Computers and
Writing 2000 Conference Graduate Research
Network
Abstracts Stephen Vincent
Bonin, Texas Woman's University
Stafford, a poet of 67 books and professor for 30 years at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, believed and practiced a philosophy. He saw his creativity as something genuine, therefore nothing to put in an auspicious class. He maintained a daily discipline of rising at 4am and writing. Stafford's product reveals the gist of his philosophy, namely, many of his poems seem everyday. To think that a poet would be able to publish so much is interesting. He garnered critical attention--a national award for Traveling Through the Dark--early on. Thereafter, he lived to write, and wrote to live. In my research, I will delineate specific methods of Peter Elbow that are illuminated by Stafford. Jennifer Bowie,
Texas Tech University
We live in a culture of gendered
language and sexist stereotypes. Language reflects the ideas, views, and
structure of the society it represents, along with creating human thought,
attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. Our language and culture work together
to foster sexism. Some feminists see the internet as a potential solution
to the sexism and stereotypes in society. They see internet as having the
power of making gender fluid and even invisible. These feminists think
the fluidity and invisibility of gender could change perceptions of gender
on and offline. But does the fluidity and invisibility change people's
perception of gendered language or is it enforcing the stereotypes of "real
world" culture? My study seeks to examine what is really happening online.
I begin by examining sexist language in today's culture and move to the
views of people who see the internet as a solution and those who think
it is not the solution. Then I move into my studies. In these studies,
I explore the ratings of feminine, masculine, and neutral and the perceptions
of statements from a MOO (onlinesynchronous virtual reality) log
to see if people are reading and perceiving these statements as gendered.
In my first study, I survey students to see if they rate statements from
two MOO logs as feminine, neutral, or masculine. In my second study, I
focus on perceptions of gendered language. To examine the perceptions,
I interview eight people. The interviews examine perceptions of language
through questions asking why the participants rated certain statements
as feminine, masculine, or neutral and then inquiring as to what the participants
own thoughts on gendered language are. My research suggests that the internet
is not savingus. Even in a medium where gender is fluid people still perceive
statements as gendered, carrying "real world" stereotypes and sexism online.
It is we, as participants in the society both on and offline, through changes
in
Shannon
Carter and Sandi Reynolds, Texas Woman's University
Computers are (and will be) an integral part of all our students' present and future real world experiences with writing. It has become increasingly clear that to ignore computers in our composition classrooms is to ignore the real needs of our students' futures with writing. But as computer technologies become more prevalent, how can we integrate software programs such as Blackboard, WebCT, and Daedalus Online into composition classrooms where instructors are already overrun with competing pedagogies? This discussion will focus on the various ways in which we have integrated technology into our composition classrooms and how this integration fits/enhances our own pedagogical goals and assumptions. How can instructors find the software programs that best fit their teaching philosophies? Does technology change our teaching philosophies? Should it? Should we teach our students (ask our students) to publish on the Web? What purpose does this serve? Additionally, how does technology problematize or enhance feminist practices? We contend as many have before, that Computer Mediated Composition (CMC) works well in the feminist classroom due to the interactive nature of CMC practice, the decentralization of the classroom, and the shifting of the burden of responsibility onto the student and away from the instructor. Thus our discussion will also consider this aspect of feminist pedagogy in relation to that sense of failure the panelists have sometimes felt as we move from the Current Traditional "lecture" format to a more student-responsible feminist format. This sense of failure stems from the feeling that we are not "teaching" in the CMC classroom--that we are not imparting "information." Speaker One will share her experiences working with the Blackboard system and how she has had to recreate her lesson plans to fit the electronic environment. Speaker Two will explain how using E-Zines in the composition class helps her meet her feminist and pedagogical goals. We will present our papers jointly in order to facilitate discussion and solicit suggestions regarding our specific integration of technology into our writing classrooms via Blackboard and the E-Zine. We will structure our discussion to open new vistas not only for ourselves but also for our audience as we all share our experiences and efforts to deal with the frustration that technology can create. Sue Crowson,
Texas Woman's University
Charles Sanders Peirce defined a sign as anything that "stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity" (2.228). Peirce codified the semiotic system that explains the triadic process which produces cognition within its interpreter. A philosophical framework can be found in Peirce's semiotic system for understanding the use of computer technology to facilitate human communication, or the exchange of cultural signs. Jay David Bolter asserts that Peirce's semiotic theory is manifested within the computer as signs interact, form the space as text, and create its texture. Virtual signs represent persons and entities as being simultaneously present and not present in cyberspace. An ontological perspective on which Peirce did not elaborate. Electronic texts placed in interaction with one another via the Internet embody his notion of the sign facilitating further knowledge and the near infinite process of interpretation. This research project examines the correspondences between hypermedia and Peirce's three ontological categories to include virtual signs. In addition to the work of Bolter and Peirce, scholarly texts of semiotic and hypertext theory by Victory Vitanza, Richard Lanham, George P. Landow, and Jonathan Bignell provide an authoritative framework to evaluate the relationship between semiotics and hypermedia. Jude
