 of its announced goal of 1,500 by June 1990. And SFSU is not at all unique in this commitment to computer-assisted instruction, for its own program is in general conformity with the other 18 campuses within the California State University system. Supplementing our own experience evaluating computer software in the academic environment is our recent participation in California State University's week long workshop on computer-assisted instruction throughout the 19 campus system. It is our intention to share the results of this workshop.
Overall discussion of the CSU system with specific emphasis on our campus would include:
A. Description of the computer and writing components for the programs at all 19 campuses in departments including: English, Career and Technical Writing, English as a Second Language, Creative Writing, Journalism, Philosophy, Speech and Business
B. Administration of computer programs within departments
C. Classroom configuration
a. Hardware
b. Floor plan
c. Furniture
d. Disabled access
D. Software
a. In use--rated include level/audience
b. Software reviewed--rated include level/audience & brief descriptor
c. Original programming
E. Desktop publishing
F. Open Lab
a. Lab scheduling
b. Staffing
(i) maintaining pool
G. Funding
a. Staffing
b. Equipment
c. Maintenance
d. Grants available
H. Bibliography
I. Faculty/Lab staff training
J. Successful syllabi
K. Class scheduling
L. Methods & techniques that do/don't work
M. Key contact people with telephone #, BITNET address
N. Support
a. Set-up
(i) computer center
(ii) Chancellor's Office
(iii) campus admin
b. Ongoing
2. Also possible would be a presentation/workshop involving our extensive evaluation of writing software currently available with particular emphasis on text analysis and pre-writing software. MindWriter receives a good evaluation, by the way.
During the past year, we have had the opportunity to preview and evaluate over 70 software programs, many of which are discussed in popular computers and composition texts, articles in CCCC's journals, other publications, such as Research in Word Processing Newsletter and Computers and Composition. While we have found much of what is offered in these publications helpful, we often find that information in reviews and articles is second hand, the author restating some other writer's commentary on a program which, in all probability, is either an excerpt from the program's advertisement sheet or the designer's idealized summary of the program's capabilities, rather than a critical response from a reviewer who has actually had "hands on" experience with the program. Having not only previewed many of the most popular programs in the composition field but actually worked with them in the classroom setting, we find that several either can't or don't deliver what they claim they will, or they do so in such a error ridden fashion that they actually encourage bad writing, a consequence becoming all too commonplace among novice writers using "style analyzers" or grammar checker programs. There seems no substitute for the actual "hands on" evaluation of a given piece of software. Our workshop will expose participants to a variety of software programs from the major types of IBM compatible software used in the composition field, especially the composition classroom, for both native and non-native speakers.
We will first define for participants a given software category, second demonstrate a sample program within the given category to show how it is intended to be used by the instructor, both in and out of the classroom, and finally, actively involve the workshop participants in a discussion of the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical considerations of the software type being demonstrated as well as the specific program being evaluated. With software programs we use or have used at San Francisco State University, we will embellish the discussion with the reasons why particular faculty members choose certain programs over others, ultimately offering participants a set of criteria for evaluating the software they currently use or may use in the future.
Mary Sauer--Indiana University
Curriculum and Curtsies: A Teacher-Administrator Looks at the LAN in the Writing Classroom
In this oral presentation a teacher-administrator will look at the issues when a teacher becomes an administrator of a computer writing classroom with a local area network. Major components of the discussion will be technical support, departmental support, adjustments of departmental approved curriculum to the computer networked classroom, orientation of (many times computer illiterate) instructors, and routine administrative hassles. Emphasis is on the practical.
The presenter has been the administrator of the composition by computer program at a large university for four years moving from the only instructor in the program to one of 33 instructors. The program has grown from four writing class sections to 45, from one room with stand-alone PCs to two networked classrooms, from no technical support to full and part time support people. The writing classes taught (and administrated) all use the process and collaborative approach.
As well as the discussion of problems and successes, the presenter will have available written material of what has worked in these classes, pitfalls to avoid, and source people to have available.
Rae C. Schipke--University of Southern Mississippi
Problems of Evaluation in Traditional and Computer Classrooms: The Influence of Gender and Personality on Writing Success
"...computers will not be the answer to our prayers in terms of assessing student writers. What they well may do instead is alter our 'concept' of assessment" (Lunsford, 1989). It seems that our greatest problem has not been so much with how we evaluate but, rather, a combination of why we evaluate the way we do along with a general lack of understanding of who we are evaluating. In this respect, computers can alter our concept of assessment by serving as a window on teaching and learning. They can allow us to resee our students, reconsider our purposes, and recast our concept of success in the writing classroom.
If evaluation by its very nature suggests success or nonsuccess, then we need assessment procedures that are going to allow us to define and measure different types of success. The challenge is to find a balance between universality and diversity. Our primary goal and our major problem in evaluation, then, is to understand and define success in such a way that it encompasses many diverse variables. Little is known about how student-based variables operate or how they influence success in regular classrooms or computer classrooms. This paper discusses the findings of a research study which focused on the student-based variables of gender and personality and their influence on writing success. It then suggests possible implications of the findings for evaluation and concludes with directions for further research.
Helen J. Schwartz--Indiana University-Purdue University
Cross-Cultural Team Teaching: E-mail for Literary Analysis
In Spring Semester 1989, an introductory literature class at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) studied drama in conjunction with a masters' level class at the University of Tampere in Finland. Electronic mail made possible the planning, coordination and exchange between the two classes and the two instructors: Professor Aarre Heino and myself. This collaboration, between two teachers who were not to meet face-to-face until three months into the semester, put into practice a number of theoretical assumptions emerging in composition theory and literary analysis:
1. Having a real audience and authentic purpose helps students understand and meet audience needs better than in the situation of students writing for the teacher as expert.
