Opening Statement

Donna Reiss, Tidewater Community College

What are ideal ways for WAC/CAC programs to use technology?

Are we ready to relinquish the word "writing" in "writing across the curriculum" along with the well-known acronymn WAC? Some colleges already have moved in that direction by calling their programs "communication across the curriculum" with its less-than-lyrical abbreviation CAC. The change to CAC usually acknowledges several kinds of verbal communication, for example, oral communication, and inclusion of "speaking, listening, reading, and reflecting" along with "writing" as essential for making and demonstrating knowledge. Sometimes visual and kinesthetic communication are included as well. Forces outside WAC, English departments, and writing programs challenge us now to think more broadly about what we mean by "writing" and "communication" in relation to learning and to curricula, primary among them the Internet and "electronic communication across the curriculum" (ECAC), a term coined in 1995 by Reiss, Selfe, and Young to highlight the convergence of information technology with the active learning principles of WAC/CAC. As it becomes easier to incorporate and manipulate sound, still images, and moving images into documents and to deliver these documents to others electronically, students can combine words with media, composing rather than writing, communicating with words but not with words alone – and sometimes without words.

Encouragement to reconsider what we mean by the word "writing" has been coming internally from more than one WAC leader. Barbara Walvoord's "The Future of WAC" noted in 1996 that, with information technology, "lines blur between writing and other forms of communication and between classrooms and other learning spaces" (72). Chris Thaiss has said repeatedly in recent years that "the act of writing means choosing among a huge array of images and forms, only some of which are 'words'" (1997). His keynote address at the Third National WAC Conference in 1997 described "interactive language-rich technology techniques" as the "single biggest influence on ways we define writing and thinking about the curriculum and across the curriculum." In their forthcoming collection about the future of writing across the curriculum, WAC for the New Millenium, Susan McLeod, Eric Miraglia, Chris Thaiss, and Margot Soven (2001) address the changed nature of "writing" in their introduction; one of the chapters in the collection, "WAC Wired" by Donna Reiss and Art Young, focuses on that expanded definition of "writing."

Not surprisingly, contributors to the first Academic.Writing Forum, Principles that Should Guide WAC/CAC Program Development in the Coming Decade (2000), identified electronic communication as a major (if not "the" major) transformation to be addressed. Anne Herrington wrote,

WAC programs need to be responsive to new challenges and issues. One of those challenges comes from electronic technologies as they increasingly shape writing, communicating, and learning.... Since these technologies have cross-curricular implications for writing and learning, participants in WAC programs need to keep informed of new technologies, have occasions to discuss their capabilities and impacts, and participate in shaping them.

sites that collect undergraduate research (writing) are providing great opportunities for faculty and students to see what students can do in their research/writing. These give students a sense that they CAN write with some authority in a discipline, as part of their education.

Voices from many disciplines challenge us to reconsider the kinds of communication the academy accepts as evidence of learning and scholarship. Donna LeCourt, also writing in the first Academic.Writing Forum, emphasizes the necessity for WAC to attend to and help shape the educational uses of electronic communication, in particular the World Wide Web, "as so many disciplines are finding the WWW a prime venue for both exchange of 'expert' knowledge (e.g. online journals, archives, etc.) and a way to communicate with the public (e.g. corporate and non-profit Web pages, extension services in medicine, agriculture, etc.)."

Two of the featured speakers at the Fourth National WAC Conference, 1999, offered further evidence that "writing" should be reconsidered as the primary medium for academic communication and for programs concerned with communication across and within the disciplines. George Landow, hypertext theorist and Professor of English and Art History, showed videos constructed by students at Brown University to demonstrate that student learning of complex concepts can be illustrated with moving images and few words. Students, he said, are "inventing new writing" which requires design skills and visual literacy, not just verbal agility. Two days later at the same conference, social psychologist Kenneth Gergen challenged the academy's privileging of writing over other kinds of communication. Student projects and processes in various media and genres, including polyvocal texts with "breaks in continuity of coherence and classification" merit recognition, he said, and e-mail dialogues among students should be acknowledged as meaningful demonstrations of the making of knowledge. The written word was absent altogether when he illustrated his claim that performance should also be legitimized as academic discourse by acting out a psychological concept. If we accept this legitimacy, then we have indeed moved from "writing" to "communication" across the curriculum and have embraced as well the opportunity to include ECAC and thus influence the ways electronic communication can serve learning in all disciplines and at all educational levels.

