Introduction
When this webtext was created, Shawn J. Miller was the Manager of Media Production for Instructional Support Services at the University of Texas at El Paso and completed his MA in Rhetoric in Writing Studies in the summer of 2006. He is now an Academic Technology Consultant at Duke University.
Beth Brunk-Chavez is an assistant professor of Rhetoric in Writing Studies in the Department of English at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Together they helped to create UTEP's Hybrid Academy for training composition instructors to teach hybrid (half f2f, half online) courses. Shawn continued to run this academy for several disciplines across campus. They also co-taught a hybrid composition course together in the fall semester of 2005. Much of the inspiration for this webtext came from the experiences in that class.
Because the focus of our paper is the importance of effective collaboration, these webpages reflect our own collaborations at various levels: our conversations with students and instructors, our conversations with the scholarship, the editorial comments from the Kairos reviewers (for the original draft of this project, before revisions), and our conversations with each other.
In addition to our collaborative efforts, we have chosen to include nearly all of the supporting material for this research: the surveys, student responses, instructor responses, and our Computers and Writing 2006 PowerPoint presentation. We believe it is important for the "readers of research reports [to] have access to the data and are therefore [able] to examine all the coding decisions for themselves" (Grant-Davie, 1992, p. 282). Although we have made selections as to which student responses to include, many of their comments are included here.
We realize that exposing the entirety of this process is somewhat dangerous, as it potentially opens our study to increased scrutiny and/or criticism. However, we appreciate the opportunity to create a mini-archive relevant to this particular study. While the end-product is the paper itself, this format allows us to include all those documents and conversations mentioned above and so is a different end-product from the paper (which is available in the PDF linked at the top). Additionally, we have created a space in the article for those who are interested to continue the conversation. (The invitation appears at the end of the section titled: Decentered and Digitized, but not Disconnected.) As one of our reviewers stated: "This project could potentially enable scholarship that in the past was reserved for folks who had access to special collections of unpublished papers."
We would like to thank the Kairos editors for their incredibly useful and thoughtful feedback on an earlier version of this webtext. We would also like to thank the instructors and their students who participated in the study. The student comments have been gently edited for ease of reading. The University of Texas at El Paso approval for this study is filed under IRB protocol ID #2283--Effectiveness of Team-Based Learning
and Technology in a Composition Program, Department of English.
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