Michael Day, Northern Illinois University
Let me start by thanking Mike Palmquist for inviting me to be part of a great group of expert friends and colleagues—names that we regularly see on the spines of books and at the tops of articles in the computers and writing field. Tharon, Christine, Charles, and Donna: nice to be in such good company!
Of course, I'm fascinated by the questions Mike asks us to address, having tried in my own work to find and develop the best practices in teaching writing using computer technology. And I've also witnessed (yes, even in my own work) some failures from which we can learn what NOT to do with computers in the composition class.
So let me briefly sketch out first what I think are some of the most promising ways for WAC and CAC programs to use computer technology to support their outreach and training efforts.
One of the greatest new potentials for using the Internet in WAC/CAC stems from the Internet's ability to connect students and teachers with businesses and nonprofit groups all over the world. Formerly, WAC programs interested in providing real-world experiences for students had to look to local businesses and agencies for student placements. Now teachers and coordinators can identify possible placements on the Web and make contact through e-mail, and interns can work on projects using Web pages, e-mail, file attachments, and real-time chat programs to span any distance. Thus, instead of being limited to the opportunities available within a geographic area, WAC outreach and internship programs have the ability to hook up with organizations worldwide. This increased opportunity expands the range of options for students who wish to specialize in specific areas because they can develop internship relationships with partners anywhere in the world.
Examples of some service learning programs can be found at the National Service Learning Clearinghouse at http://www.nicsl.coled.umn.edu/. For examples and discussion of internships on the Internet, see "Staying Connected: A Case Study of Distance Learning for Student Interns" by Diane Witmer. (http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/vol4/issue2/witmer.html)
As Donna Reiss (1996) and others have noted, teachers in almost all fields have found that asynchronous and synchronous discussion on the computer network enriches the students' understanding of the material and of each other. In bouncing ideas back and forth, incrementally contributing to a growing and morphing conversation, they become more confident with concepts and vocabulary. In turn, they also become more accustomed to validating and expanding upon each others' ideas, learning the conventions of turn-taking, restatement, concession, and polite disagreement.
But for WAC and CAC programs, one of the greatest benefits stems from the fact that ALL of the discussion occurs in writing. Students and teachers do not have to struggle to record important observations and comments since all the written conversation can be logged and saved for further consultation and possible revision. Classes can mine logs of conversations for interesting ideas for papers and projects and develop them individually or in groups. Further, as teachers of argumentative writing know, students can improve the credibility of their writing by taking into account the possible contending points of view. Reviewing the transcript of a synchronous or asynchronous discussion can give students a good idea of the range of viewpoints on a topic—at least the range within the class, at any rate. Thus the class creates a polylogue of voices contributing to a scholarly conversation on the subject matter, a polylogue that allows them to collaboratively brainstorm ideas and even possible locutions for more polished written work.
With the connection possibilities of the Internet, collaborative brainstorming and written discussions need not be limited to just one class. Classes can work together across great distances, and sometimes classes from vastly different areas or cultures can exchange information relevant to class projects. For research projects, as I have described elsewhere (Day 1998), classes or individual students can also tap into what Howard Rheingold (1994) calls the "Living Database" of expert individuals and groups accessible through e-mail.
We all know that there are times in our research that no book and no database seems to have the answers we need, so many of us ask the members of our professional communities for help by posting questions to an Internet discussion group in our field. For example, most of the contributors to this Academic.Writing forum belong to an Internet discussion group which has evolved from PARTI to MBU-L (Megabyte University)to ACW-L (Alliance for Computers and Writing) to what is now tentatively known as TechRhet. We consider it a lifeline when we need advice and information, but with proper preparation students too can tap the living database for information on topics related to the discipline. Or, if they are not ready to participate in the living database by asking questions, they can simply monitor or "lurk" on discipline-specific discussions in order to learn more of the concepts and vocabulary of a particular field. In this way, WAC and CAC students can enter the worldwide conversation on a particular subject and find out how professionals communicate on the Internet.
Most WAC professionals will agree that one of the most compelling and pragmatic reasons for using computers and the Internet in WAC and CAC programs is the fact that students are getting training with tools, software, and media that they will most probably use in future careers. Since technologies of writing have evolved from pencils to typewriters to computers, the argument goes, students should be using the latest technologies for writing and communicating when they write in an academic setting. For some, this reason for using computers sounds too much like a vocational-technical approach, based on "training" and "skills," but for others, it does provide an added benefit when we consider all the other reasons for using computer and Internet technologies.
In their Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum, Donna Reiss, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young showcase programs, partnerships, and classrooms that provide excellent examples and rationale for using Internet technologies in the WAC and CAC programs. Locally, through the hard work of Writing Across the Curriculum director Brad Peters, Northern Illinois University is planning a new WAC writing center which "centers" on a computer classroom/lab. At every level, WAC and CAC professionals recognize the importance of having students use the most current technologies of writing in creating documents and communications ranging from memos to reports to email messages to Web pages.