So how can we use technology to support and to promote WAC or CAC or ECAC? We can (1) expand our existing WAC and CAC initiatives to include information technology and new media, and (2) collaborate with information technology and new media initiatives to incorporate WAC principles in their workshops.

1. WAC and CAC programs can incorporate technology into an existing series of workshops to attract people already interested in or committed to WAC.
    
   
   • Offer a workshop on writing for learning or problem-based learning and demonstrate e-mail exchanges or threaded Web discussions as one of the ways that students communicate with you and each other. Model such discussions during the workshop and ask participants to design assignments in which students send 3 or 4 messages to build an argument or expand understanding of a topic or solve problems.
      
     
   • Offer a workshop on collaborative projects in which student construction of Web sites is one possible product: annotated lists of hyperlinks; collaborative writing with hyperlinked expansions, illustrations, and decorations; Webquests.
      
     
   • Offer a workshop on interacting with experts in which various approaches to the distant consultant are offered: e-mail exchanges with experts; interactive television.
      
     
2. Integrate WAC/CAC into workshops that purport to focus on the technology itself, following Susan McLeod's advice that "WAC may need to quietly co-opt an initiative" and Anne Herrington's concurrence to "co-opt it [technology] to serve teaching and learning goals of WAC" (Herrington et al., 2000). Russell and Young both advise "cooperation" rather than co-opting, and partnerships with institutional technology groups and trainers are of course advisable. Depending on the culture of the school or college, however, cooperation may grow out of initial intrusion into alien territory. WAC and CAC programs can and do form alliances with the agencies that work with information technology, with centers for teaching and learning, with writing centers, with departments that have technology centers and staff as has been done at University of Missouri-Columbia and Clemson University, among other places. The Resources links at Academic.Writing's WAC Clearinghouse list some of these institutional collaborations.
    
   
   • Plan a PowerPoint workshop and emphasize collaborative presentations in which teams develop a presentation together, select and organize information, incorporate images and media, and make an oral presentation to the group using the PowerPoint show. Afterwards, ask them to write about the experience. Show participants how to print the slides for students to use as both reference and note paper. Show how to upload a PowerPoint presentation to the Web and accompany it with audio files or with complementary extended narrative text. Show how students and teachers can build a PowerPoint presentation during class as a way for students to generate and organize and then present ideas.
      
     
   • Offer a session on managing e-mail and construct exercises in which participants work in groups on e-mail discussions of topics related to teaching. Show how to design meaningful discussion questions for e-mail groups, how to ensure that all members of a group are active participants, how to set up subject headings that identify groups, how to make folders or mailboxes to organize the e-mail, how students can use their groupmates' e-mail as resources for their formal papers or test responses, how to convert the e-mail messages to word processed files or Web pages or portable document files for preservation and publication.
      
     
   • Collaborate with a librarian to offer a workshop on Internet research strategies. In addition to the searching and evaluating of Web sites, participants can learn about and possibly participate in Web activities with a communication-intensive purpose, such as Webquests, collaborative Web projects, reflective electronic portfolios, and hypertext writing.
      
     
   • Offer a session on Web development with an emphasis on instructional uses of the Web. A series of sessions might be preferable, sequencing from putting a syllabus and a few handouts online to using threaded Web discussion forums to having students construct collaborative Web projects that involve research, writing, editing, designing, and presenting findings orally to the class.
      
     

What are potentially problematic uses of technology in WAC/CAC programs?

