Selected Abstracts

Anthony Atkins

Role: presenter

Interest: Historical

Goals: My goals are to find more resources concerning historical perspectives on computers and composition, to determine what warrents such a study for the computers and writing community, and to learn who else is working in the area/s of hypermediated pedagogies (moo and/or distributed education teachers).

Topic: The History of Computers and Composition: Pedagogy and Theory

Abstract: I am investigating the history of computers and composition.  While Gail Hawisher, Paul Leblanc, Charles Moran Cindy Selfe's book: Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History traces events that have affecetd the ways in which computers have evolved in higher education and English departments. This historiography examines the ways in which computers and technology have been treated in journals (print and non-print), books, national conferences, and software.  The focus, however, is on pedagogy and theories devoted to teaching composition with computers.  What articles have been published on computers and pedagogy?  Where have they been published in the past? Where are they being published at present? and Where will they be published in the future?  How have puiblications, conferences, books, and software affected the niche of our community?

Dana Bard

Role: Participant

Interest: Technical & Professional Communication

Goals: This will be my first C&W conference, and I'm just beginning my Ph.D. research work--just formulating my ideas, etc. I'll be there to listen and learn and join in when I can.

Topic: Feminist Constructions of Identity: Gendered Communication in the Workplace

Abstract:    Identity formation is a social process based in language; for those who spend the majority of their day in the workplace, that process is largely based in the social language of their discourse community at work. I am interested in a study of the gendered aspects of workplace discourse practices using the framework (in its nascent stage of construction and subject to renovation) of George Kamberelis’s theory of hybrid discourse practices and Carol Gilligan’s theory of psychological gender differences. The pop-culture’s embrace of work like Deborah Tannen’s linguistic studies of the differences between language use of men and women (e.g. You Just Don’t Understand), and the apparent resonance of her theses with the readers’ lived experiences, is indicative of some level of “truth” to Gilligan’s theories. Accepting that premise, then, have women brought with them into the male domain of the workplace a female discourse practice which allows them “possibilities for self-production through strategically appropriating practices…[found] there”? (Kamberelis 2001).

Kamberelis claims that hybrid discourse practices (HDP) are dialogic, contingent and generative. Given that “when resources from different discursive worlds interact, new codes are forged,” do women use HDP differently than men? In any particular workplace, is the HDP practiced there libratory or violent? Gender equality in the workplace is not a new or even ‘hot’ issue anymore. Yet gender is an identity that is in part constituted through the discourse community at work. So many years after “women’s liberation” when many believe the battles have been won, has social language at work been transformed so as to eliminate all (most?) traces of gender discrimination? These are important questions not only for women who desire and deserve equal treatment; they areimportant for employers who are interested in realizing the full potential of their human resources (of either gender). Employers have a vested interest in knowing to what degree their workplace practices foster or discourage gender equity.

Angela Crow

Role: Participant

Interest: Pedagogy, Institutional Contexts, Literacy/Technological Literacy, Research, Rhetorical Analysis, Technical & Professional Communication, hm.  i assume identity fits within many of these categories?

Goals: uhm...my goals for this workshop are to help Janice in whatever way she needs :)

Erin Karper

Role: presenter

Interest: Research, web design

Goals: I've just started to sketch out and begin work on a project that will hopefully  form the basis for my dissertation. I'd really like to get some feedback on how the project looks now and possible directions it could take in the future. 

Topic: seeing novice web design(er)s as rhetorical

Abstract: How do novice web page designers make (rhetorical) choices about creating web pages? Why do they make the particular choices they do? Does the rhetorical status of a page, its purpose, and its intended audience influence the design choices made by novice designers? What vocabulary do they use to talk about these choices and about their designs? Are these choices and vocabularies related to what help and resources for novice web page designers say about design choices and the vocabularies they use? If so, what resources are influencing novice designers the most? If not, why is there little or no relation between what novice designers are being told to do and what they actually do, and what forces are guiding their choices? Where do they turn for help, and how do they decide what is "good design" and good visual rhetoric?

Sebastian Mahfood

Role: presenter

Interest: Pedagogy

Goals: My goals for the workshop include learning from other presenters their successes in using web-enhanced learning platforms to generate interactive learning environments, presenting the successes I have had involving myself in the use of instructional technologies as both a teacher of graduate students at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary and as a graduate student finishing my doctorate at St. Louis University, and researching the new theories and practices arising out of the other themes of the conference.

