Kairos

When Revision is Redesign

This webtext for Inventio describes my response to Kairos' invitation for "re-envisioning," which I took as a provocation, a challenge to literally re-see and reimagine the visual and conceptual design of my argument. By highlighting some of the complexities of the design and redesign of one digital project, I hope to demonstrate the complicated relationship between seeing and design in envisioning and enacting argument, to make more visible the rhetorical and intellectual work of scholarship in digital media, and to argue by example for publishing scholarship about new media in new media.

A Review of Digital Video Production in Post-Secondary English Classrooms at Three Universities

Digital video production in composition courses is both new and exciting. However, this newness comes with challenges and obstacles as well as more questions than answers. What exactly is so fun, attractive, liberating, and transgressive about digital video work? Is it the time invested in editing minutes or hours of footage into seconds of film clips? Is it the sheer thrill of having the power to overlay images, words, and sounds to produce an effect impossible in the real world and highly effective in the multimodal, rhetorical one? Is it that the composition teacher is finally asking for a product where grammar (understood as punctuation and sentence structure) is mostly invisible? Is it the crisis moments when the software, the hard drive, and/or the accompanying hardware crashes and we are still left with a classroom full of students to teach? Or, is it the mesmerizing effect of the screen that promises sustained attention to a composition assignment? The answer, we think, in all cases is 'yes'--yet sometimes that yes is a hesitant one.

Why Kairos Matters to Writing: A Reflection on its Intellectual Property Conversation and Developing Law During the Last Ten Years

Highlights the major legal cases and illustrates how each case set up a rhetorical construct that allowed the next case to happen, leaving us where we are now. Highlights the provisions of the DMCA and how that law might impact our composing and publication practices.

Why Teach Digital Writing?

This webtext 'talks' in all the ways we are asked to talk about teaching digital writing: in the hallways to colleagues, in policy documents to administrators, in classroom exercises to graduate and undergraduate students, and to colleagues at conferences, in journal articles, and other scholarly genres.

It's about the Community Plumbing: The Social Aspects of Content Management Systems

In the summer of 2003, we worked on creating a general description of Drupal--an open source content management system (CMS)--for the "About Drupal" page on drupal.org. While Drupal is clearly within the class of applications known as content management systems, we felt that to describe it with that term alone would not present a clear picture of the breadth and range of Drupal's capabilities. Thus, the final description ended up describing Drupal with a total of four characteristics, although notably not distinct content management; weblog; discussion-based community software; and collaboration. Why is it then that the term CMS alone would not suffice? The word "content" places much emphasis on the product over process; it fails to emphasize the social use of CMSes, a mislabeling which places too much emphasis on the content itself at the expense of the communication and collaboration the better of these systems implement. In order to better understand how CMSes are being influenced by the precepts of social software and their role in creating social networks online, this presentation will: explore Drupal's social software features, narrate its genesis as software serving a community; and explain the influence of the community itself on Drupal development and the software's influence on the community that creates and uses it. In composing this text, we draw on the coauthors' unique perspectives. One of us is the founder and lead developer of Drupal, and the other a researcher in Computers and Writing and a participant in the Drupal community.

Minimalism and Documentation

What is minimalism? Is minimalist documentation 'risky,' and if so, what can be done to mitgate the risk? Was the structure of Windows 95's Help based on John Carroll's Minimalist Model or was 'the result' more a Microsoft business decision -- or a bit of both?

A Weblog Webliography

A bibliography with hundreds of online articles about weblogs.

InterMOO: Joseph Unger

A discussion with a systems support specialist, documented from InterMOO.

"Just" Professing: A Call for the Valuation of Prototypical Electronic Scholarship

We should not limit our view of 'what counts' as electronic publishing to online journals that merely replicate print conventions but enlarge it to include other, even yet-to-be-developed forms of electronic publishing.

The Kairos of Kairos: It's Time for a Change

Having over ten thousand readers visit the journal each month probably means that we are not quite an obscure web journal any longer.

Lumiere Ghosting and the New Media Classroom

Refocusing courses around the structure of narrative and how they use theatrical forms of interaction in the presentation of complex online help and instructional systems

Picturing Work: Visual Projects in the Writing Classroom

Composition faces the daunting task of promptly translating its theories into pedagogical strategies and often these teaching experiences lead to new questions for scholarship.

Search Engine Interfaces

Even though Internet search engines occupy a huge space in students' lives, there seems to be little examination of the effect of search engines on students. The interfaces of popular search engine such as Yahoo and Google simulate annotated bibliographies, a very abstract form.

