Tharon Howard, Clemson University
In his opening statement on key principles for WAC/CAC program development , Art Young charges WAC/CAC program developers to "broaden further the notion of genre in classrooms across the curriculum." He argues that we need to expand our approaches to communication beyond our traditional rhetorical emphasis on argumentative writing and to open up to alternative genres and media forms. I would like to use Art's challenge here as my jumping off point for a discussion of effective uses of technology in WAC/CAC programs.
Although I'm less sanguine about the role of expressivist forms of communication than Art, I do agree that we need to expand our notions of acceptable genres if we are going to remain relevant to the different constituencies our programs are supposed to serve. We have to reach out and demonstrate our value to the communities we serve – the student community, the faculty community, the local community, the business community, etc. – and to do so we must use modes, genres, and media that are recognized, credible, and valuable in those communities. Effective uses of technology are those which help us to achieve this goal. More specifically, the kinds of technologies I've tried to exploit in my own teaching are those that promote scenario-based, real-world projects or service learning opportunities because it seems to me that these are immediately recognized as relevant by members of the communities we serve.
In trying to achieve this goal, I don't want to argue that any one technology is intrinsically better or more "ideal" than any other. We've used LISTSERV lists, MOOs and MUDs, gopher servers, and of course Web pages; recently, I even had to resort to archaic command line interfaces where we used anonymous ftp servers to allow students to share files and USENET discussion groups to allow them to conduct conversations. All of these tools served their purposes. What's more, in developing outreach projects with the K-12 community, I've learned the hard way that you just can't depend on familiar GUI technologies being available. You have to be able to adapt to the resources at hand. Instead of searching for the "ideal" technology, what matters is that the technologies be used in a way that reinforces the concept that writing is first and foremost an act of communication that has consequences for both the writer and the intended audience.
For example, one K-12 outreach project with which I've been involved is called "the Village Green" and it brings writing for the community projects into K-12 classrooms throughout the entire Greenville County School District's curriculum. In middle school science courses, students might write to the local TV weather announcer in order to learn more about using the scientific method to forecast. In other courses, students partner with the local hospital system in order to design fliers and brochures that help raise consciousness in their local communities about nutrition or other health issues. Basically, the Village Green Web server gives teachers the opportunity to bring business, industry, and government experts from the local community into their classrooms in ways that make both the content matter and the communication relevant to students. In other words, students aren't merely writing to parrot back facts-a problem for all CAC/WAC programs. Rather, by using technology to bring the community into the classroom and by using the genres of the community, the students are writing to change their communities.
Of course, the problem with the Village Green project is that it had a $5 million federal grant providing the personnel, hardware, network feeds, software, and other resources needed to make all those community connections possible. For those who have little more than "elbow grease" and the computing services of their local institutions as their principal resources, a more modest approach is needed. Unfortunately, examples of these are often difficult to find since they are often situated behind firewalls so that only students, faculty, and authorized individuals may access them. At Clemson, for example, we have developed a wonderful set of networking tools we call the "Collaborative Learning Environment" or "CLE" that automatically provides every faculty member in every course at the university with a class listserv list, a class Web site, threaded Web-discussion groups, network space for sharing files, tools for creating and maintaining networked teams of students, etc. The CLE is a tremendous resource for CAC/WAC program directors because it allows any faculty member to have his or her students collaborate with each other or with faculty and students in any number of other courses at the University. The technology has eliminated many of the logistical barriers that so often stymie CAC programs before they can get started, and it has spawned a variety of interdisciplinary communication projects since it was used by over 1000 courses at the university in its first semester of operation alone. Sadly, the projects themselves can't be viewed without being authenticated by the CLE server, so I can't show examples of them here, but you can learn more about the CLE suite of networking tools and see screen captures of the interfaces at http://cle.clemson.edu.
However, one of the most creative examples I've seen that is accessible to the public is Peg Syverson's "Worlds Fair" project at the University of Texas. The Worlds Fair Web site is a scenario-based, interactive project where students are required to use writing, audio, and visual communication skills to solve a series of problems developed in the scenario. The basic premise of the scenario is that the citizens of the earth have been contacted by aliens and invited to participate in an interplanetary, worlds' fair to be held on the earth's moon. In working through the story line of the scenario, students are required to use their communication skills to resolve a number of different writing problems. For example, early on in the narrative, they are asked to write memos to government leaders and to consider both the advantages and dangers of participating in the Worlds Fair. However, the main project that students produce is a Web site that will be used as a "gallery" in the Earth's Worlds Fair exhibit.
Even though I doubt that Peg intended for her Web site to be used as a CAC project, what I think makes her site so interesting has less to do with the technology she uses than it does with the fact that the scenario can be used for projects in a variety of disciplines. Math instructors, historians, or political scientists could all use her Web site to have their students create "exhibits" about the content in their respective courses. But more importantly, the scenario requires that students communicate in ways that have consequences for both the authors and their audience-even though that audience is, in this case, alien races of the future. It's this last feature of the Worlds Fair Web site that makes Peg's use of technology a success. Conversely, the uses of technology that fail or that are (to use Mike's term) "potentially problematic" are those which try to turn technology into a substitute for an authentic audience or for the teacher.
One example of this "problematic" use of technology occurred in our Biology program. In general, Clemson's Biology faculty are strong supporters of the CAC program, and they are genuinely concerned about the communication skills of their students. They are also serious about using instructional technologies to improve the teaching of Biology and were one of the first departments at the university to invest in multimedia authoring tools, training, and support for their faculty. Consequently, given these two programmatic goals, it wasn't surprising that a Biology faculty member decided to try to design a piece of courseware that would help students write more effective lab reports for the experiments they conducted in their Biology courses. Though well intentioned, the unfortunate result reduced students' composing processes to a cookie-cutter approach. Students were literally to "write" reports by filling in slots when prompted by the interface. Technology was used to strip all the rhetorical decision-making processes from the students' control in order to ensure uniformity of organization and thorough coverage of material in the reports (and, oh by the way, it made the reports easier to grade).
The obvious problem with this use of technology to teach "writing" is that it doesn't. Students don't learn about the purposes for writing lab reports; they learn nothing about who reads lab reports and why. They never think about how lab reports might be used or the consequences that the reports can have for both the author and the audience. Students fail to learn "portable" skills, i.e., skills that they can take from the educational experience and apply in other, future situations. On the other hand, using technologies to develop service learning projects (as in the Village Green) or scenario-based projects (as in the Worlds Fair) provide students with rich opportunities to develop skills in ways that allow students to easily transfer those skills to the modes and genres valued by their communities.
– Tharon Howard
tharon@hubcap.clemson.edu