The Way We Will Have Become:

The Future (Histories) of Computers and Writing

Topic: "The Writing *in* Computers"
Facilitator: Dene Grigar
Panelists: Bill Condon, Joel English, Judi Kirkpatrick, Anthony Rue, Cindy Selfe, Victor Vitanza 

Generative Questions: 

• Where is writing headed? 
• Are we teaching the kind of writing needed by our constituents? 
• How will we assess success when we use computers in the electronic classroom? 
• Have we lost the "writing" in computers and writing? If so, is that a mistake or are there bigger things we can gain by teaching "writing" in MOOs, or writing to the WWW? 
• Do we still call this writing? 

John Barber: Announcement about call for special issue of Readerly/Writerly Text. 

Michael Day: Announcement about call for proposals for C&W99. 

Cindy Selfe: Announcement about one slot still available for this year's computers & writing institute at MTU. 

Montgomery College, Rockford, MD, has two full time faculty positions starting in August. General composition/literature. 

Dene: Encouraging to see good turnout on Sunday morning. Glad to see energy Friday morning. People left the session still talking. Hope Town Hall continues next year. 

Victor: I love all things that flow... We take actuality into virtuality and that ain't good. We are bungling the migration to virtual cities. Not to say we haven't made progress educating each other, but we haven't been near radical enough in creating new rooms in our MOO architexture. Classrooms. Seminar rooms. We can have wonderful educational happenings in this space, but I'm disappointed. I want something far stranger, something more dereferentialized. Been there, done that. Begin to think of a new architexture for MOOs. Countless set of multiplicities. Crazy Deleuzian Prism. Experimental work on LinguaMOO. We love all things that flow. 

Cindy: Speechless! and very conventional. I would think the type of texts we're asking students to make and the kind we're starting to make ourselves are not limited to conventional genres. Expanded notion of both composition and text. Include use of images and sound to create new kind of text. We don't have enough examples of the new stuff. How do we imagine things we haven't seen before? Geoff Sirc is one. Talks about duChamp & avant garde art. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Anne Wysocki doing interesting work with their students, helping them create multi-media texts. Some of the things in Kairos and C&C Online are examples, but they are rare. Surprising. It takes a lot of work to break out of habits. This community has to work to bring in a range of voices. Not just because we want diversity in our ranks, but we can't solve the problem alone. We need other perspectives. Student self-sponsored texts. Start looking to students as the experts in these texts. Stop thinking of them as having lost a traditional kind of literacy. They have, but the loss is nothing compared to the gain. Need to respect the kind of work they do. To me, text-only documents are looking a bit pale and anemic these days. 

Joel: Q #4 have we lost writing? No. We've found it. Have we lost literacy? No. We've stumbled upon it. it's an increasing reality that our students are using wider range of tools, and skill with them is expected in the work world now. As fundamental as traditional skills as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Will become as basic to our classrooms as traditional skills. If students leave our classrooms without being able to writing critically and reflectively using new tools, we will have failed. Technological literacy becoming functional literacy, basic to the ability to navigate our society. 

Bill: An embarrassment of riches, a forbidding challenge. Unparalleled opportunity. Awash in hypertext, email, MOOtext, we have to help students become more versatile writers. The page seems manageable and safe. The screen multiplicitous and indefinite. If challenge of teaching is great, the task of evalution is greater. How do we evaluate these diverse texts/performance? Traditional evaluation is inadequate. Performance assessment is the way to go. Portfolios, for example, gives students a voice in evaluation, more flexibility. Turn an overwhelming task into a great opportunity. 

Judi: Writing is taking place in places being invented or barely imagined. What's different about this place is it's cheap and easy to get there. Disintegration of authority and ownership. People don't have to get past the gatekeepers any more. Not that there are no more gates. There are lots of gates. starting gates. Bill and henry louis gates. pearly gates. the gates of hell. Reading thinking writing are interwoven. but which follows which? how do we keep students writing reading thinking all the time? we introduce them to network writing? don't apologize for bringing students into network writing. 

Cindy-as-Gail: (gail on her way to myrtle beach conference; she flits about from resort to resort. imagine me as gail). writing is headed into more of everything. alphabetic text. multimedia. writing on the net is writing. anything else is foolishness. student (sigfried) the danger is not that we will lose anything by writing with computers but that we will gain too much, laying the groundwork for bigger losses later. (karen lundsford) writing is headed into more of everything. epistolary. students spend hours on email. they groaned when when told they had to hand in 20 page paper, but they end up writing more than that. 

dene: themes. vve need to move beyond current paradigms. expanding notion of comp and text. the necessity of teaching computer literacy. the challenge of assessing performance. the danger we face if we don't teach computer literacy. the increase in the kinds of writing we will need to teach. 

keith: all five, in spite of wider consideration of what counts as literacy, but what's missing is programming. no matter how complicated a hypertext gets, it's still in some sense static. dynamic html creates no possibilities for creating movement. 

cindy: that's what I mean by expanded notion of composition. composing an assemblage. more robust notion of literacy. thick. 

janice: I don't think we have the terms yet to describe what we're trying to say. 

cindy: that's why I love listening to anne wysocki. she uses terms differently. brings them in from different areas. talked about the 'weight' of a work. 

joe: other faculty don't yet see computers as part of basic literacy. 

dickie: was talking to mtu sysops the other day. they said 'our students don't need to create web pages.' we have to be creative in how we market this idea. 