Hypertext in the Computer-Facilitated Writing Class

The advent of new print-based communication technologies can facilitate the convergence of composition theory and praxis in the computer-assisted composition classroom.

Review of Writing at the Edge: Student Webs from Brown University

In Writing at the Edge, George Landow has provided a hypertext that is both in and about hypertext.

Building a Multiliteracy Center

David Sheridan shares what he has learned during his 2000-2003 efforts to build a Multiliteracy Center within the University of Michigan's Sweetland Writing Center.

Composing New Media: Cultivating Landscapes of the Mind

A multimedia exploration of new media technologies.

Disrupting the Computer Lab(oratory): Names, Metaphors, and the Wireless Writing Classroom

Considers metaphors that may be created or carried over from wired, face-to-face, and non-academic experience as names for wireless writing places. Ultimately, it suggests that names for wireless sites have the potential to enhance writing instruction’s status on campus and provides a naming heuristic for those seeking to accommodate local complexities.

Fashioning the Emperor's New Clothes: Emerging Pedagogy and Practices of Turning Wireless Laptops Into Classroom Literacy Stations @SouthernCT.edu

It seems humans want the best of technology without having to look at it, or what it does, closely. Though wireless technology makes a great pun about how it improves our ability to be "wired," not everyone is laughing. In this collaborative hypertext, four English professors explore their learning curves in a newly created, wireless, laptop-equipped classroom. Our research and writing was guided by these four questions.

New Literacies and Old: A Dialogue

Despite what some consider evidence to the contrary, the U.S.A. remains largely a nation of readers and writers.

So Much, So Far, So What? Progress and Prediction in Technorhetoric

In any popular cultural innovation one cares to name, there is an explicit or implicit claim about the way that the innovation will 'change' or 'transform' life, its quality, or its effect.

Wi-Fi Rhetoric: Driving Mobile Technologies

I argue that the wi-fi industry promises mobility, security, and entertainment not by emphasizing the open-spectrum technologies upon which they are based but through strategies that anticipate and recycle generic consumer values. These values—obtained by quantifying and interpretting consumer behaviors or "choices"—are represented by a universal product image that obfuscates difference, contradiction, and conflict in order to distribute products efficiently to a mass audience.

Wireless Laptop Classrooms: Sketching Social and Material Spaces

How course policies and instructor practices concerning wireless technologies affect community within the classroom.

Accountable Assessment in the Age of Digital Labor

Entrepreneurship is THE economic mode of the digital age and entrepreneurship is defined by risk. Students who will become workers must be comfortable, even engaged by, risk-taking.

Evaluating Student-Created Hypertexts: A Map

In this paper I offer thumbnail sketches for four methods of assessing student work in computer-mediated composition courses.

So You've Decided to Develop A Distance Education Class...

As colleges and universities race into Distance Education via the World Wide Web, instructors are asked to move out of their 'safe' zones and into a new realm of teaching.

Administering Teacher Technology Training

The collection of materials included here are designed to assist those, who for the first time, find themselves administering and developing an ongoing program for training teachers to use technology in the composition classroom.

As It Was in the Beginning: Distance Education and Technology Past, Present, and Future

As DE courses are being developed and carried out by an unprecedented number of university-level educators, it is time to reexamine the long history of DE in hopes of better understanding the ways in which seemingly revolutionary developments such as virtual classroom and e-mail collaborations have more in common conceptually with early iterations of DE than might be supposed.

Collaborative Configurations: Researching the Literacies of Technology

Discusses the electronic literacies of individuals from other countries who travel to the United States to study at colleges and universities in this country.

Why We Need More Assessment of Online Composition Courses: A Brief History

Online courses now command a prominent position in composition scholarship where we dream of democratized education and liberating literacies. But...

Some Notes on Simulacra Machines, Flash in First-Year Composition, and Tactics in Spaces of Interruption

This article is an examination of the discourse surrounding a new media tool, Macromedia's Flash, and a discussion of a qualitative study of Flash's use by students as part of an electronic portfolio assignment in a first-year composition course. My article explores how the software industry constructs Flash as a discursive object for the regulation of information flow, while also examining how the present generation of students interacts with these new media environments, making meaning within them through the use of simulacra tools.

Kairosnews

Kairosnews is an open community of members interested in the intersections of rhetoric, technology and pedagogy. Visitors can create an account, submit a story, join in the many discussions by posting comments, or read the news gathered from other sites by our aggregator. Members can also subscribe to a daily email newsletter of updated site content.

