September 1997 — Features

Print this article | Email this article

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal

E-COMP: A Few Words About Teaching Writing with Computers

  • Observation #1 Instructional use of electronic media creates an intermittent distance in communication between the instructor and the students that can reconfigure authority relationships in the classroom.
  • Observation #2 Both mailgroups and conferencing software encourage a sense of group effort beyond the felt privacy of e-mail.
  • Observation #3 Computer-mediated discussions of peer writing tend to decrease students' reticence.
  • Observation #4 Working with text through electronic mediation encourages attention to sentence-level writing issues.
  • Observation #5 In electronic collaboration, the immediate classroom audience may overshadow a distant audience as the readership for which one writes. Observation #6 Instructors asking students to use electronic media for writing and research may want to thematize general rhetorical issues that are transformed by the employment of these media.
  • Observation #7 Electronic collaboration can reinforce the tendency of group writing to produce arguments that are more homogeneous and less controversial in both form and content.
  • Observation #8 Assignments that allow the use of electronic sources of information must also require that those sources be used thoughtfully.
  • Observation #9 Students can legitimately expect that instructors who require using electronic resources in their courses be able to justify their particular choices of requirements and have a certain minimum competency in guiding students' use of those resources.
  • Observation #10 As any given semester proceeds, the meanings and uses of the technologies may change, and instructors should be prepared to take advantage of evolving pedagogical opportunities.

How We Integrated Computers Into Content

How did computers figure into the content of our writing courses? We found that our pedagogical goals were aided, rather than hindered, by the judicious use of electronic media (including e-mail and institutional file sharing that allow on-line peer editing and evaluation, and Internet access that vastly augments local resources). As one example, traditionally invisible rhetorical practices became highly visible to students when they considered the different ways language is used to persuade and communicate in different media. Students also learned that every discourse has its own set of practices.