Joe: territory at stake. 

bill: what's a text? we still don't agree about what it is. we're making the transition from what sharon crowley calls 'full frontal lecture' to what I would call human textuality. I'm a text. We're making a transition, but the academy is behind. we have to catch up with what's happening around us. 

woman: different levels of understanding. y'all talk to yourselves. if you want more people involved, you have to talk to people who aren't coming to this conference. you have to speak to the luddites who aren't there yet. 

dene: right. we haven't defined things for ourselves. we're grappling with this ourselves. we're still shaking things out. some consensus but very little. 

leslie: what troubles me is that I still love the essay, a sane argument with convincing evidence. I would hate to lose that as a form. I still love sonnets! perhaps the essay needs to be the upper division course, presented as a historical form. 

cindy: you are not alone! there's a great piece coming out in a book from utah state passions pedagogy and something in the 21st century. by doug hesse. talking about the essay as a way of making meaning. wanting to hold on to some of the ways of making meaning that are part of the culture of the essay. 

true: heard same argument echoed in the art faculty. still clinging to the painting while they adopt computer tools. I don'tthink we have to give up the painting or the essay but there's something else developing. I would love to see C&W become so multidisciplinary that we have programmers and artists and architects presenting with each other 

victor: I don't think we're trying to do away with the cartesian essay. I would love to reclaim the esssay as an experimental essay. we're trying to reclaim the essay, reshaped as it passes through other filters. 

cindy: people from different disciplinary backgrounds may come at topic in diffferent ways but write together 

tammy: assessing success. we are called in ourdept chipheads, gearheads, techheads. we're english teachers! fculty come into my classroom to evaluate me, but they know nothing about technology. rather than just observing, they participate. i have to teach them how to use a mouse! frustrating. some people stick their heads in and say 'is this a class? can I check my email?' 

bill: ref. to trent and judy at CCCC. we have to prepare people. they don't recognize what we're doing. we have to revise the forms and people's notions of the forms. they say 'i'll come back on a day when you're teaching.' we have to teach them how to evaluate us. just as students have to teach us how to evaluate them. 

joel: when writing became a focus because of a sense of student deficits compared to faculty literacy levels. now, though, rather than presuming the teachers are better than the students, the reverse is true. I think it's important that we don't treat teachers as luddites but help them acquire new skills and ideas. 

mikeP: people are taking their time to learn new literacies. but as much as we talk about new tools, etc. the teaching roles are still pretty samey. the roles have to change. biggest change I've seen is that students are writing more and writing with each other, talkingabout writing, talking with faculty about writing. that's the most compelling argument for me. 

mike horst: programming included as literacy? mixed feelings. tried having students write modules using cold fusion. I would tend to argue against it because in code, ethos and pathos don't count. producing the module was so time consuming that other things got elbowed out. at some point you have to draw the line. 

keith: it depends on what level of programming you take them to. there are simpler things to do, like html. I would argue that there are ethos and pathos in code. 

sally: I teach scientific writing. bio dept. I'm thinking from perspective of bio dept and of competition for money in the acadmy. engineering school and health sciences are getting the money right now. how do we convince hardcore people with whom you're competing for money that these kinds of things work. the whole project of how we describe our teaching is something we need to concentrate on. I don't think we can be scornful. we have to justify and articulate rigorously what we're doing for people on the outside our classrooms who don't recognize what we're doing. 

dickie: we don't do a good job of doing this for the public. if we want to survive we have to do that on a regular basis. letters to editors. let the public know what how and why we're doing what we're doing. one phrase I like is database writing (and reading). information archaeology. 

steven: assessment. instruments. we need opt for the most flexible ones available. we have experimental classes in which the instructor is allowed to write their own questions of students who evaluate the course. teachers who push technology will not necessarily get the best student evals. for institutions that go strictly by the number that's a problem. 

gian: something randy bass said. we haven't really thought about teaching before technology came into the picture. there's a sense that we have to do something about technology, but it's an opportunity to provoke discussions about teaching generally, not just teaching with technology. 

judi: need to not only talk to our own faculty, but find people in other depts who are using technology and partner with them into learning communities. cluster technology rich courses. students may start educating teachers who are not using technolgy as much. 

janice: difficulty of assessing myself sometimes. when I get student evals and they say this is the greatest class & they cite that they learned email, etc. is that what I'm supposed to be doing? 

dene: yes. students are writing so much that it becomes transparent. the technology is what sticks out. 

ty: we're at a point when we need to articulate the things we do that don't seem to have anything to do with writing or technology per se, but the things that help students create cognitive maps of their ideas, to make choices with what they do and how they do it. we all started dancing together *in a circle* (at ginnie springs fish fry). 

mday: what she said. you go, girl. in terms of expanding the circle... we need to welcome faculty. participate in faculty development