Topic: Virtual Learning Environments as Creative Discursive Spaces

Abstract: This presentation will focus on the development and use of virtual reality software in the creation of virtual learning environments.  Web-enhanced learning generates a new pedagogical awareness as the shift into cyberspace provides teachers with not only a way to re-envision their instructional practices, but also a way to re-envision their relationships with their students.  The strengths of mediated communication platforms like virtual learning environments (VLE), or virtual reality game spaces, take the best of the MOO discussion features and of the asynchronous discussion boards and allow students the use of creative discursive spaces through which to engage the subject.  Ultimately, the VLE create a synergy between the subject and the participants (professors and students), a kind of negotiated syncretism that engenders a greater critical awareness of one's place within any given discourse. 

To present, I'll need a projector that I can hook up to my laptop and an Internet connection.

Gloria McMillan

Role: Participant

interest: Pedagogy, Hypertext Theory, Literature and Technology, Historical, Institutional Contexts, Literacy/Technological Literacy, Assessment, Research, Rhetorical Analysis, writing my own programs for literary analysis and interesting others in using these.

Goals: I would like to populariize "CAL" or computer-assisted literary analysis.  I have been doing this for about eight years.  I know where there needs to be improved speed of preprocessing of texts and am deveoping programs to help at this tagging the text stage.

Topic: What can Computers Add to Literary and Rhetorical Analysis?

Abstract: My presentation has a different title:

Shades of 2001: Is CAL just another HAL?

My talk will first show the *need* for CAL (computer-assisted literary analysis) and what this type of analysis means in terms of power structures in the field of Humanities research.

Then I will talk about current obstacles to conducting CAL and how now software under develoment addresses these issues.

I have several programs along with me for the ride to Normal.

Alicia Middendorf

Role: presenter

Interest: Electronic Publishing, Not Applicable

Goals: My goals for this workshop are to further develop my research project and to find a suitable publication venue. 

Topic: Weaving the Web of Student Publishing

Abstract: A research study focusing on technology in the college English classroom will prove or deny that the World Wide Web can be successfully woven into the curriculum to improve student writing.  The purpose of this research is to discover how student writers conceptualize audience and to discover how the use of web design essays affects the teaching and understanding of audience.  The subjects will compose samples of traditional and web design essays.  Subsequent drafts will be made of each essay.  Subjects will mark changes on their essays by underlining.  In conference settings, subject will be tape recorded to attain precise data, and I will ask them why the underlined changes were made.  Subjects will write in and out of class journal entries about their progression and understanding of audience throughout the study.  Subjects will complete anonymous surveys evaluating their essays and their use and understanding  of audience.  I am hypothesizing that subjects will become more aware of writing to an audience, more aware of the usefulness of computers, and gain a comfortable attitude toward the use of computers.  Also, I am hypothesizing that teachers will gain a better understanding of computers as a teaching tool in theEnglish composition classroom.

Kurt Neumann

Role: Participant

Interest: Rhetorical Analysis

Goals: I would like feedback as to whether or not my understanding of Burke's work is consistent with others', particularly in the area of the forensic aspects of the pentad. I would also like to know if my topic is simply not significant or relevant.

Topic: Burke's Pentad and Stasis Theory

Abstract: In _A Rhetoric of Motives_, Burke notes that his _A Grammar of Motives_ "dealt with the universal particulars of substance"; and in a practical sense, Burke's pentad (Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose) modernizes classical stasis  theory (a prior theory of "stance"), and his ratios extend the interrelationships of the four classical stases (fact, definition, quality, and proposal). The pentad  and the ratios are "resources of placement and definition", which also are the  functions of the stases and which in large part are forensic functions. The stases are forensic to the extent that they provide a rhetorical framework for understanding  an event (an "Act" for Burke) that has taken place. Yet, they allow also for deliberation in the form of proposals about what action, if any, should be taken in response to the event. The pentad is also forensic, in the sense of a grammar, or set of structural principles that exist prior to any rhetoric, with which to analyze an event. The ratios, in turn, extend the forensic function of the pentad (and thereby of the stases) in a psycho-social direction by including as objects of analysis the interrelationships between individual terms of the pentad. The ratios describe synecdochic relationships between the terms of the pentad, or the relationships between the implicit and explicit functions of human motivations and the rhetoric through which they are expressed. For instance, given that rhetoric is the expression of human action, and thereby the embodiment of human motivation, the ratios suggest that inasmuch as all of the implications of an action are latent in the action itself (a state of implicitness), the act itself is an explicit manifestation of conditions that exist as prior possibilities within the very context (the Scene) in which the action occurs. For Burke, the oscillation within the ratios is a point of overlap and ambiguity; for instance, one cannot discern the implications of an action before the action takes place. The ambiguity, though, is articulated through the working out of the action.

