Overview of Writing Courses in the Virtual Age

The telescope, telephone and the internet were invented to bridge distances. Today we have remote controls for the garage door and the television (the latter a remote for the remote). But as our reach is extended we're increasingly vulnerable to error, deception, and forgery. What is the relationship between distance, authenticity, and the thing we call knowledge?

--Ken Goldberg in Interaction - Artistic practice in the Network

"Writing Courses in the Virtual Age: Graduate Students and Professors as Co-Conspirators" is a multivocal text with several purposes. While we have co-created this article to provide an overview of our experience as students and instructors with on-line graduate coursework, we would like to stir up as many questions as we answer. Using a framework similar to Pamela Takayoshi's in "Complicated Women: Examining Methodologies for Understanding the Uses of Technology," we are interested in the way internet technology "can be used to both oppressive and empowering ends." Bringing an awareness of the often invisible ideologies at work in technology to create hierarchical power structures where the instructor is seen as the 'knower,' we've structured this visible, virtual, networked co-creation with an approach that utilizes feminist theory with computer technologies - and designed our text to challenge academic hierarchies. In this way, we hope to move past some of the ways technology fragments our view, and we would like to offer this raw digital material as evidence of how collaborative work in an on-line environment challenges dominant cultural beliefs about technology, gender, and power.