On Origins, Goals & Status: Launching Academic.Writing

Mike Palmquist, Editor
Home Page: http://lamar.colostate.edu/~mp
Email: Mike.Palmquist@ColoState.edu

Welcome to Academic.Writing. The mission of Academic.Writing is to support interdisciplinary discussions of communication across the curriculum and to provide resources for scholars in the area.

As you may have seen already, Academic.Writing is both like and unlike other journals. You'll find refereed articles, reviews, and columns, much as you'll find elsewhere, but you'll also find information (and links to information elsewhere) that support all aspects of communication across the curriculum. Perhaps most important, materials will appear on this site as soon as they've been reviewed and prepared for the Web. As a result, Academic.Writing will not use the standard volume/issue format. Instead, we'll offer a single volume each year, beginning in January, and publish materials on a rolling basis.

For this reason, subscriptions are extremely important to us. We will notify our subscribers periodically about new materials that have been published in the journal. Subscriptions are free, and our database allows you to easily update information and to unsubscribe (in the unlikely event you'd ever want to do that).

Origins

Academic.Writing is, in some ways, a journal in spite of itself. It can trace its roots to Colorado State University's Writers' Center Web site, a project that began in 1992 as CSU's Online Writing Center and which went on the Web in 1996. The Online Writing Center was, from its start, the centerpiece of the University's writing-across-the-curriculum program and, as such, we were extremely interested in developing materials to support WAC faculty at our University and elsewhere.

Our desire to support faculty led to the development of the WAC Clearinghouse in 1997. Originally a stand-alone site, the WAC Clearinghouse has now been incorporated into Academic.Writing. You can access it by clicking on Resources on any of the menus.

Unfortunately, although faculty from several institutions were involved in planning the WAC Clearinghouse, they were unable to devote the time and effort needed to sustain it. Frustrated, I asked one of them why they thought there was dwindling interest in the effort. His response: "Frankly, I can't find anywhere on my annual activities report to include 'working on a Web site.'" I responded by asking whether it would help to turn the WAC Clearinghouse into a journal and he responded with an enthusiastic "yes."

Turning the WAC Clearinghouse into Academic.Writing has been, as my programmer friends like to say, a non-trivial task. But it's been well worth the effort. The founding members of the editorial board met at the 1998 and 1999 Computers and Writing Conferences and corresponded frequently via email. In 1999, we assembled our editorial board and our editorial staff began the process of soliciting submissions. The result is, as these types of projects so often are, different than we'd originally expected. But it hasn't worked out all that badly considering none of us really wanted to start a journal in the first place.

In this Volume

I'd like to call your attention to materials that are currently and soon will be on the site. The inaugural Academic.Writing Forum takes advantage of the Web by presenting an interlinked discussion of the future of writing across the curriculum by five leading members of the WAC community: Anne Herrington, Donna LeCourt, Susan McLeod, David Russell, and Art Young. These forums will appear at least twice a year and, if the first one is an indication of the kind of quality we can expect, it will be a valuable addition to scholarship in the field.

Our featured articles include work on program design, writing in the sciences, the relationships between WAC and ESL, and teaching in computer-supported writing classrooms. Mary Hocks and her colleagues discuss the work they've done to develop the interdisciplinary professional writing program at Georgia State University. Ezra Shahn and Robert Costello report a study of student writing in a writing about science course at Hunter College, City University of New York. And Paul Kei Matsuda and Jeffrey Jablonski, both of Purdue University, critically examine the relationships between WAC and ESL and consider the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration between WAC and ESL specialists. John Barber's hypertext essay, Promoting Cybernetic Ecology in Writing Classrooms, explores key issues for the teaching of writing with computers and for all teaching that incorporates writing and computers. One reviewer of his article observed, "Aswirl in colors like the spinning blossoms of Brautigan's poem, the opening images and Barber's reflections remind us of our humanistic, not mechanistic, goals in using computers for teaching."

CAC Connections, edited by Donna Reiss, introduces the new and expanded WAC Clearinghouse, as well as an innovative hypertext written and designed by John Barber and Dene Grigar. Barber and Grigar, both at Texas Woman's University, report on the Town Hall Meetings at the 1999 Computers and Writing Conference. In addition, CAC Connections provides access to the WAC Clearinghouse's links to CAC and WAC resources (greatly expanded by incorporating the links formerly found on Donna Reiss's extensive Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum site) as well as information about upcoming and past conferences. CAC Connections will also be home to our soon to be published database of CAC consultants, a resource we think will be of value to many CAC scholars.

Our Reviews and Interchanges section offers reviews of two books and one conference – and promises to become the home of much more before the year is out. Our reviews editor, Will Hochman, is designing a Reviews section will be unlike any available on or off the Web. He asks your support in reviewing not just books, but conferences, Web sites, and important articles, as well as your participation in Interchanges with guests from a wide range of academic and non-academic contexts.

The Teaching Exchange, edited by Nick Carbone, offers several pieces addressing teaching issues. We anticipate adding several new pieces to this section before the year is out. You'll also find the beginning of what promises to be a useful selection of papers given at recent conferences in our Conference Papers section and a section that may prove to be among our most valuable in the long run: the Research section, edited by Dickie Selfe. In the Research section, you'll find Dickie's welcome and call for research, as well as the first in a series of Program Research Reports.

LLAD Online

Academic.Writing is host to the new Language and Learning Across the Curriculum Web site, which provides access to subscription and submission information for LLAD as well as back issues of the journal. In the future, we're planning collaborative special issues with LLAD, a journal that shares our interest in communication across the curriculum.

Coming Soon: Clusters

One of the goals of Academic.Writing is to create clusters of related articles on a range of issues. The first of these, a New Directions cluster edited by Martin Rosenberg, will address innovative educational partnerships and programs that incorporate key CAC practices. Make sure to register as a subscriber so you can get immediate notification when the cluster is published. Other clusters in the planning stages include CAC in the secondary schools and the relationships between CAC and the workplace.

Browser Wars

Call for Submissions

I'd be shirking my responsibilities as an editor if I failed to encourage you to send us your work. If you're interested in publishing your work with Academic.Writing – and I certainly hope you are – please view our Contribution Guidelines and Submissions Procedures for information about sending us your work.

And Finally, My Thanks Go Out To ...

First, to Linn Bekins, for helping conceptualize the WAC Clearinghouse, and to Christine Hult, who provided some needed encouragement early in the process. My thanks go out as well to the other founding members of our editorial board – Luann Barnes, Nick Carbone, Bill Condon, Gail Hawisher, Will Hochman, Kate Kiefer, Donna LeCourt, Donna Reiss, Martin Rosenberg, Cindy Selfe, and Dickie Selfe – for their patience and support in what has been a long trek toward publication. Thanks also to the members of our editorial staff and, in particular, to Managing Editor Donna LeCourt for helping keep Academic.Writing on the right track.

Publication Information: Palmquist, Mike. (2000). On Origins, Goals & Status: Launching Academic.Writing. Academic.Writing. http://wac.colostate.edu/aw/observations/observations1.htm
Publication Date: March 26, 2000