2. Interpreting literature is a constructive act in which the reader interacts with the text to create a meaning that is based in individual and cultural experience. As a result, different people will have varying interpretations, as will people from different cultures.
This paper will report on the inception and goals of the course, the implementation of cross-cultural exchange via bitnet (including sample messages), an analysis of the problems and achievements resulting and plans for future collaboration.
Richard Selfe--Michigan Technological University
A Computer-Supported Communication Facility as the Site for Collaborative Student Activities: A Naturalistic Study
Scholars have supported the notion that non-structured, spontaneous, "underlife" activities in our educational institutions may accomplish pedagogical goals that formal classroom activities cannot, particularly in reading and writing-intensive courses (Brooke, 1987; Sutton-Smith, 1980: Daiute, 1989). This may be especially true in programs that integrate technology and literacy. Specifically, teachers of communication classes who encourage their students to use computer-supported laboratory settings as common work areas have claimed that such facilities often serve to "intensify collaborative writing habits" (C. Selfe and Wahlstrom, 1986) in students as well as to create the formation of effective student writing communities (Bump, 1988; Faigley, 1989).
The proposed paper explores these issues and provides teachers and lab administrators with the following information:
1) a systematic, detailed description of a computer-supported writing facility that proposes to encourage collaboration and support informal, out-of-class student language activities. This will also include a description of the user behaviors observed in the lab.
2) a comparison of student interactive behaviors within such a setting with those characteristics of behaviors in a more formal classroom environment.
A naturalistic study with these two foci and including observations, participant observations, questionnaires, and interviews has been going on since the Fall quarter of 1989 at Michigan Technological University in the Center for Computer-Assisted Language Instruction. The purpose of this effort is to collect data that will help teachers and scholars more clearly understand the effects of computer-supported communication facilities on students' informal, out-of-class behaviors and collaborative activities.
The paper will begin by describing the interactions that occur between students in this common, computerized learning space and exploring how their spontaneous and self-involved activities differ from those which occur in the formal necessarily more restrictive classroom environment. The second half of the paper will discuss how student activities in such informal learning spaces can help establish productive working communities of student communicators.
Henrietta Nickels Shirk--Northeastern University
The Computer as Editor: Changing Roles in Writer-Editor Communication
This paper examines the impact of computer technologies on the review and editing phase of the writing process. It focuses on a group of software products called Editing Response Programs (ERPs), which may be divided into two categories:
After a brief survey of the current research literature, the state-of-the-art software in this area and its advantages and limitations, the paper describes the environmental, psychological, and social impact of ERPs on the traditional writer-editor dialogue. It suggests that the usual bi-directional aspect of the dialogue between writers and editors can be transformed into a tri-directional interchange which includes the computer and thereby greatly enhances the writing process, if managed correctly. It concludes with recommendations for the new roles required by this technologically enhanced editorial conversation.
[Products are mentioned as examples, not for demonstration purposes.]
Geoffrey Sirc--University of Minnesota, General College
Towards a Polylogical Hermeneutics
As the use of synchronous and asynchronous communication software in writing classes becomes common-place, new genres of writing arise--the verbal traces of such electronic communication. These new written forms in the writing class represent some degree of a challenge for the instructor: how to receive them? how to incorporate them into the curriculum? how to teach (to/with) them? For many instructors, the challenge is a welcome one, and these new forms are seen as incarnations of current theoretical notions regarding intertextuality or neo-canonical forms or social construction of meaning. For other instructors they become an unfortunately necessary but pedagogically puzzling side-effect of the next phase of technological power in computer-assisted writing. In any event, the forms exist and determining ways of positioning them in our courses seems appropriate.
For the past several years, I have been involved in such determinations. Using a computer-network to teach basic writing (in the so-called ENFI environment), I have evolved my own pedagogical uses and considerations of the text-file trace of student interaction over the network, dubbed by Fred Kemp the "polylog." It became important for me to find a way of reading these polylogs, since I was sure they were telling me interesting things about students, writing, literary theory, and even technology, but I wasn't quite sure what. As a genre, the polylog can easily resist entrance by a concerned academe because (with many of the first-year, and even some of the upper-division, writers I've seen) one of the loudest subtexts of the polylog is resistance to academia--students often use the opportunity of network discussion as a chance to gossip, swear, flirt, and in general, avoid the instructor's task-directive (e.g. Kremers, 1988, in which he refers to the students' network interaction as "mutiny"). Where it's currently fashionable in discourse studies to trace the points of aporia or fragmentation in a given text, the polylog appears often as simply one big rupture.
In order to gain entrance into polylogia, I found it necessary to devise a structure or method of reading, a hermeneutics. Such a method, one which attended to the occurrence of various phenomena--e.g. off-task behavior, metaphors, "echo" comments, insults, jokes, collaborative behavior--as well as tried to account for such "determinative screens" as race and gender, and which also took into account (when peer-response of writing was the task) the locus of a student's commentary in relation to various textual features, made my students' polylogs richer documents for me, allowing me ultimately to reflect on the way students position themselves in regards to writing and the writing classroom. I'd like in this paper to describe the hermeneutical tool I developed and share my reflections as to what it's shown me about my students' conceptions of writing and the institutional environment in which their writing occurs. I hope my reflections will afford other instructors in a similar environment ways they might consider this new genre; more importantly, I hope my reflections will allow attendees at the Sixth Conference on Computers & Writing to refine their assumptions of what should happen in a writing class.
Sitko, Barbara--Washington State University
Thomas, Gordon--University of Idaho
Judge, Mary Ann--University of Idaho
Naylor-Redmond, Kate--University of Idaho
Pendergast, Thomas--Washington State University
A Comparative Study of Two Large Computer Writing Labs: What Policies and Instructional Arrangements Make the Best Use of Computer Facilities?