Edminster, University of South Florida
Today, information technology promises a new wave of change for the practice of scholarship. Powerful search engines speed the process of data communication and facilitate the rapid dissemination of conversation within scholarly communities. Electronic publication promises an unprecendented proliferation of new scholarship at the same time it threatens the conventions of "gatekeeping" and peer review. Resistance to the inevitable transformation of the profession resounds in every corner of the university. This presentation is an attempt to tell the story of both the eager anticipation of the transformation to come and the resistance to it that will no doubt continute to resonate for some time, as all resistance to innovation does throughout its diffusion period. This is a story of a research project--one which incorporates and reflects upon that project's expectations, participation, data collection, products and processes, and the interactivity which takes place between participants and technological interfaces, as well as within networks of participants as they use, resist, and transform technology in the effort to accomplish their research goals. Laura Gray,
Texas Woman's University
What types of tools are appropriate for measuring and evaluating the epistemological progress of students in a feminist-modeled computer-based writing class? Feminist scholarship claims that feminist models of pedagogy foster both critical analysis and problem solving abilities (Wetzel, 1999), skills worthy of praise in any classroom, yet how is one to measure students' abilities in these areas? Feminist theories on epistemology are central to this exploration. Can feminist epistemology, with its emphasis on both the personal and the social, lend itself to measurement? How does the computer-centered classroom figure into this measurement? Are we now "affirming the epistemological frameworks students bring into the classroom . . . [and] finding ways to use computers to help students (women and men alike) develop their abilities to think in different ways" as Emily Jessup hoped we would nearly a decade ago? While scholarship outlining the theoretical positions and values of feminist epistemology is rich, the composition instructor wishing to apply these theories in the practical day-to-day management of her or his classroom, which includes assessment, will find little to model assessment standards on. This empirical research project is part of a larger work in which such standards will be searched for in both the computer and traditional composition classrooms. Billie Hara,
The University of Texas at Arlington
Leaves of Grass is Walt Whitman's "landscape across America." He writes about people and places from one end of the nation to the other (with lots of interesting stops in between). The vastness of the "landscape" concept--and Whitman's poetry--is often lost on inexperienced readers who can label Whitman "hard to understand" or "confusing. With "The Whitman Project"--an interactive online tool to aid in student understanding of the poem--this vastness becomes manageable because students construct--visually--their interpretations of the poem. Instead of reading the poem "Song of Myself," for example, in a straight beginning-to-end linear manner, students can choose where to begin reading the poem by roaming (metaphorically) across a preconstructed, unlabeled landscape of the United States. Students find "hotspots" that interest them, then by clicking on this random spot, are then transported to a specific segment of the poem, sound bytes of Whitman's voice, reproduced artwork about the poem, or other Whitman poetry that concerns itself with a particular geographic location, theme, or word in the poem. These are then linked to other segments of the poem in a seemingly arbitrary manner. The random, non-linear links in the full-text online poem can lead readers through an entirely different reading of the text each time they click a link. With "The Whitman Project" the road to understanding Whitman's poetry becomes almost limitless. While the shell of the landscape is preconstructed, students will add to the site by including individual perspectives, writings, treatments of the text, as well as visual reprsentations of what they "see" in the poetry. To aid the students, I have constructed a concordance (initially only of "Song of Myself," but will include other Whitman texts as student interest dictates), an extensive Whitman bibliography (which students will annotate), and a subject index that students will define, then update. Eventually, students will construct specific landscapes themselves by using some of the tools "The Whitman Project" provides. Student constructed landscapes would then become--as Whitman himself envisioned the poem--a growing interaction between students and teachers where students and teachers often exchange roles. Byron Hawk,
University of Texas at Arlington