Computers can be a double-edged sword, in that they provide ideal pathways and even incentive to writing for some students, but we know that they can also be an obstacle to others. However, if we find out as much as possible about our students, we can often find technologies that will help them brainstorm, research, and write. If some students have problems with typing, or hesitance to commit words to the screen, or to say things that others will read, we may need to find these out by questionnaire or interview at the outset of a class semester, then make adjustments for the students. But the bottom line is that the wider the range of technologies and software programs, the more options we can provide to students, and the more likely they will be to make progress in writing.
I like to think of a writing class as a potential three-ring circus. That is, my students can be working individually or in groups on different projects, or on different stages of a project. They can be working in different media (which also solves the problem of having too few computers in the room): while one group might be MOOing, another could be talking face to face, while another is clustered around one computer, doing a collaborative draft. Another group might be either creating a Web page, or doing research on the Web. The lack of a single focus can cause problems for some instructors, but I believe that the variety of learning styles, aptitudes, and the range of projects students might be working on, justifies the multipurposed, three-ring circus approach. The presence of computers and the Web's connection to the outside world enhance the potential of the WAC classroom to reach an increasingly diverse student population.
For more information on learning styles and computers, see Jonathon Ross' "The Effects of Cognitive Learning Styles on Human-Computer Interaction" (http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~jross/thesis/toc.html). For research on computers helping students with diverse learning styles achieve more, see Geisert and Dunn's "Learning Styles and Computers." See also Susan Santo's interesting pages on distance learning, personality, and learning styles at http://www.people.virginia.edu/~sas2n/Distance/indiv.html.
In Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich looks toward a society in which education could be torn from the clutches of centralized institutions that tend to kill natural curiosity and play in inquiry, and bring schooling into homes and other places where expertise flourishes. Apprenticeships are just one model; other forms of learning could occur in spontaneously formed groups of people excited about an issue or subject, which meet outside of institutional structures. In chapter six, Illich asks that we reconsider education and make use of "learning webs," that is "new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching" (77).
Along with Eales and Byrd (1997), I see great potential for WAC/CAC programs to connect experts with learners using the Internet as a vehicle for Illich's learning web. When I hear about students e-mailing elders for wisdom and information, and see bustling online learning communities arise spontaneously in MOOs and on Listserv discussion lists, I know that we may have at our fingertips the possibility of revolutionizing education through connection and collaboration on the Internet.
It made my day when collaboration expert Kenneth Bruffee wrote in to the online discussion group for Computers and Writing 2000 about his dream for a distributed collaborative educational system, and mentioned that any software solution would need to foster that. Among other observations, Bruffee said that "software must prompt students to talk not only with people who say what they expect them to say, but with strangers--professors, peers, and those represented in reading assignments--who challenge their preconceptions." He sees the power of the Internet to connect all kinds of people in microschooling arrangements, the kind of power I mentioned above (Tapping the Living Database).
Bruffee claims that the software
would have a chance of transforming distance learning into something like the experience of substantively avocational college education. It's not inconceivable, for example, that in neighborhoods and small towns local librarians could turn the local library into the neighborhood locus of the "conversation of mankind.
Although Bruffee does not think that we are anywhere near making this scenario a reality, I think that WAC/CAC programs using the Internet to connect experts and learners are coming close to this model. It is also conceivable that educational communities such as Interversity, not based in traditional institutions, will flourish on the Internet. Perhaps WAC/CAC programs will spawn some of these independent or semi-independent communities. Or those programs within traditional institutions could have students "intern" in avocational learning networks that tap into the "conversation of mankind." Ultimately, these new online educational communities increase the options for writing and communicating across the curriculum, across communities, and across cultures.
Not only does the Internet offer a great way for WAC/CAC students to collaborate and do research, it also provides a vehicle for instant publication of student writing. Students and teachers eager to share and showcase their individual and collaborative projects can put them online as Web pages, and in the course of writing for the class can also create valuable resources for others on the Web. As in service and internship writing, writing on the Web gives students a purpose and an audience. This rhetorical context is widely recognized to help students pay more attention to professional tone and even correctness issues such as grammar and mechanics. They come to recognize that the credibility and usability of the Web page depend on its correctness, organization, and appearance.