Two land-grant universities in close proximity to one another, Washington State University (WSU) and the University of Idaho (UI), have made large-scale commitments to use computers in the teaching of writing, but they have made very different decisions about the degree to which the computer labs will be used in the actual instruction of writing. Both institutions made special computer facilities available to between 1000 and 1500 writing students because they assumed that composing and especially revising on computers would enhance the teaching of writing in diverse ways. Another reason for these commitments has been the institutions' desires to encourage students to integrate computer technology into their writing process.
Within these broad areas of agreement, however, the two institutions have created facilities that are markedly different: at WSU, a majority of introductory writing classes meet regularly in the computer lab and the lab has 62 open hours a week. The University of Idaho requires all students in the introductory writing classes to use computers, preferably machines located in the department's computer lab, which is open 88 hours a week. However, no instruction, except for individual tutoring, takes place in the lab. The question arises: what are the tradeoffs involved in making these decisions? What is the most effective and responsible use of expensive computer equipment that cannot be made freely available to all students?
This study used two methods to examine the effectiveness of these different institutional arrangements. The first was an evaluation of the two labs by all the students using it and their teachers. Both labs routinely conducted their evaluations each semester, but in the fall of 1989, they coordinated these evaluations so that students in both universities were asked largely the same questions. The following semester, the investigators then conducted follow-up interviews with particular students whose responses indicated that they represented a particular category of computer-lab user (based on previous experience with computers, negative or positive reactions, and so forth). The purpose of these evaluations and follow-up interviews was not to prove that one lab's arrangements were better than the other's, but to identify the advantages and disadvantages of using the computer facility primarily for instruction or primarily for unstructured open hours and individual tutoring.
Catherine F. Smith--Syracuse University
Commas Across the Curriculum: A Case History of Cross-Disciplinary Writing Courseware Development Using HyperCard
Collaborative writing presents a number of practical problems. Among them are stylistic differences among co-authors following differing conventions or usage rules--for citing sources or punctuating items in a series, for example. Such differences in convention also mask interesting intellectual and pedagogical issues for the teaching of writing across the curriculum in a large university comprising colleges of arts and sciences and professional schools. Punctuation, for example, has a history and evolution, a structural role in textual meaning, a design role in document architecture, and a social role in defining and differentiating communities of writers and writing teachers in a university. (The Associated Press Stylebook differs from the Harbrace Handbook on commas, for example. To student writers taking courses in composition and in journalism, the differences matter. Moreover, without any comparative perspective, the differences seem opaque and arbitrary.)
With an equipment grant from Apple and funding from our institution, teams of instructors in the University Writing Program and the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University are authoring interactive courseware to teach punctuation and related sentence construction (using HyperCard) in composition and public communications courses. This presentation will outline what we've learned through creating and managing the project, and through processes of designing, building, and testing the product. Such case histories document a new phase of the emergence of computers in writing instruction, as writing teachers begin authoring their own electronic course materials instead of relying on applications such as word processing packages. For teachers or researchers considering HyperCard as an authoring system, cases can inform choices and decisions by detailing experiences others have had.
Our emerging product is a collection of HyperCard stacks addressing single writing problems--with punctuation as the prototype problem--from multi-disciplinary perspectives and built by developers within cooperating disciplines. The composition stack intended its introduction to the collection invokes the metaphor of conversation to pluralize the discussion of writing technique in an academic community. Eventually, all the stacks will hang in a campus network accessible by students, faculty, and staff from classrooms and offices
Following presentation of the case history, we propose to demonstrate the tool.
Case History Working Outline
Funding and support
Process and product
Approaching courseware as a problem in design
Software development vs. instructional design and development
Project management
Phases of Development
Paul Taylor--University of Texas at Austin
Hypertext, Heteroglossia, Chaos
Let's take a few glamorous words from several different disciplines, stir them together, and see what they have to tell us about the future of reading and writing. The words are hypertext (from Ted Nelson and the computer scientists), heteroglossia (from Mikhail Bakhtin and the literary intertextualists), and chaos (from Benoit Mandelbrot and the scientists of dynamic systems).
Hypertext is a computer-based textual form that is fundamentally non-linear. Traditional texts are visually linear--the printed words proceed from the first line on the first page to the last line on the last page. The linearity of traditional texts results partially from simple physical constraints; the permanence of ink on paper quite naturally leads to a fixed form that helps to construct (and then conforms to) a reader's expectations about sequential arrangement. In contrast, hypertext offers a non-sequential alternative. The writer of a hypertextual document can provide multiple paths through the text simply by establishing electronic links between different chunks of the text; consequently, the reader gains the freedom to choose a reading strategy appropriate to his or her particular needs.
Not only can the author of a hypertextual document provide internal links within the document, but subsequent readers can also link other texts into the original at relevant points. The readers thereby become co-authors in a growing, dynamic document. While this process may seem a little unfamiliar (and difficult to implement in an intuitive fashion), a hypertextual reading/writing environment actually supports what we already do with texts. Whenever we read or write, we are constantly making connections with other texts that we have read or written. Sometimes those connections are subconscious, indirect, or limited; hypertext provides a platform for making the connections conscious and direct without requiring a linear structure.
The multiplicity of voices in a dynamic hypertextual document calls to mind Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia. According to Bakhtin, the highest form of literature is the novel because the novelist incorporates diverse voices (heteroglossia) rather than unifying the language to support a single artistic vision. In the novel, the author's voice is merely one of many: the various characters speak with words and ideologies that do not necessarily belong to the writer.