Angela Pettit

Role: Participant

Interest: Pedagogy, Literature and Technology, Literacy/Technological Literacy, Assessment

Goals: What I hope to gain is a better understanding of computer technology in the composition classroom; how I can fit that into my pedagogy; if and how technology can help literacy and how to assess work in a technology based composition class. All of these issues are things I see ahead of me as I embark on a composition teaching career.

James Purdy

Role: Participant

Interest:

Goals:  I'm participating in the session for first time participants at C&W Thursday afternoon, but I would like to sit in on the Graduate Research Network in the morning.  Is that possible?  Below are abstracts (one from my C&W  presentation and one from a proprosal for a CCCCs panel) that indicate my area of interest. Please let me know if I can participate

Abstract:

Imag[in]ing Composition: The Call to Visual Literacy

This presentation addresses what embracing calls to instruct students in visual literacy might mean for composition studies in this  age of new media. Acknowledging current concerns over the pervasive use of the literacy metaphor (Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola, Kress, Selfe), this presentation examines how visual literacy seemingly constructs composition classes/studies, exploring what it might mean to have a “baseline measure” (Markel) of students’ abilities to perceive and analyze visual rhetoric. Specific consideration will be given to how visual  literacy constructs and/or modifies notions of texts and composing in the composition classroom

This presentation will address two of the narratives employed to legitimize the use of networked computer classrooms for composition courses: the egalitarianism narrative and the visual literacy narrative. The presentation primarily explores the move by scholars and teachers to embrace the visual literacy narrative and how a critical examination of this narrative might provide insight into the operation of composition classes as well as the evolution of composition studies as a discipline.

Yanjun Shi

Role: Participant

Interest: Technical & Professional Communication, Intellectual Property

Goals: I hope to get many latest infomation and news. And a good discuss about 

computer and writing is appreciated.

Topic: Computer-aided writing: Language functional module and Searching

Abstract: Nowadays, commercial computer-aided writing (CAW) software mainly use pattern technique. But the pattern is only a frame, and the problem of how to obtain the writing materials appended to patterns is still unsolved up to now. This paper studies the problem of retrieval writing material from the sample library and attempts to resolve it. And basing on Hallday's sections and chapters theory, we present the concept and characteristics marks of language functional module, the method of retrievaling language functional module from the sample library at the point of computer technology view.

Jay Szczepanski

Role: presenter

Interest: Pedagogy, Hypertext Theory, Literacy/Technological Literacy

Goals: My program requires a portfolio approach, so I'm without thesis, but I'm interested in doing some preliinray research into the idea of technological literacy, specifically the relationship between primary orality (as defined by Ong, that is) and the new orality that technology brings with it (video, radio, etc.).  I'm also interested in the problems that I see with the Internet and how it complicates definitions of orality in the TV/pop-culture oriented age.

Another interest area is in the self-publishing ease of the web.  Manuscripts and other difficult to reproduce texts--before the standardizing influence of the printing press--were a jumble.  I see this analagously with the Internet--sure, the characters pacing and technical aspects of the web (for writing purposes) are standardized or fixed, but there are radically different, non-academic voices floating in space.  And then I think, what does this do to Ong's idea of writing literacy as a means of reflection and deeper analysis?  If anyone can get published, and there are no checks on quality, and I can upload an html file at 3:00 a.m. and have a man in Switzerland read it at noon, (and I know I spent next to no time on it) is my writing, or, I guess, "cyber-literacy" really worth anything?    (and there are dicsussions about the organizing notions of oral cultures, the idea of topoi, etc., but I can ramble about this all day, and this is a neat opportunity for me to just stop).

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