Publication on the Web allows WAC/CAC classes to bypass the cumbersome process of print publication, which not only takes a long time, but also often means losing ownership rights over the material to a publisher. Rather than ownership and financial gain, many who publish on the Web are more interested in following the hacker's credo "Information wants to be free" and insuring that webbed documents be readily available for copying, free of ownership and charges per copy. The "copyleft" movement began among software programmers belonging to the Free Software Foundation that brought us GNU Emacs GNOME, and Linux. In effect, copyleft takes the notion of "fair use" one step further and provides a statement on the work prohibiting anyone from restricting the right to copy it. Michael Stutz claims that copyleft is crucial to the survival of community and free information sharing in the digital age. WAC/CAC teachers and students may not want to allow others to copy their work, but at least publishing on the Web gives them a choice.
For example, my students created a webbed guide to Teaching Composition in a Networked Classroom for new composition teachers as part of the McGraw Hill Higher Education-sponsored Teaching Composition Web site and listserv discussion (http://www.engl.niu.edu/tcomp/). See also "Weaving Guilford's Web," in which Michael Strickland and Robert Whitnell describe how they involved their students at Guilford College in developing the college Web site.
Even though it might be important to showcase our students' work on the Web, could we be contributing to the overall glut of somewhat useless pages in cyberspace? Just because we CAN make our students' writing, thoughts, and work available to other students and even the world through class listserv groups, MOO and Web pages, should we? What is the distinction between public and private discourse in our classes? How do student responses vary in public and private settings? Should class work and Web pages be open to the entire world?
When we plunge students into written conversations with their classmates, through listserves, and let the class and even the world see their work on the Web, we are making assumptions about the need for public discourse in WAC/CAC classes. Rheingold (1994: 290) calls our attention to the possibility that the Internet is a kind of electronic panopticon through which we may be watched and controlled. We need to be vigilant about setting limits to what we put on the Web, and we much not be surprised when the information we put on the Web is used in ways we cannot control.
Not all writing is public, nor should it be, and some students may need to do some writing that is only for the teacher, or for another student or group of students. Further, some students may not want their names and e-mail addresses on publicly accessible Web pages and class discussion list archives, where sophisticated address-harvesting software can find them and add them to annoying mailing lists for cyberspace junk mail. We should seriously consider password-protecting student work on the Web, but at the very least we need to explain to students that putting anything on the Web exposes them to sophisticated search engines and possibly even unwanted attention.
Equally problematic is our increasing dependence upon grammar checkers which come built in and set on default in most word processors such as Microsoft Word. As most of us know, these programs have limited value at best, because the software can understand neither the context of natural language nor the varieties of individual style. Are we in danger of Microsoftening or Wordperfecting the language through repeated use of these tools, until the little green squiggles homogenize style into a rather lifeless gray drone? Teachers of WAC/CAC need to remind students that no software substitutes for a knowledge of the rules, and that dutifully editing until the squiggles go away may void the prose of artistry and originality. (Day in press, 258)
As much as I have glorified the Internet in the previous paragraphs, and placed much hope in the potential for communication, interaction, microschooling, and distributed learning on computer networks, I still have gnawing doubts about the idea of community on the Internet being a cruel joke played on us by government and big business to keep us all busy playing at democracy while the movers and shakers tighten their grip on our minds and wallets. Indeed, naysayers such as Cliff Stoll and Mark Slouka aren't the only ones voicing such concerns; even Howard Rheingold (in Chapter Ten of The Virtual Community) brought out the possibility that the Internet may be a panopticon for surveillance or a simulacrum of reality designed to keep us busy. But my favorite quote comes from Richard John Neuhaus:
Partisans of the digital revolution protest that the Internet ... is interactive, not passive. But to the extent it is geared to quantity and speed of communication, it is interactive vacuity, a reciprocal fix to keep thought at bay, producing a global village of village idiots.
Although I find the passage more amusing than truthful, I do admit that Neuhaus' words are useful in that he challenges us not to be vacuous, not to be idiots, to focus on quality and depth of interaction and engagement, not quantity and speed. He reminds WAC/CAC teachers to challenge students by discussing the problems of technology in addition to the benefits. With students, even as we use computers and the Internet, we need to scrutinize the effects of these technologies on our lives, our work, and on our relationships.
As our culture dives headlong into computer mediated communication, lured on by promises of faster, cheaper, and better access to the Internet, we have witnessed many problems -- what Charles Moran calls the growing pains of an "amphibious condition" (Moran 14) in our move into cyberspace. We've crawled out of the primordial slime of print text, to a degree, and have grown proto-appendages to deal with cyberspace communication, but we're still caught up in many of the conventions or print culture. And despite our new appendages, our ways of finding our way online, we are encountering the drawbacks of the rather voiceless, disembodied texts we exchange in cyberspace. They just aren't the same as face-to-face or telephone conversations, nor do they convey the personal touch offered by the handwriting in a conventional letter.