I am inclined to argue with Bakhtin's assertion of the unique position of the novel: on one hand, the novelist is still a single mediating agent who chooses which language to include, and on the other hand, many non-novelists incorporate dissident voices within their literary texts. Nevertheless, Bakhtin provides a useful counter-argument to the textual isolation and independence assumed in formalist critical theory; he emphasizes texts as participants in a living dialogue rather than static objects. Furthermore, Bakhtin makes his argument by reference to interplay within specific novels, which are readily accepted as single texts. Since Bakhtin provides us this model of a single text containing multiple voices, I wish to argue that the product of a dynamic hypertextual environment is not a multiplicity of texts by various writers, but a single text incorporating dialogic interaction among various speakers.
It is easy to raise objections to the notion of a dynamic multi-voiced hypertext as a single text. Where is the unifying structure? How do you know when you've finished reading? How can there be multiple authors of a text if the authors don't get together and hammer out a final, finished version (i.e., a consensus)? To answer (or perhaps deflect) these questions, I'll call on the third term in my title: chaos.
The scientists who study the new interdisciplinary field of chaos have questioned many traditional assumptions about valid approaches to understanding complex physical phenomena. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, for instance, started out with a seemingly innocuous question: how long is the coastline of Great Britain? Several encyclopedias differed in their answers by as much as 20%. In working to resolve the question, Mandelbrot developed a new branch of mathematics, which he called fractal geometry. While his explanation of the coastline problem is too long for this abstract, his conclusion is remarkable: the length of Great Britain's coastline (and all coastlines) is actually infinite; the distances recorded in various geographical sources represent over-simplifications.
Of course, it is counter-intuitive to declare that two obviously different islands (for example, Great Britain and Australia) have coastlines with the same (infinite) length. But the scientists of chaos have created a genuine paradigm shift: they have changed the fundamental questions that are theoretically valid. Instead of worrying about the length of a coastline, the scientists of chaos consider its "fractal dimension" (basically how rough or smooth the contour is). They have brought about this change by challenging the premise that complex physical phenomena (the shapes of coastlines, the populations of ecological systems, the fluctuations of the weather) can be described in linear, hierarchical terms.
If we assume that texts--and in particular, hypertexts--are complex physical phenomena, then the recent developments in chaos studies suggest that we should reconsider our (hierarchical) notions of individual authorship and our (linear) notions of textual unity and coherence. In a new era of computer-based textuality, we may find it useful to develop new descriptions of texts--to ask other questions than those associated with traditional issues of authorship or structural unity.
Of course, the sincere objections of the serious composition teachers are quite natural: "My students already write chaotic texts. It's not good writing. I want them to write well structured documents that communicate effectively." My reply is that the world is changing, with or without us. Relatively soon, computers will become the primary means of textual transmission, just as the printing press supplanted manuscript technology five centuries ago. Computers are transforming the nature of texts, and the expository essay may not figure prominently in computer- based discourse of the (near) future. Certainly, rhetoricians should use what we have learned to help shape the future. But we must also be prepared to reevaluate our old assumptions about how texts communicate. Otherwise, we will simply become the old guard that, according to Thomas Kuhn, will literally have to die off while the winds of change sweep past us.
Diane P. Thompson--Northern Virginia Community College
Space/Time for Teaching Writing: A Computer-Supported Model
Teaching composition in a computer lab has advantages and disadvantages: the advantages include teaching students powerful ways of using computers to brainstorm, draft, revise and edit their papers; the disadvantages stem from the greater isolation of each student and the loss of unity and interaction of the whole class. Connections between the members of the class as a whole and between the teacher and that class get lost in the computer lab for several reasons:
Students in a lab can be connected into small groups for collaborative projects so that they share a terminal for composing. However, under these conditions, although a group may work closely together, the members become even more cut off from the rest of the class. Each group tends to form a tight social unit, often hidden behind computer screens, instead of focusing on the teacher and/or the class as a whole.
A local area network with interactive messaging and screen distribution capabilities can offer interesting solutions to the whole class, either singly, or in groups. Further, the same technology which connects the students to one another, also allows the teacher to communicate with all the students simultaneously when needed, recreating the unified classroom within a lab environment. This reunified, networked classroom provides support for a wide variety of collaborative activities which stimulate student thinking and talking about writing.
Networking can reestablish connections in a variety of ways:
These network techniques support collaborative writing activities that can be extended into group writing projects. However, time becomes a problem: collaborative activities use a great deal of class time, and many students have difficulty getting together out of class to work on collaborative projects.
More effective use of class and student time and the computer facilities can be achieved by separating activities into those which need to be done in the classroom, those which can be done by individuals during open lab hours, and those which may be done at any time. Face to face real time activities need to be done in the classroom at a set time. However, many writing activities can be done in an open lab or at home and loaded onto shared text files on the network, so that they can be read and responded to by other students whenever they use the open lab. A computer conference provides even wider options of space and time, allowing students and the teacher to interact in writing according to their individual schedules. Combining in-class, lab and dial-in methods of communication frees the classroom for those activities which require the presence of the teacher and the class as a whole, while supporting a wide variety of interactive, out-of-class collaborative writing projects.
Myron Tuman--University of Alabama
Literacy Online: The Continuing Dialogue
Literacy Online, the symposium I directed at the University of Alabama in October 1989, was intended to focus on the promise and peril of a computer-based literacy. Much to my surprise only two of the ten figures who addressed the audience over the three days expressed any misgivings, and even they (Eugene Provenzo, education professor from the University of Miami and Stanley Aronowitz, sociologist from CUNY) expressed concerns that had more to do with the cultural impact of technology generally (concerning legal evidence and jobs in engineering, for example) than with specific and imminent changes (what some would call "dangers") to our inherited notion of literacy itself. Classicist Jay Bolter, the author of Turing's Man and the soon to be released Writing Space, literary historian George Landow, one of the developers of Brown University's Intermedia project, the science writer Pamela McCorduck, the linguist Victor Raskin of Purdue, the critical theorist Greg Ulmer, author of Applied Grammatology and the just released Tele-Theory, hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson, and finally two people with great experience with college composition, Helen Schwartz and Richard Lanham, almost uniformly saw only the promise of computer-based literacy. What they repeatedly pointed to were the liberatory potentials in a reader-controlled, author-diminished (if not eliminated), graphics-based world of hypertext.
In developing the symposium proceedings for publication, I have found myself engaged in a running dialogue with all ten presenters on the general notion of dangers inherent in a literacy based on "reading" and "writing" in such a world. Specifically, I find myself asking them what happens to the individual's sustained interaction with a single, unified projection of possibility (i.e., the traditional reading and writing of a text) in this new world. George Landow, for example, sees Brown's Intermedia project as offering students in introductory literature survey courses more accessible materials as a replacement for the typically unused library reserve shelf (just as Jay Bolter sees Michael Joyce's interactive story "Afternoon" as an enrichment to traditional fiction); what neither deal with explicitly is what happens when their individual efforts get incorporated into larger, user-driven systems, and thus free of the authorial control that is currently exercised? What happens, for example, to the slowly derived individual experience of reading Tennyson's In Memoriam in an electronic world of information about the poet, the poem, and the age? Why bother with the individual reading when the distilled results of many other skilled readers are readily available? What happens, in other words, to the very kinds of analyses that, with the exception of Ted Nelson, these scholars have themselves consumed and continue to produce throughout their professional lives? In a phrase, what happens to critique in a user-driven, graphics-based information society?
In Austin, I will review the general nature of this dialogue, update the position of the key players, and suggest what we can learn from this discussion about both the true dangers and the real potentials for a newly emerging, computer-based model of literacy.
Sanford Tweedie--University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Beyond Electronic Conferencing: What's Next?
This presentation examines a relatively new, but already widely praised method for altering the power structure of the classroom--electronic conferencing, or what I call the computer conversation. I believe that the computer conversation has potential beyond its currently perceived, isolated function. After briefly reviewing background literature and procedure, for those unfamiliar with the technique, I explore potential ways for furthering the uses of the conversation. These possibilities include: direct pedagogical implications, research possibilities, and a further raising of the stakes involved in an already highly staked procedure.
The computer conversation, as discussed by Cynthia Selfe and others, allows students a space outside the classroom to express themselves anonymously. It removes the hierarchical structure of the classroom, creating an alternative format for students to express themselves. It also foregrounds what is said rather than who says it. Stances and power and personalities are developed through the writing, not through being the loudest, the most demanding, or the quickest to get the hand in the air. Each student has as much time and space and freedom to express herself and direct her arguments and responses right at other students, rather than filtering them through the teacher. Unfortunately, most applications of the computer conversation remain separate from the dynamics of the remainder of the classroom activities. I propose several methods for returning the computer conversation to the classroom as well as ways to keep it outside the classroom but alter its dynamics.
Concerning pedagogical implications, I explore how the computer conversation can be brought back into the classroom and used to create assignments based on students' interests and experiences. This discussion examines whether or not bringing the computer conversation into the classroom undermines and reduces its naturally subversive intent. Also, should the instructor participate in the conversation or should she just set it up then drop out? Why do some students invariably choose not to participate in the conversation even when just making entries in my class gives them an automatic A for I0% of their grade? Why do students develop a persona in the computer conversations that provokes, inspires, or even dominates dialogue, yet remain silent or non-participatory in classroom situations?
Many possibilities are available to researchers. Since the computer conversation resembles prompted freewriting and the students often act as though they are freewriting, once the students' identities are revealed, a logical paper trail can be traced for those researchers interested in process development. The most important aspect of this method includes how other students' computer conversations entries may have an effect on the writer which can be seen directly by observing the writing. Further, do content and thematic issues explored by students in the computer conversation find their way into student papers? Does the style of "conversation" and writing fostered by on-line dialogue transfer into student papers? If so, does it compete with traditional styles of academic discourse?
Finally, I want to examine how the computer conversation can be kept out of the classroom, yet still raise the risks and stakes involved in participation. I see several possibilities for this. One would be to have inter-sectional computer conversations. That is, have students in different sections of the same course participating in one conversation. This could be done by one instructor who teaches two different sections of the same course or two different instructors. This was done at our university by two instructors of second semester freshman composition, and I'd like to discuss their findings. Another possibility would be to have the conversation occur between members of two completely different courses taught by the same instructor. Say, having members of a lower-level literature course conversing with a class of freshman composition students. Like the initial intent of the computer conversation, this will expand our (and students) concepts of discourse communities and establish new ties within and between them. Also, do different classes take on different personalities or develop different approaches or attitudes toward writing and readings that would benefit from dialogue with such a distinct approach? That is, what is significant that researchers can look for?
Thea Van der Geest--University of Twente (NL)
Formative Evaluation of Courseware for Writing Instruction: What are Useful Instruments?
INTRODUCTION
In 1985 the University of Twente (The Netherlands) started a research and development project in the field of computer-assisted writing instruction. One of the products of the project is a computer-assisted 'writing environment', called SPIRIT.
As part of the systematic design and development process, a field test of the developed materials was undertaken. The goal of this 'formative evaluation' was to find problems students and teachers meet when actually using the courseware in the daily classroom practice. The data should provide a firm base for decisions for revising the experimental materials. In this paper presentation I will describe the instruments that were used in the formative evaluation study. They will be compared in their usefulness for revision of courseware for writing instruction.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A WRITING TOOL
The goal of the project Computer-Assisted Writing Instruction is to build up knowledge about the role computers could and should have in process-oriented writing instruction.
A 'writing environment', a toolbox for students that would support them in the different stages of the writing process, has been designed. In the writing environment written materials and software are complementary.
With considerable financial support of the Dutch government a computer program prototype, called SPIRIT, has been developed.
The program consists of four parts:
The SPIRIT software runs on DOS-computers and can be considered as an application of MS-Windows. The computer program is part of a courseware package, which also includes:
FORMATIVE EVALUATION IN THE DESIGN PROCESS OF INNOVATIVE COURSEWARE
Formative evaluation is most useful when an innovative product is under development. But for most courseware and especially for the integrated tools (as word processors combined with outliners, databases, etc.) only at the end of the development process a program in an operational state is available. Often the classroom testing with students is neglected (Kurland, 1989).
On the other hand it is the innovative courseware that causes most implementation problems. This courseware often is a double innovation: a new aspect in the curriculum (e.g. process-oriented writing) combined with an innovative use of computers (e.g. an integrated writing environment).
This double innovation makes the implementation of the courseware highly problematic. One way to minimize or avoid implementation problems is to do an extensive formative evaluation during the design of the innovative products, so all kind of practical problems are known and possibly solved before the program is on the market.
One can conclude that paradoxically formative evaluation is very necessary for developing good innovative courseware, but is handicapped by the innovative nature of the courseware itself.
FORMATIVE EVALUATION OF SPIRIT
Goal of the formative evaluation during the development of SPIRT IT was to find out what kind of problems (especially implementation problems) writing teachers and students meet, when using the prototypical courseware. The research data should yield enough qualitative information about the nature of the problems to give insight in solutions and revisions.
It was decided that a number of evaluation instruments should be used in the study; that would give an opportunity to have data confirmed and validated by several measurements and it would provide information about the usefulness of the instruments for revision of the innovative writing courseware.
The computer-assisted writing lessons were given by 4 teachers in 8 third classes of secondary education (15-16 year old students).
COMPARISON OF INSTRUMENTS
In the paper presentation the instruments will be compared for the features:
PRELIMINARY RESULTS
On the level of student use of the materials 'working aloud-protocols' have the highest information value. They give a very clear view of the discrepancies between the intended writing processes and the processes that take place actually. The data processing of protocols is generally very time consuming but for formative evaluation purposes a written out protocol is not really necessary. Scanning the taped sessions for problems is satisfactory.
On the level of teacher use of the materials the in-process interviews have a high informational value. Teachers proved to have a partial overview of the problems students meet when using the lesson materials. Interviews have the positive side effect of giving the teachers the feeling of being supported during the course and respected in their expertise as classroom teacher.
William Van Pelt--The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Teaching the Future: How the Computer Revises Pedagogy
This paper examines data collected over five years (1984-1989) in a continuous study of student and teacher performance in a computer-assisted classroom. The study includes data from control and experimental groups, pre- and post-semester attitude surveys, teacher surveys and interviews, and case studies involving collaborative writing groups. The paper concludes that student attitudes and writing performance can improve in the computer classroom, but argues further that the computer environment dramatically alters student and teacher relations and revises traditional concepts of learning by creating a new pedagogical situation.
Detailed surveys from about 350 students per semester in the computer classroom show that students' experience with computers has grown steadily in 4 years: in 1984, 65% of our students claimed prior computer experience, while 28% claimed prior word processing experience; in 1988, however, 93% of our students claimed computer experience, and 46% claimed word processing experience. Remarkably, college seniors report substantially less experience with computers than incoming freshman, especially in word processing. Similarly, student attitudes about computers and writing remain positive: in 1983, only 20% were uncertain about writing on the computer, whereas in 1988, only 11% were uncertain about writing on the computer. By early next year I will have collated and evaluated full survey results on student experience and attitudes through 1989.
In control and experimental groups (instructors teaching two sections of the same courses, one section using computers and one not, but using the same syllabi and texts), we found that students in the computer classroom revised their papers twice as often as those not in the computer classroom, even when the instructors offered the same incentives for revision to both the experimental group and the control group. Based on student reports, we developed three categories for distinct writing categories among our students. "Sprinters" who like to just sit down at the computer and start writing comprised the largest category and they claim that the computer frees them from worrying about errors so they can generate text rapidly. Sprinters are often less developed writers who perceive writing as straightforward text generation and like the computer for this reason. When asked how much the computer affects their writing habits, Sprinters claim the computer influences them a great deal and that it helps them become "better writers," which nearly always means they can write more text faster without the drudgery of conventional typing. "Revisors" combine drafting, revising on-line, and planning as they go along: they praise the ability to correct errors and reorganize their papers, but sometimes complain about their own tendency to get caught up in the surface features of the text. "Planners" who like to outline, take notes, and plan papers before drafting comprise the smallest category of students and seem to have difficulty getting started, especially in planning a text holistically on the computer screen. "Planners" and "Revisors" were among the more mature and developed writers, both in terms of year in school and in their ability to see their writing as a recursive, complex process.
These results indicate that word processing can initially favor students who do not already have well-developed writing strategies and need to develop fluency in generating text and getting their thoughts out. This appears to be the case with younger students who already have computer experience but not much writing experience. However, students who have well-developed writing strategies but little computer experience encounter a wide range of benefits and problems, depending on their individual maturity and conception of the writing process. The problems often appear temporary as these students discover new strategies for adapting the technology to their writing habits or develop new habits that change their writing.
