September 1997 — Features

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

While many college teachers feel that the ever-expanding reach of costly computer networks represents a dubious "bells and whistles" distraction from basic education, E-COMP, a group of graduate student instructors and faculty at the University of Michigan, felt otherwise. We decided to share and test our common belief in the potential of electronic media to serve as powerful new learning tools (as well as some common uncertainties about how to use those tools effectively). Over a period of two years we have pursued an experiment that has produced both student success and a set of observations that we believe will apply wherever courses make use of computer-mediated writing.

Electronic media can serve some contemporary ideas about writing instruction quite well. The workshop- or peer-editing process, for instance, is especially facilitated by electronic media.

Although we emphasized collaboration in varying degrees, we shared a belief in collaborative evaluation and writing as potent means of improving any writerís crucial sense of audience. All of our courses required students to engage with one another through several forms of (often collaborative) writing. And our experiences with new writing media, such as e-mail and Web publishing, had convinced us that the technology would encourage the future development of collaborative writing processes. We designed our courses as thoughtful and rigorous preparations for these new writing challenges. Electronic media also tend to reconfigure authority relationships in the classroom, moving toward an active student-centered course where the teacher serves as an expert guide rather than dominant instructor.

Over the course of two years, we met on a weekly basis and discussed how our original ideas were or were not working in practice. Though we experienced difficulties, we found, to our delight, that students were developing into much better and more flexible writers, and this has encouraged us to continue using computers in our writing instruction.

10 Observations

We therefore offer the results of our collective work in the following ten observations to other teachers of writing who may be interested in the benefits (and limitations) of computer-aided instruction: