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If you
visit the writing program websites for universities with
outstanding graduate programs in rhetoric and composition, would you
see "brochureware" (i.e., "monologic sites that primarily provide
information about an academic unit, with strongly limited feedback or
contributions from those who are represented by the site" [Bowie & Spinuzzi, 2003]) or would you see interactive websites that enable graduate
students and other teaching faculty to revise and compose the
curriculum? If you examined our curriculum and practices, would you see us engaging students'
passions
for social networking sites, or would you see us prohibiting these
sites? Would you perhaps see us generally ignoring social
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networking sites such as blogs, and wikis, focusing instead on the time-honored essay?
How have
we modified our practices to account for our increased sensitivity to
the underlying social nature of our literacy efforts?
When push comes
to shove, have our classrooms evolved along with our understanding of
the collaborative nature of learning and literacy? |
Are our classrooms
empowering students to use technology tools to collaborate (i.e., to practice
contemporary literacies)?
In a climate of
decreasing financial support for higher education, how have
universities kept pace with new writing tools that facilitate
collaboration, from Tablet
PCs to wikis to blogs? While we may all
agree that writing technologies have fundamentally changed writing
processes and assumptions about literacy, would an analysis of writing
classrooms and/or composition textbooks suggest any major changes have
occured in writing, especially collaborative writing or collaborative
teaching, over the past twenty years?
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