By 1986, I realized that the students and the technology were less of a problem than the traditional writing teacher and how he or she conceives the classroom. Each new class of students is more computer literate and increasingly eager to use computers for writing. The real problems reside in traditional notions of pedagogy and the structure of the classroom. Many teachers and researchers still conceive of the computer as merely a tool, like a typewriter or chalkboard, that can be added to writing or teaching, making it "better" or "easier." They fail to realize that the computer creates a whole new classroom environment in which new relations are possible between writers and their writing, between student writers as a community of peers, and between students and teachers who discover the possibilities of this new environment together. For example, our instructors used to ask for grammar or style checkers that would make students better at grammar and style, but when they saw what was available, they were disappointed and realized that they would have to put more effort into teaching students to use the programs properly than the benefits of the programs justified. Similarly, as students began to rapidly generate and proudly print their papers on the laser printer, they just as rapidly created and printed out errors in their writing. Consequently, our teachers began teaching revision strategies that attacked this problem: they incorporated revision on paper into peer writing groups, they created textfiles to highlight specific revision problems, and they developed on-line group exercises, collaborative revising on the computer, and one-to-one student conferences at the computer screen. The very shape of the classroom was changed by the technology: instructors frequently remark at how difficult it is to lecture in the computer classroom; they universally prefer individual conferencing with students or assisting small group activities when in the computer classroom.
For two years we constructed experimental and control groups and learned that students write more and revise more in the computer classroom than in the traditional classroom, but we learned nothing significant about the quality of their writing. We concluded that our empirical methods cannot measure improvement in writing quality and that the computer so dynamically changes teaching that it is unrealistic to identify computer technology as an isolated variable. Teachers reported that computer sections consistently fell behind the control sections in reading and discussion on the scheduled syllabus. They also reported that students in the computer section complained that they needed more time to write than the students in the control classrooms. Some teachers reported that although students in their computer section often turned longer papers, those papers were ;just as often more error ridden and disorganized than papers from control groups. These teachers further claimed it was unrealistic and pedagogically unsound to use the exact same syllabus in the computer classroom as in the traditional classroom: they needed more time to teach students how to use the technology, how to spell-check, when and how to revise on paper rather than on the screen, and they especially needed time to develop sequenced assignments that take advantage of the specific needs of sprinters, revisors, and planners. We advised teachers to rewrite their syllabi to allow less time for classroom discussion of readings and the writing process, but more time for student writing and response to the technology. We abandoned the control and experimental groups and focused on creating a new approach to teaching writing in the computer classroom. The remainder of this paper reports the results of this effort and the implications for further research, emphasizing writing strategies adapted to the computer, the decentering of the classroom by diminishing the authoritarian role of the teacher, peer response groups, collaborative writing, electronic conferencing, and electronic mail.
Sandra Varone & Karen Nilson D'Agostino--Brookdale Community College-Lincroft, NJ
Teacher Research in the Computer Writing Classroom
This paper presents the results of our classroom research investigation into the changing role of writing instructors in the computer classroom. As part of a research project formulated under the guidance of Dixie Goswami, Mimi Schwartz and Nancy Sommers at the Center for the Study of Writing in New Jersey, we have examined the kinds of teacher interventions that take place in our basic writing classroom where students write with word processors. Our project helped us to better understand our role in the computer writing classroom and the impact our interventions seemed to have on our students' text.
The project involved our computer-integrated basic writing classes, where writing and responding to whole, student-generated texts is the basis for all classroom activity and instruction. Both teachers and students kept "interaction logs" in which they described and recreated their interactions at the word processors as students composed and revised.
Our analysis of this information has helped us to articulate the changes that have taken place in our teaching, giving us some insights into the dynamics of our computer writing classroom. Successful computer integration requires both the flexibility to deal with twenty writers who are simultaneously clicking away at their keyboards and asking twenty different questions, and the ability to respond to a piece of writing quickly and effectively while it is in process and without usurping the writer's control Thus, knowing when and how to intervene in the writing process is one of the most important skills that writing teachers who teach with computers need to develop.
While classroom inquiry is not a substitute for rigorous experimental research, it can provide us with valuable information that can shape teaching. This is especially helpful for teachers who are faced with making technology work for their own students in their own teaching environments. By "thinking about the information we already have, "---that is, by re-examining and re-evaluating what goes on in our own computer classrooms--classroom teachers will be better able to repeat their successes and devise new approaches and strategies to teaching writing with computers.
Donald K.Wagner & Geraldine B. Wagner--Syracuse University
Writing in Heteromedia Environments
By heteromedia we mean an electronic communication environment with the capacity to compose, edit, copy, send, receive, or otherwise manipulate information. Heteromedia includes word processing, graphics, databases, e-mail, scanning, slide presentations, and the like.
Communicating in heteromedia environments forces us to recast familiar questions of compositionists and rhetorical theorists by redefining both the medium (the text) and the act of composing itself. The coming of new technologies like Local Area Networks (LANs), electronic mail (e-mail), and applications (like graphic systems) helps us expand our notion of "communicator" in our culture. We attempt to investigate the impact of heteromedia tools on writers, teachers, and readers, and their relationship to writing, teaching, and reading. Co-teaching technical communication in an electronically "live" classroom begins to transform our notion of the traditional text, the traditional teacher, and the traditional classroom in revolutionary ways.
While co-teaching a prototype technical communications studio entitled, "Writing in Heteromedia Environments," we discovered some important and exciting implications that get beyond rapidly-aging research questions like whether or not students were writing better with computers. We had students from two campuses--SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) College, and Syracuse University. We had students from two disciplines--ESF and Engineering. We had them communicating with each other electronically, sharing ideas and idea structures. The life of their "docuforms" existed entirely on-line. We were discovering that writing with heteromedia was breaking old, static boundaries of printed text. Classroom walls were breaking down, teaching was becoming collaborative and being performed in different spaces and time, discourse-specific boundaries were blurring, and campuses were literally being conjoined.
Our studio was composed of four (4) modal categories: operational, contextual, rhetorical, and environmental. In the operational mode, we wanted students to become familiar with and rehearse computer technology--both hardware and software. Our networked Macintosh computer classroom used a fileserver with MS Word, with graphics, with mainframe communications, and with a 20 megabyte file storage area for our class materials, messages, and assignments. The operational instruction continued all semester as we were repeatedly introduced to new features, datalinks, or applications.