Jean Baudrillard reads America as a desert, an open space, a primal scene that calls (for) invention. But America is also "neither dream nor reality. [. . .] It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved" (America 28). This paradox between infinite openness and assumed completion emerges in discourses about cyberspace. As noted by Douglas Rushkoff in "Seeing Is Beholding," the dream of a Cyberia "free of time, location, or even a personal identity" (31) is the imagined goal of early "explorers" who were writing the utopia. The image of "psychedelic explorers" who take a "real" trip and bring back an imagined utopia for the rest of us is counterposed by notions of hypertext as an infinitely open genre--the utopia of cyberspace is closed in an open position. CyberWriting, then, is not about creating something new from nothing. One needs to be immersed in order to invent. Baudrillard has to travel to America, immerse himself in its (un)culture (the culture that exists prior to his arrival yet does not exist without him), in order to bring back an image of this virtual world for the purpose of critiquing the 19th century bourgeois culture that persists in France. In this presentation, I intend to explore the paradox of openness and completion in relation to the hypertext essay as a genre. Following Victor Vitanza's distinction in Writing for the World Wide Web between "hyper"-text as print literacy made Web-ready and "hypertexts" as experimental genres that are working toward post-literacies, I take "hyper"-text as the completed notion of the genre and use it as a space/topos for inventing other conceptions of the hypertext essay and its possibilities as a post-genre. H. Brooke
Hessler, Texas Christian University
My research examines how non-profit and for-profit American universities compose themselves as [pre]eminent sources of knowledge, community, and certification for an increasingly diverse, Web-based audience. During a period when many institutions appear to be struggling to re-define or re-emphasize their civic importance, it is interesting to observe that educational technology is regarded as both an emblem of democratization (through, for example, increased accessibility and innovative pedagogies that engage a wider range of learning styles) and as a portent of the commodification and corporatization of higher education. Applying Burkean criticism to an extensive collection of artifacts (including university mission statements, Web sites, convocation addresses, and curricular description), I consider the extent to which the rhetoric surrounding distributed education appears to enable and disable the kinds of unversity-community relationships needed to further (and refine) the public goals of these institutions. Chris
Johnston, University of California--Santa Barbara
This project looks qualitatively at the impact of computers on the academic writing class I taught last quarter. I'm currently in the process of sorting through and analyzing the variety of data I collected, prior to starting writing. Woosung Kim,
Texas Woman's University
The purpose of this study is to investigate the problems and potentials of computer-aided English composition faced by international students, particularly Korean students at the university level. Despite the mastery in English grammar and syntax, many Korean students have great difficulties in writing English composition. However, this study is to explore how the computer-aided writing program can hep with these problems. With extensive personal interviews, it first tries to identify the procedures and strategies of international students in computer-aided writing, then shows the common obstacles and difficulties in each step of writing procedures. It also targets to find out the reasons and possible solutions for those difficulties. This study will also compare the strategies for writing used by these students in traditional writing environments and computer-aided environments. Through this comparison, this study will try to show the advantages and disadvantages of the computer-aided writing program for international students. The results of this study can provide some suggestions for teaching computer-aided English composition for non-English speaking students. It gives better understanding for the problems they face and possible solutions for them. Also, in terms of pedagogical aspect, the result may provide a new direction for the instructor in English composition. Phillip
P. Marzluf, University of Oklahoma
This presentation, an extension of a larger project which explores the role of empirical research in the development of the theory for computers and writing, is an exploration of the contributions that L. Vygotsky and M. Bakhtin have offered to the field. After reviewing how theorists (Elbow, Halasek, and Hawisher) have situated Vygotsky and Bakhtin in traditional composition studies, I contrast these positions and explore their relationship with technology. Though Vygotsky and Bakhtin's influence in promoting student collaboration and interaction has been well documented, this paper reexamines the intersection of individual subject, culture, and language. Of crucial interest is how a Vygotskian perspective would define technology's relationship to the subject; does technology become an extension of subjects themselves--in other words, can it alter consciousness--or is technology "merely" an extension of memory, a tool to mediate the use of symbols? A Bakhtinian analysis, furthermore, focuses on how technology can aid writers in situating themselves within the ideologically-bound constraints of texts, contexts, and audiences. The latter part of this presentation addresses how Bakhtin and Vygotsky can be deployed in the computer-mediated writing classroom. I explore the following questions in my attempt to make their contributions meaningful: How do the ethnographic descriptions of networked classrooms reveal the Bakhtinian/Vygotskian positions? How can technology foster the social nature of writing? How does technology (especially hypertext) emphasize the intertextuality and dialogic quality of all texts? Finally, how can technology imbue the composition classroom with a Bakhtinian conception of audience? Diane
Masiello, New York University
With the advent of synchronous time
communication, listservs, email, and hypertext, freshman composition teachers
who have networked computers in their classrooms can approach teaching
writing in new ways. However, as Trent Batson points out in his article
"Rhetorical Paths and Cyberfields: ENFI, Hypertext and Bakhtin," teachers
who use these new approaches are making a "shift from the current world
[of linear, orderly printed academic writing] to the new world [of hypertext
and non-linearity, non authority, multivocality] while still working within
the expectations of the current world" (207). As with any shift,
when teachers move between the "current world" and "the new world," both
they and their students will feel some sort of tension.