Kairosnews Weblink Directory

A collection of links to websites in rhetoric and technical communication.

Shifting Boundaries of Intellectual Property: Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Publishing on the WWW

The following set of links provide information on issues of copyright intellectual property, and fair use.

CoverWeb? Adding Multiple Authorship to Multi-Linearity

This multi-vocality and multiple authorship allows an enactment of some of the collaboratory promise of hypertext while web publishing allows decentralized publication. Finally, the CoverWeb allows Kairos to deliver texts appropriate to many tiers of readers. This issue's CoverWeb on educational MOOs includes basic introductions to MOOing linked to discussions of the pedagogical possibilities of virtual spaces linked to problems of administering MOOspaces. We have tried to cover a spectrum of possible interests as well as familiarity to MOOs in education and this layering simply wouldn't be possible in print.

As It Was in the Beginning: Distance Education and Technology Past, Present, and Future

Many features of present-day Distance Education (DE) writing instruction would have been inconceivable when DE was first undertaken: On-demand instruction, nearly instantaneous content delivery, and virtual classrooms capable of facilitating real-time conversations between students on different continents about events that may have taken place only minutes ago, a half a world away. All of these things would have seemed as unlikely to early DE practitioners as holding classes on the moon, yet the many of the primary issues and concerns of twenty-first century DE, particularly with respect to the significance and effects of technology, have persisted throughout the many years of its existence. Now, as DE courses are being developed and carried out by an unprecedented number of university-level educators, it is time to reexamine the long history of DE in hopes of better understanding the ways in which seemingly revolutionary developments such as virtual classroom and e-mail collaborations have more in common conceptually with early iterations of DE than might be supposed. This work represents an attempt to identify some of those commonalities, with respect to both the ways in which DE technology has functioned in particular historical contexts and to their significance to the field of DE in a more global sense. It is hoped that through such investigations we will become better able to shape DE courses so as to take advantage of the functionalities of new technologies without losing the benefits of DE that have traditionally drawn students and teachers to it.

[Continuing to] Mind the Gap: Teaching Image and Text in New Media Spaces

Our panel presentation for Computers and Writing 2002 was consciously modeled on conversations that we have had with each other over the past several years as our paths have crossed in our individual journeys from the edges of our own distinct disciplines into the nebulousness of interdisciplinarity. We have made this journey as scholars, teachers, and students, and have discovered along the way that new media spaces have blurred the traditional boundaries between academic disciplines and the hierarchies that support them. Because the connections forged between disciplines can be tenuous in nature, their maintenance requires continuous conversation and exchange of ideas and resources.

Learner Access in the Virtual Classroom: The Ethics of Assessing Online Learning

Web-based instruction is often valued because of the way hypertext and dynamic visual media may enhance course content. The advantages of virtual space are framed in terms of 'access' - access to broader dimensions of ideas, access to academic and non-academic databases and information, access to diverse learning communities.

A Brief History and Technical Overview of the Current State of JAC Online, with a Few Observations About How the Internet is Influencing (or Failing to Influence) Scholarship: or, Who Says You Can’t Find JAC Online?

This article has two purposes. A number of people have asked me what has been involved in producing the current version of JAC Online, and so the electronic archive’s history and technical development is presented here for them. In the process of working with JAC Online, I have come to some tentative conclusions about the role electronic research plays in scholarship, the significance electronic publications hold for paper publications, the question of e-publication and tenure, and how much technical knowledge is relevant to current and future scholarship in the humanities. I present these tentative conclusions in the context of my experience as an online editor. It is important to emphasize that my experience is limited to a single journal and my role with that journal is limited to that journal’s needs, and thus what I say is local knowledge. But like a lot of people I see all knowledge as local, even in cyberspace. To create the context for what I will suggest about the current state of online scholarship, I will first recount the history of JAC Online.

Gauging the Value of Online Grade Posting: An Inquiry into Full Disclosure

With the continued development of the Internet, distance learning initiatives and Web-based mechanisms designed to support traditional classroom pedagogies are here to stay, and traditional notions of teaching are forever changed. Online colleges and universities like the University of Phoenix already boast burgeoning enrollments, as students flock to a curriculum that will gladly meet them on their own terms and in their own homes and offices. On the Web, teaching moves from brick and mortar classrooms with thirty students entering and leaving every hour, on the hour, to a compendium of synchronous and asynchronous experiences characterized by bulletin board posts, downloads, real-time chats, file transfers, and video and audio files. Web-based approaches to teaching writing and rhetoric are, generally speaking, multivalent, offering new and important capacities that surpass some of the dimensional and practical constraints of the traditional written page. Moreover, many of the practices common in Web-based pedagogy are well supported by theories of dialogism and negotiated learning, and those in the computers and composition community have long trumpeted these benefits.

