The WAC Clearinghouse

Reviewing CW2K: E2 Authoring and Design in Student Electronic Composing

This session brought four presenters together in some interesting and unplanned ways. Elizabeth Battles (Making the Private Public: Electronic Publishing of Undergraduate Writing"), Jeff Rice ("Writing about Cool in the Computer Classroom"), Jonathan Alexander ("E-zine Redux: A Story of Student Writing on the Web") and Robert Friedman ("On the Development of Common Skills for the Integration of Programming and Writing Tasks") all showed their individual ways of making student Web pages into learning spaces.

Friedman was illuminating the audience with his ability to connect programming challenges with those commonly experienced in expository writing. Alexander described the learning stages inherent in his class's E-zine creation as a process that began as imitation and parody and developed into invention, discovery, and rhetorical sophistication through a continuing focus on design, interactivity, and content. Rice used his class's pursuit and online exposition of what cool means to help rethink relationships between C&W, cultural studies, and composition.

Battles explored Web generated discipline changes in composition and was helpful with the ways she described teaching students to sense audience via Web publication. Publishing student writing has always merited a certain slice of composition's pedagogical pie, but as these presenters clearly know, publishing student writing on the Web is more than a better binding and fancier cover. As the issues of teaching writing and universal publishing continue to converge, this session's ideas and ideological context will become even more essential to the progression of making online space into learning space.

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