Many educators have invested much of their lives and acumen to create computerized writing spaces; most know that we aren't focused on the technology so much as on understanding pedagogy. When technology and pedagogy mesh, it creates what I call a convergence of literacies. For some of my more recent thinking on why traditional and technological literacies must be part of our writing classes, see a short lecture I delivered at a SCSU forum on undergraduate learning.

Throughout most of my teaching life, I've been involved in creating classrooms that have used cyberspace to enhance teaching and learning. In l987, I worked with John McDaid, the author of an early computer-based hyperfiction called "Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse", to develop NYU's first computerized writing classes. We knew we were teaching against the grain then, and our teaching and work was not only successful, it was a hoot. Computers then were new--magic boxes indeed! To simplify their mysteries, I used to show people how little there really was inside a computer but that made computers seem even more magical.

In l991, I was an ABD newly hired to teach composition and creative writing at the University of Southern Colorado (now called Colorado State University at Pueblo ). There, I began my friendship with Mike Palmquist, Dawn Rodriguez, and Kate Kiefer at Colorado State University (at Fort Collins , Colorado ). At one point, I made frantic calls to my new colleagues asking how my institution could be so unwired. I was shocked because I knew Colorado State had wired several computerized writing classes in the mid-1980s. (See Computers in English and the Language Arts and Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies for some of the early research produced by Colorado State. See http://writing.colostate.edu/ for more current, online progress of a writing centered, online supported writing program.) After plenty of struggling for money, platform, space, and teachers willing to innovate their pedagogies, I developed the maclab and online writing center at the University of Southern Colorado in l993.

I used a paradoxical approach to getting the college learning community in Pueblo to adopt the use of computers in writing classes. For some administrators, the magic box approach seemed to make the most sense. For other administrators who had a sense of technology’s promise, I used careful planning and promises of personal involvement beyond normal (or sane) thinking.

Because the English Department at CSU at Fort Collins was using computers, and thanks to Cindy Selfe's 1989 Creating a Computer-supported Writing Facility: A Blueprint for Action, I was able to convince my new faculty colleagues that we were really following paths that could yield better teaching and learning. I told them that these paths would be fun to try in any case. In retrospect, I wonder now whether Cindy had her book title backwards because I knew then that the "Blueprint for Action" wasn't about setting up computers as much as it was about getting a tired, aging faculty excited to teach composition. Cindy has taught us all too much about how to be critical about literacy for us to fall into the trap of magic box syndrome.

But here I am today, doing just that, but I think I'm almost trapped in heaven.

Node Six of the Introduction