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.
Sallya