Teaching Professional Writing Online with Electronic Peer Response

For primarily practical reasons, professional writing courses are increasingly being taught totally or partly online. These practical reasons concern me because I do not believe that a pedagogical practice whose benefits are being actively debated by scholars, such as online education, should be utilized only or primarily because it is seen as a way of saving or making money. However, online education is one pedagogical practice that, I believe, has great potential to improve writing. A year-and-a-half ago, I taught several partly online sections of my professional writing course, and I discovered that a strategy valuable in my traditional sections became invaluable in my online sections: electronic peer response.

Building a Print/Digit Interface

The new Computers and Composition segment, 'Print/Digital Dialogue,' is designed to enable communication between print and digital forms of professional conversation. For some time, email discussions have been peppered with references to other digital resources as well as print resources. Rarely do professional print journals refer readers to digital resources, even with scholars such as Janice Walker creating citation guides for references to digital scholarship in print. Print is important -- this effort to put digital and print resources into conversation should not be seen as a threat to on-line discussion but as an opportunity to expand the professional community of Techno-rhetoricians. We are members of a hybrid community, existing both on-line and off, and need bridges between on- and off- line scholarship. It is a translation from one established realm into another, perhaps less developed one.

What Matters Who Writes? What Matters Who Responds? Issues of Ownership in the Writing Classroom

This text was originally constructed as a keynote address for the NCTE conference held August 10-12, 1995 at Colgate University and was delivered under the same title. Some text has been changed to accomodate hypertextual publication. To follow the text nearly as it was delivered August 11, click the link labelled 'Next' at the bottom of each 'page.' However, following the text in this manner defeats the purpose of this hypertextual presentation. Explore the structure of the text -- you may find yourself rewarded with your own unique reading experience. There are conceptual links to themes that run through the text (Postmodern (un)grounding, Collaboration, Copy(w)right/Ownership, and Possible Futures ), and navagational links ( Next, Previous, and Back ) which should provide you with many reading possibilities.

Communication as the Foundation of Distance Education

Communication plays a vital role in learning, not only with respect to expository and discussion methods of instruction, but at a more consequential level in the development of higher mental processes through acquiring and learning to manipulate symbols. This has been so at least since the early days of Greek society where education of the citizen primarily was concerned with the ability to express oneself in a thoughtful manner in order to develop a better society. Isocrates, one of the first Western educators, stressed the relevance of speech in sharpening thought and judgment; his emphasis on the relationship between education and speaking well became the standard throughout the ancient Western world.

Learning to Write: Learning about Sustainability

I had been involved with a program at Clemson to integrate laptop computers into the engineering curriculum. In this pilot project, I had taught first-year writing since 1998 to engineering and science majors using their own laptops in classrooms equipped with ethernet connections and a video projector. This proved to be a rich environment for sharing work and collaborating among ourselves. I wanted to see whether we could extend our collaborations to other Clemson classrooms. Mary Haque (a professor in Clemson University’s Horticulture Department) and I decided that my first-year composition classes could collaborate with her horticulture classes.

Private Literacies, Popular Culture, and Going Public: Teachers and Students as Authors of the Electronic Portfolio

In The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, Richard Lanham suggests that perhaps those most resistant to the 'digital revolution' are members of English departments, those who are often divided between what does and what does not constitute a text. Often at the heart of this debate is the privileging of one literacy paradigm, that of print, and the marginalizing of another, primarily that devoted to the production of electronic discourse. To further complicate the issue, even when we do recognize electronic models of literacy, we tend to shape our experience, as Johnson-Eilola has so eloquently pointed out, through our nostalgia for earlier models of literacy, again, those focused on print and the printed page. It is no doubt important to teach students the ways in which rhetorical and literary texts are produced, distributed, and consumed; however, it is equally important for teachers of writing, primarily members of English departments, to acknowledge the production and consumption processes of texts external to the genres of the academy and to recognize that the essay is a printed form that admittedly for our students has little use outside the academy.

Terrorism, Teaching, and Technology: Reading for Rhetoric in September 11th Documents on the Internet

Documents associated with September 11 and its aftermath offer a sobering but appropriate opportunity for writing instructors to demonstrate the value of rhetorical analysis and the utility of the Internet as a tool for locating primary sources.