I intend to explore these questions by visiting one or two networked freshman composition classrooms and using qualitative research methods of participant observation, interviews and recursive meaning making to record and analyze what I find there. In the end I hope to gain new insights that may help teachers working in computer networked writing environments understand both their own methods and practices and their feelings about their methods and practices as they evolve in the light of these newly advancing media. Jeff Rice,
University of Florida
The Computers and Writing Work Group, http://web.english.ufl.edu/cwwg/, is a working group at the University of Florida for faculty and graduate students in various specializations, studying under various directors, who are interested in the field of computers and writing. The group is open to all faculty and graduate students regardless of technological expertise. One does not have to be specializing in the field of computers and writing to participate. Anyone whose itnerests include working with technology is welcome. The group's purpose is to establish a place where we can collaborate on projects, offer technological help, provide resources for publication and further reading, share methods of research and pedagogy, and continue discussion on matters we may feel relevant and worth exploring. We want to take our interests beyond the borders of the university's Networked Writing Environment (NWE) and place our work within the larger framework of research, employment in the field, and teaching. While many of us have done interesting work in the classroom and on our own, a great deal of our work has been in isolation. We hope to bring together our interests and goals in order to form a greater collaborative atmosphere. This discussion will explain our efforts as graduate students to develop our own support center for work in computers and writing as well as our interest in providing a model for other graduate programs throughout the country. Katherine
J. Robinson, Texas Woman's University
Over the years, the word peripatetic (from the Greek meaning "walking about") has described any number of individuals from the Irish Travelers to the wandering artist or philosopher--each reflecting different aspects of the word (Guide to Philosophers par. 1). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries travel via walking was considered dangerous and best left to the poor. It isn't until the Romantic period that the paripatetic ideal gained a new life as well as redefinition. Recently, the 20th century incarnation of the peripatetic school can be found within the lexias and pathways of Internet and MOO environments. As such, Aristotle's idea of a "walking and talking" school based on "an 'improved' Platonism" (Grayeff 39), itself a modified version of the Socratic Method, blended with romanticism, has found new life within the realm of virtual space. This cyber-oriented reassessment of the classical school's structure has added its own postmodern spin to the discourse by moving the discovery process from dialectic to dialogue. Indeed, by extending the romantic decontextualization of the classical ideal the peripatetic walker is able to engage in a process-oriented dialogue that will help him or her discover a place within a set of narratives rather than a single universal. The virtuality of the Internet and MOO spaces provide opportunities for the wandering individual to seek out a diverse array of communities and ideas. While the basis of discourse and mode of movement have metamorphosed from dialectic to dialogue and the covered pathways leading from the Apollonian temple to the forest glen of the virtual landscape, Aristotle's peripatetic school maintains its place within the wandering search for probable truths. This presentation will discuss the relationship between two strands of rhetorical thought, classical and cybernetic, and the relevant nature of both in the composition classroom. Ida L.