Problematic uses of technology in WAC/CAC programs correspond to problematic uses of technology throughout society and the educational system. Many of these issues correspond as well to problematic uses of lectures or textbooks. How do teachers at every level learn to use chalk, books, handouts, and other media effectively? Today's teachers comprise several generations influenced by their own educational experience, most of which preceded the incorporation of electronic communication into instruction. We remember the inspiring lecturer, the droning reader of antiquated lecture notes, the lively class discussion leader, the person whose invitation to talk in class always turned into a rebuke. Where are our models for and lessons in effective incorporation of e-mail and the Web across the disciplines and within the disciplines? Left to flounder with new technologies, we often fail and then reject them just as we might have failed in our efforts to integrate group processes into our classrooms without sufficient training, planning, and understanding of the pedagogy and its application. WAC/CAC stepped in to demonstrate to faculty in all disciplines writing to learn, creative writing, collaborative communication, freewriting, the writing process, multiple measures for evaluating writing. So this problem – teaching effectively and appropriately with electronic communication – is a challenge WAC/CAC can take on to renew itself and instruction.

Another problematic use of technology is described by Art Young (2000) as diminution of "'sustained thought' (e.g. a lengthy intellectual project involving coherent writing over time)" because of electronic communication's "omnipresence, immediacy, and distractions." As if anticipating this critique, hypertext writer and professor Michael Joyce observed that "a sustained attention span may be less compelling than successive attendings" (1997). WAC/CAC/ECAC can take the lead in valuing both sustained and successive attendings and helping colleagues plan individual assignments and group projects that foster one or the other or both.

Whenever colleagues attempt to temper my enthusiastic advocacy of ECAC with reminders to be critical of technology, I defer to the people in our profession whose critiques have been learning-centered rather than teacher-centered or institution-centered (although I acknowledge the need for these other areas to be critiqued). I come back always to WAC and CAC and ECAC, to Cindy and Dickie Selfe and Gail Hawisher, whose critical examinations of technology and new media have been ever respectful of diversity and economy; to the contributors to the first Academic.Writing forum (Herrington et al.), whose critical examinations are grounded in WAC and writing theory; to Art Young's chart of three forms of discourse – personal, classroom, and public – and the role of electronic communication in each area (57). The primary problematic use of technology in WAC/CAC programs, then, is the failure to use it in the ways that WAC can use it best.

Works Cited

Gergen, Kenneth. (1999). Writing as Relationship. Paper presented at the Fourth National Writing Across the Curriculum Conference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. http://www.arts.cornell.edu/jskwp/wac99.html (20 June 2000).

Hawisher, Gail E., and Selfe, Cynthia L. . (1999). Passions, pedagogies, and twenty-first century technologies. Logan: Utah State U P.

Herrington, Anne, LeCourt, Donna, McLeod, Susan, Russell, David, Young, Art, and Palmquist, Mike. (2000). Principles that should guide WAC/CAC program development in the coming decade. Academic.Writing. http://wac.colostate.edu/aw/forums/winter2000/ (20 June 2000).

Joyce, Michael. (1996). Keynote Address. Mid-Atlantic Conference on Computers and Writing. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University.

Landow, George. (1999). Reading and writing in the presence of other texts: The student writer in E-space. Presented at the Fourth National Writing Across the Curriculum Conference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. http://www.arts.cornell.edu/jskwp/wac99.html (June 20, 2000).

McLeod, Susan, Miraglia, Eric, Thaiss, Chris, and Soven, Margot. (2001). WAC in the new millennium: The challenges of change in higher education. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Reiss, Donna, Selfe, Dickie, and Young, Art. (1998). Electronic communication across the curriculum. Urbana, IL: NCTE. (The table of contents for this book is online at http://www.tc.cc.va.us/faculty/tcreisd/ecac/ecacbk1.htm.

Selfe, Cynthia L. (1999). Technology and literacy in the twenty-first century: The importance of paying attention. Southern Illinois U P.

Selfe, Dickie. "Surfing the Tsunami: Electronic Environments in the Writing Center." Computers and Composition 12(3).

Thaiss, Chris. (1997). Reliving the history of WAC – Every day. Presented at the Writing Across the Curriculum 3rd National Conference, Charleston, SC, 5-8 Feb.

Walvoord, Barbara. (1996). The future of WAC. College English 58(1), 58-79.

Young, Art. (1999). Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum. 3^rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

– Donna Reiss
dreiss@wordsworth2.net