Alliance for Computers and Writing

The Alliance for Computers and Writing is a national, non-profit organization committed to supporting teachers at all levels of instruction in their intelligent, theory-based use of computers in writing instruction. The operating principle behind ACW/Web is that writing teachers will provide the shared knowledge necessary for doing their job well if someone gives them the means to share that knowledge.

Alliance for Computers and Writing. Organizations>Writing>Computers and Writing

Composing New Media in the Humanities: A Disciplinary Study of Design Heuristics

Because computers and writing as well as other related areas, like professional writing and increasingly even first-year composition are interested in new ways of composing, more and more heuristics are being brought in from other fields.

Agena, Kate. Purdue University (2003). Articles>Writing>Computers and Writing

A Computer Writing Environment for Professional Writers and Students Learning to Write    

While some models of computer writing environments have emerged in the literature on writing, most of them are done with the purpose of helping writers in an academic context and very few, if any, with the aim of facilitating the work of professional writers or students in professional writing. We think, however, that we can learn from the previous models to build a multi-purpose computer writing environment that will take into account the needs of the professional writers as well as those of the students learning to write. We will begin by looking at some models of writing proposed by Hayes and Flower in 1980 and also at the model of White and Arndt. Afterwards, we will review the model of professional writers developed by Clerc and link it with the previous models. We will then have to look at some computer writing environments described in the literature and see how these environments take into account the process and tasks identified in writing. Finally, we will suggest our model.

Bisaillon, Jocelyne, Isabelle Clerc, and Jacques Ladouceur. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (1999). Articles>Education>Computers and Writing>Writing

Computers and Writing

The goal of this course is to foster a sophisticated understanding of rhetorical situation, style and arrangement. Writing for the electronic medium with its specific demands should reveal by contrast material aspects of the practice of conventionalwriting that may have been taken for granted. Technologies encourage certain kinds of thinking and behavior and discourage others. Writing has always been one such technology. The World Wide Web is not the introduction of, but a shift in, technology. Students will analyze, conceptualize and create websites with HTML and graphics without the use of WYSIWYG helpers. WYSIWYG programs can make website development easy; however, we will stay close to the actual code in order to get a better understanding of the medium.

Levy, Matthew A. University of Texas. Academic>Courses>Computers and Writing>Web Design

Conversations: Computer-Mediated Dialogue, Multi-logue, and Learning  

The purpose of this [text] is to argue in favor of a 'pedagogy of textual conversation,' a pedagogy made possible in large part by electronic technology, by computer mediated communication. Informing the argument is a deep philosophical commitment to conversation itself as the primary mode of meaning-making in both social and personal life. Material presented in support of the main argument is drawn from current and past pedagogical and communications theory as well as from ethnographic research conducted in the fall semester of 1994 in which students in an English composition class were linked to students in an education class via a single VAX electronic conference. Actual experiences in the electronic medium are forwarded to suggest that those who engage in extensive textual conversation with one another benefit from improved rhetorical skills, understanding of course content, the ability to make connections between ideas, and a liberalization of ideological views. But this [book] is not meant only to argue this issue in a classical or academically authorized sense, i.e., as a monological exercise of logic and reason with its inevitable linear development and closure. It is meant also to enact a conversational model. Thus it is a hybrid form of writing, a fugue-like composition which, like its musical counterpart is a polyphonic (multi-vocal) composition based upon several related, but different themes enunciated by several voices or parts in turn, subjected to contrapuntal treatment, and which gradually builds up into a complex form having distinct divisions or stages marked at the end by an open-ended climax rather than a conclusion. In other words, the work as a whole is in great part the subject of itself.

Baldwin, Beth W. RhetNet (1997). Books>Writing>Computers and Writing

Fluency, Fluidity, and Word Processing  

Despite the above maxim, numerous studies have been conducted over the past five years to determine whether student compositions improve significantly with the use of a computer. As Gail Hawisher (summarizing Seymour Papert) suggests, our field is so new that we seem lobe in a technoúcentric phase comparable to the egocentric phase through which Piaget’s children must pass on the way to maturity. We are searching for “THE effect” of the computer on the product (the text) rather than “the effects” of the computer both on the writer and on the context in which the product is produced. We have already passed judgment on what the computer should do (improve the product) rather than investigate what it does do. Thus, the results of the studies conducted to date appear contradictory.

Boiarsky, Carolyn. JAC (1991). Articles>Rhetoric>Computers and Writing

Informação: Computação e Comunicação

A 'Sociedade da Informação' que se configura neste fim de século decorre de uma revolução tecnológica cujas origens remontam ao final da Segunda Grande Guerra, e cujo complexo desenvolvimento transcorre durante toda a segunda metade do século, com potencial para modificar, a médio prazo, muitos aspectos da vida cotidiana. Segundo a National Science Foundation, a tecnologia eletrônica da informação alterará cada instituição da vida americana, com ``efeito transformador'', até 1998. Embora muitos elementos tenham contribuído para essa transformação, dois pontos focais aparecem como determinantes do seu crescimento: Computação e Comunicação, diretamente ligados a dois objetos tecnológicos que proporcionaram a esse crescimento uma velocidade nunca vista: Micro-computador e Rede Internet. O uso da rede aumenta dramaticamente o grau de cooperação entre parceiros, muitas vezes geograficamente distantes, e impõe novos paradigmas, novas possibilidades e novos problemas para muitas atividades.

Mandel, Arnaldo, Imre Simon and Jorge L. deLyra. Universidade de Sao Paulo (1997). (Portuguese) Articles>Writing>Computers and Writing

The New Frontier: Conquering the World Wild Web by Mule  

This article offers a close examination of the effects that teaching hypertext markup language (HTML) has on students’ perceptions of class goals in a networked composition classroom. A networked classroom that requires students to send documents using a file transfer protocol (FTP) by command line and view the World Wide Web with a textual browser shifts the emphasis of the class from writing to coding. Helping students to identify a balance between computer technology and writing goals becomes essential to a successful classroom.

Gresham, Morgan. Computers and Composition (2000). Articles>Education>Computers and Writing