Rodgers, Texas Tech University
I am seeking other's experience with and feedback on across-programs research design, research on peer critiquing, and research about training teachers to teach peer critiquing. My research to date will serve as pilot (or pre-pilot) studies to part of a planned large scale examination of the Texas Tech University composition program. Here, we offer instructors (mostly Graduate Part-Time Instructors) an electronic (Web) environment called TOPIC as a place for students to post their work and critique the work of their peers. This environment is used for sections taught in normal classrooms, computer labs, and on the Web (distance education courses). We are now brainstorming TOPIC evaluative projects. My questions involve exploring ways to research peer critiquing both as a course activity and as a subject to be taught. Too often, I fear, peer critiquing instruction is shortchanged in compostion classes. However, Mary McGroarty and Wel Zhu (1997) conducted an experiment that involved teacher and student training in peer critiquing. They report (Language Learning, v47, Mar. '97, p. 1-43), for the experimental group, improved peer feedback, higher portfolio grades, and improved attitudes as a result of the training. TOPIC provides a rich environment to study critiquing across an entire (and large) program and to experiment with methods of teacher and student peer critiquing training. Because of the potential for significant studies here at TTU, I appreciate the opportunity to both present my work to date and to receive feedback and suggestions for future research. For a Web presentation of the first part of my current research, please visit: http://english.ttu.edu/student/classwebs/IRodgers/courses/cover.html Emmanuel
Savopoulos, SUNY/Albany
This paper was born out of a graduate course in the History of Rhetoric (taught by Prof. Bob Yagelski) and an "incident" that occured on the English Graduate Student Listserv at Albany last year. On the aforementioned listserv, an email was posted onto the list whose subject was "microsoft & hidden racist text." Although the information contained therein was somewhat misleading, the response to it as well as the inflammatory inaccuracies it contained, shed a peculiar light to discussions of online community, exigency and ethos. With each post, participants either engaged with, tried to distance themselves from, or sidestepped previous postings, and in doing so, in responding to the list, positioned themselves not only against or with one another, but also in relationship to issues dealing with technology. Citing James E. Porter's notion of ethos (1992) and Laura J. Gurak's articulation of exigence (1997), I try to argue that an understanding of a community ethos is bound up in the embodied and temporal conditions of its exigence. The difference between the aforementioned studies and this one is, even though their bodies lie "outside" online discussion, the participants on ENGRAD-L have to face one another on-campus. The relationship then between the material affects of online discursive practices are made tangible in ways that newsgroup discussion and electronic bulletin boards do not. While often the participants of newsgroups and bulletin boards are anonymous in the sense their participants have no embodied knowledge of each other, the members of the English graudate student population do, and such knowledge complicates the intersections between subjectivity, discursive practice and community. Jill Walker,
University of Bergen, Norway
This project is a comparative study of two forms of digital discourse that I will argue share many important features: hypertexts and Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs). The analyses of selected texts will form the centre of the dissertation. A central goal in the project is to read slowly and openly, exploring how the analysis of digital texts relates to conventional literary analysis and developing detailed, critical analyses of the chosen texts. In this, I wish to take part in the ongoing development of a critical vocabulary for discussing digital discourses. I will primarily discuss fictional or aesthetical texts, but will also include examples from non-fiction when relevant. The focus of my analyses will be the relationship between goal- or quest-oriented organisation and a different, more meandering structure that resists overviews and order. I see the second kind of texts, those that are not primarily goal-oriented, as relying on mystery, a hidden structure to be discovered and explored. I will study how mystery in this sense becomes both a thematic device and a formal quality in many digital texts. This approach is founded in my MA work, where I examined the structures used in non-fiction hypertexts. The texts I intend to analyse are M.D. Coverley's Fibonacci's Daughter, Stuart Moulthrop's The Reagan Libraries and sections of LambdaMOO and AtheMOO. I will also discuss brief examples from other hypertexts, MUDs and MOOs as well as games such as Riven and Quake. In addition to recent cybertheory I will draw upon narratological and rhetorical theory as well as critical theorists such as J. Hillis Miller, Barthes and Deleuze and Guattari. As I am at an early stage in the project, I expect to expand and refine my theoretical framework considerably in the next few months. Carl Whithaus,
CUNY
In the various forms that computer-mediated writing instruction has taken from 1960 to the present, the methods of reading, responding, and evaluating student works in computer-mediated writing instruction as in face-to-face wriitng classrooms have continued to reinforce the hierarchies of power and control found in most American classrooms. Despite some important counter-hegemonic developments in pedagogy and software, most computer-mediated writing instruction has continued to emphasize the process of creating sequentially organized, academically sound, and grammatically correct essays. In other words, computer-mediated writing instruction has, like composition instruction in general, worked to improve the form of student papers, and thereby improve students' general writing skills.
 Back
to Top
|