Deafened to Their Demands: An Ethnographic Study of Accommodation

After a semester of working with the population of Deaf students on a larger southwestern, suburban University campus, it became clear that the institution would not be able to provide reasonable accommodations requested by deaf students. As I witnessed students, rightfully fighting for reasonable accommodations (as outlined in the Americans with Disabilities Act), I saw individuals both inside and outside the institutional structures attempt change only to find themselves rebuffed. The institution itself was not able to accommodate the reasonable and lawful demands of the deaf population of students at the university, but interestingly the efforts of reformers inside the institution were similarly unable to enact significant change. The institution was unable to hear the pleas of its students but was equally unable to accommodate the demands of members of the administration seeking to provide services to these students.

Hypertext Reflections

A discussion of some of the most compelling elements of current hypertext theory. By practicing the theory it preaches, it hopes to explicitly model the theoretical interrogations of the issue.

Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy

In these days of dizzying technological change, it is difficult for teachers of composition not to be enthusiastic about the ever expanding arsenal of literacy tools at our disposal. From the myriad possibilities of networked classrooms to the disseminal opportunities of the World Wide Web, these technologies offer us promising venues in which to teach the craft of writing to our students, who seem more than eager to embrace these digital technologies. Yet anyone who remembers the days before word processors realizes that the relationship between writer and text has changed, and not just because of poststructural theorists like Barthes and Foucault. While word processors undoubtedly have eased our production and revision of texts, they have also altered our spatial and tactile relationship to the writing process. And some would argue these changes are not necessarily for the better; perhaps all of us in the computers and writing community know a Luddite colleague who eschews the technological elegance of an Apple PowerBook for the simpler pleasures of an antique fountain pen and hand-bound writing journal. To the technological cognoscenti, such resistance seems at times like quaint nostalgia for a world that is quickly disappearing. But the more I scour the digital landscape to keep abreast of new technologies, the more a gnawing question tugs at my synapses: 'What is being gained and what is being lost as the tools of literacy increase in complexity?'

Monitoring Order: Visual Desire, the Organization of Web Pages, and Teaching the Rules of Design

Monitoring Order looks at two potential sources -- writings about book design and writings about visual arrangement in painting -- for helping teachers of writing think about teaching visual composition for Web pages; both sources are problematic but suggest directions for further study.

Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication

Communication used to be about telling stories, about listening to narratives of discovery, learning, redemption, and war. Not just little stories, but big stories: heaven, hell, utopia. Relatively recently, though, the map has started to replace the story as our fundamental way of knowing. The new emphasis on spatial rather than temporal or historical concerns goes by a number of titles -- postcapitalism, networked workplaces, nonhierarchical management -- but the most popular (and often misunderstood) is postmodernism. In this text, I sketch out some of the ways that postmodernist tendencies affect the careers and possibilities for business and technical communicators. Briefly, I see the potential for increased responsibility, prestige, and influence for business and technical communicators, but only if we are able to reconceive what we think of as the value of our work; that is, we must reposition ourselves as mapmakers rather than authors.

Search Engines and the Will to Truth

Thousands, probably millions of writers are putting up pages of information or speculation on the Web. They are choosing to bypass the whole apparatus of referees, editors, reviewers, catalogers, and indexers to make a direct appeal to 'the world' on the Web. If the cost of Web publication were that the pages remained un-indexed, few would choose it, for it would amount to being one drop in a sea of 1.5 billion pages: the chance of anyone with an interest in the topic finding the page would be infinitesimal. But along with all this unauthorized, uncatalogued writing has come the development of fast and powerful search engines, some of them indexing over one billion pages. And suddenly 'to look something up' means 'to run it by Yahoo!' It is easy to make a case against the Web search engines, and from that a case against the Web itself as a medium, or even a tool, for making and exchanging public knowledge. But...

Kairos

Kairos is a refereed online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. In Kairos, we publish 'webtexts,' which are texts authored specifically for publication on the World Wide Web. These webtexts include scholarly examinations of large-scale issues related to special topics, individual and collaborative reviews of books and media, news and announcements of interest, interactive exchanges about previous Kairos publications, and extended interviews with leading scholars. With Kairos, we seek to push boundaries in academic publishing at the same time we strive to bridge the gap between print and digital publishing cultures. We further seek to bring forward and support the voices of those too often marginalized in the academy, especially graduate students and adjunct and other part-time faculty.