For many of us, the lack of as many channels in online writing feels like a bottleneck, as if we simply can't communicate as much without our hands, gestures, and faces. People misunderstand each other or become insulted frequently in online exchanges, but these miscommunications may help us learn to more effectively put thought into a writing-only medium. That is, if the bottleneck forces consideration of appropriate rhetorical strategies in writing, maybe it's more a blessing to writing teachers than a problem. In discussing distance learning, Rich Rice finds the approach similar to how disabled people compensate for the lost ability:
People who lose some tool or ability immediately begin to work to compensate for the loss. For instance, if someone becomes blind he relies on his sense of hearing more. In current online course models one of the tools or abilities that is lost are nonverbal communication cues. The subtle nod here, the impatient sigh there. These cues are simply negotiated between onliners in different ways: pausing in chats, use of specific word order or choice, special *emphasis*, etc. The person who is blind often grows as a listener--the person in environments without the ability to use nonverbal cues often grows as a reader.
And, I would add, as a writer. Thus the problem of the narrowed channels of communication may be a blessing in disguise for WAC/CAC teachers.
I've written far too much in response to Mike's questions, so I will end here. But in closing, let me suggest that WAC/CAC programs not focus too closely on computer and Internet activities alone. For the sake of a diverse student population, I hope that teachers will make use of every resource available (especially libraries!) and balance Internet and computer activities with face-to-face and paper-based activities.
Bruffee, Kenneth. (2000). RE: [online2k] social and intellectual practices E-mail to Computers and Writing 2000 online discussion list (online2k@nwe.ufl.edu). http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/writing/mail-archives/online2k/msg00116.html (July 8, 2000).
Day, Michael. (1998). Writing in the matrix: Students tapping the living database on the computer network. In Jeffrey Galin and Joan Latchaw, (eds.), The Dialogic Classroom: Teachers Integrating Computer Technology,Pedagogy, and Research, pp. 151-173. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE Press.
_________. (2000). A meshing of minds: The future of online research for print and electronic publication? In John F. Barber and Dene Grigar (eds.), New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing about and in Electronic Environments, pp. 245-270. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
_________, Hoffman, Eric, Larsen, Meredith, Hall, Aimee, and Matt Duncan. (2000). Teaching composition in a networked classroom. http://www.engl.niu.edu/tcomp/ (July 8, 2000)
Eales, R. T. Jim, and Laura Byrd (1997). Virtually deschooling society: Authentic collaborative learning via the Internet. Proceedings of WebNet 97 - World Conference of the WWW, Internet & Intranet - Toronto, Canada; November 1-5, 1997 [CD-Rom edition], Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Charlottesville, VA. http://www.webcom.com/journal/eales.html
Geisert, G. and Dunn, R. (1990). Learning Styles and Computers. ERIC Document number EA021730. New York: ERIC Clearinghouse.
Illich, Ivan. (1971). Deschooling Society. New York: Harper and Row. (online at http://www.la.psu.edu/philo/illich/deschool/intro.html)
Moran, Charles. (1992). Computers and the writing classroom: A look to the future. In Gail Hawisher and Paul LeBlanc (eds.), Re-Imagining Computers and Composition: Teaching and Research in the Virtual Age, pp. 7-23. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann/Boynton Cook.
National Service Learning Clearinghouse. http://www.nicsl.coled.umn.edu/ (July 8, 2000)
Neuhaus, Richard John. (1998). The Internet produces a global village of village idiots. In Kathryn Schellenberg (ed.), Computers in Society, pp. 14-15. Guilford, CT: Dushkin/McGraw Hill.
Reiss, Donna. (1995). A comment on "The Future of WAC." College English 58(6), 722-23.
________, Selfe, Dickie, and Young, Art, eds. (1998). Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE Press.
Rice, Rich. (2000). [Teaching_Composition] on what the student is experiencing. Email to Teaching_Composition discussion group. teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com (July 10, 2000)
Ross, Jonathon.The Effects of Cognitive Learning Styles on Human-Computer Interaction. Master's Thesis. University of Calgary. http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~jross/thesis/toc.html (July 8, 2000)
Rheingold, Howard. (1994). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Addison Wesley.
Santo, Susan. Learning Styles & Personality. http://www.people.virginia.edu/~sas2n/Distance/indiv.html (July 8, 2000)
Slouka, Mark. (1995). War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality. New York: Basic Books.
Stoll, Clifford. (1995). Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. New York: Doubleday.
Strickland, Michael, and Whitnell, Robert. (1998). Weaving Guilford's Web. In Donna Reiss, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young (eds.), Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE Press.
Stutz, Michael. (2000). Applying copyleft to non-software information. http://gnu.april.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html (July 8, 2000)
Witmer, Diane. (1998). Staying connected: A case study of distance Learning for student interns. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (4)2. http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/vol4/issue2/witmer.html (July 8, 2000)
– Michael Day
mday@niu.edu