Second, we began exploring contextual issues through structured tasks surrounding a semester long case-study project. We began by investigating traditional genres of technical texts a communicator might need to know how to compose/read, and contrasted those with other disciplines. Ultimately, we wondered about creating "MacTexts" and heterotexts and the impact these docuforms would have on audiences.
Third, each student outlined some of the rhetorical concerns she would like to investigate throughout the course. These rhetorical concerns (things like grammar, punctuation, style, organization, etc.) were made explicit, and she reiterated these concerns in protocols (short reflective pieces commenting on text production), tracing those concerns in/through the heteromedia.
Fourth, the environmental mode was an attempt to establish a teaching/learning environment in which writers-editors-readers could participate in the process of communicating in heteromedia. The aim of the environmental mode was to help teach the student to function as both a editor and writer in an electronic classroom which mimics one large discourse community working toward a similar goal.
We found that some of the traditional views about author, about text, about text production, about teaching, and about classroom pedagogy help us little in heteromedia teaching. Heteromedia negates much of what we've learned about composing, teaching, and reading paper texts. This presentation begins to uncover some of our reflective findings while teaching in/with this new medium.
Chris Webb--University of Texas at Austin
Using Dynamic Texts
Created through video taping or keystroke capture for replay on a monitor, a dynamic text is one under construction and in motion. As prototext (i.e., language that evolves from a first word into a final product), it provides more data for inference of a writer's struggles and strategies than does hard copy.
While these texts have been used in research (e.g., in studies of the effects of word processing on composing), as far as I know very little has been done with them in computer-based pedagogy. In this practitioner's report, I will discuss why I use dynamic texts, how I create them, and what I do with them (including the use of keystroke capture data to create graphic profiles of a text's construction).
Noel Williams--Sheffield City Polytechnic, UK
Talkback: A Hypertext Collaborative Conference
In this paper I outline a project being run by the Communication and Information Research Group (CIRG) at SCP. It is a pilot project using a simple hypertext system for conferencing (called here, 'hyperconferencing'). The project has two main outcomes: an evaluation of the hyperconference concept and a specification of a tool for hyperconferencing. Although the project is not yet completed, we have a number of interim observations under both heads which will be of value in any further work of this kind. From the point of view of those interested in computers and writing it also has a number of beneficial spin offs, not the least of which is the establishment of a disk based conference on the topic of Training and Writing Technology.
First, however, because our group will be largely unfamiliar to readers, the paper provides a background to the work by introducing CIRG, then describes the project's rationale and procedure and finally reviews our interim results, examining some of the problems with the concept and some of the desirable features of a purpose-built hyperconference tool.
William Wresch--University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point
Computer Analysis of Student Essays--25 Years of Research
In 1965 Willis Page presented a plan to the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) to have computers automatically evaluate student writing samples. He had already completed two years of research in which he found computers could "grade" an essay as effectively as any human teacher--just by checking for such easily detectable attributes as sentence length, essay length, and the presence or absence of particular words. His plea at the time was that computers take over much of essay grading, not because they were superior to teachers, but because they could do as well and do it cheaply and with few problems of fatigue. His hope was that with computer grading programs available, students would be assigned writing, and so would get the practice they needed to develop as writers--practice that was not possible in most classroom because of the burden it placed on writing teachers. Here is how he stated the problem:
There are those who find great comfort in such surviving pockets of antiquity [manually grading essays]. Yet time is invariably cruel to the inefficient, and some cruelties seem visible today: Teachers in the humanities are often overworked and underpaid, harassed by mounting piles of student themes, or twinged with guilt over not assigning enough for a solid basis of student practice and feedback. (Page, 211)
From this initial assessment of the problem faced by writing teachers, and with the power of newly available computers, Page and a series of others attempted to bring the statistical capabilities of computers to the task of writing analysis. Every study published by Page and others proved that computers could be profitably used for just such analysis, and every study was derided or ignored. Twenty-five years after the initial research in this area, businesses are quietly adopting writing analysis software, but high schools and colleges continue to ignore it. This report sums up the initial research, and describes a contemporary replication of the original studies.
William W. Wright, Jr.
International Group Work: Setting up a telecomputing and writing project that gives the most benefit for the cost
The network of teachers that we started in 1984--now a series of asynchronous computer conferences--is called BreadNet. Each year around 250 teachers attend the Bread Loaf School of English, a six- week summer graduate program of Middlebury College in Vermont. (The name comes from a loaf-shaped mountain near the campus) Teachers study literature, writing, and theater with excellent faculty members from places like Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton--then return to their homes and schools where they continue work on the network. Many of the teachers are in very remote places like Homer, Alaska, and McDowell, Kentucky.
The network is used as a support and professional development tool for teachers as well as a place to set up well-structured projects for students. Rather than have as electronic network serve as an expensive way to send pen pal letters, we encourage activities that involve group work and collaborative writing. For example, in conferences called "Workshop," and "World Trade," schools sign up for week-long slots and put up writing that peers around the globe respond to. We have guidelines so that we won't have redundant pieces, problems with peer comments, or too much writing for other classrooms on the group to respond to. Moderators keep things moving.
One project links secondary school teachers of Native American students and their classrooms on reservations around the country. They are connected to a Georgetown University class in Native American Literature. A major class activity in May, 1989, was a global forum about the environmental crisis called "World Class." This included an international online reading group, online guests from major environmental groups and universities, discussion by classrooms around the globe, and an essay contest managed from Peru and Chile. Using parallel conferences that reduce costs, "World Class" has continued in the 1989-90 school year. Part of my talk will be about that.