The Intersections of Online Writing Spaces, Rhetorical Theory, and the Composition Classroom Our introductions to the writing tools and theories discussed within this CoverWeb occurred at different times, at different levels of use (1). For example, some years ago Beth's theoretical introduction to webtexts drew her into the world of using hypertext code to design an online writing lab and to author webtexts within it, but her practical introduction to using templates came with her more recent uses of Macromedia Dreamweaver, a web-authoring software program. The ease with which a writer can develop a webtext that uses both textual and visual rhetoric seems astounding when compared with older software and authoring codes. This ease, which suggests--often falsely--a nearly transparent writing process from text to hypertext, is certainly more complex than it looks at first glance. The promises, challenges, and problems of superimposing a text-based model in a hypertext world have been raised frequently within the literature of technorhet/composition, and they are raised again within this CoverWeb. Cheryl, on the other hand, was introduced theoretically to blogs years ago, but she only found a reason to start "keeping" a blog last December despite the fact that she has been teaching composition and design in digital environments for over eight years. She posts only occasionally and mostly for a small audience of family and friends; it seems to be a simpler way to stay in "mass contact" than through emailed life-event updates. The use of a one-button install of the blogging program WordPress converted her, and the program's templates allow her to quickly log in, write an entry, and post it online. While she has conflicting reactions about the lack of design involved in using a blogging template, many users/teachers appreciate this aspect of online writing spaces. Several of the webtexts in this CoverWeb address this affordances and complications of not thinking about design when writing online. Leah, however, was introduced very recently in both theoretical and practical ways to these online writing spaces--especially blogs, wikis, and Drupal--only two years ago and within a six-month time span. Although she had been using computers since the early 1980s and had designed an online synchronous writing lab, she had never used online writing spaces for writing. Even when designing spaces, she had always used templates and only recently learned to code HTML. Then, Leah used wikis and blogs in a rhetoric and technology graduate course one summer, used blogs to teach an online, first-semester writing course later that summer, and by fall was using a combination of Blackboard and Drupal in a computerized writing classroom. The crash course in online writing spaces was wonderful, terrible, and--in the best possible way--educational. Some of the students (Leah included) struggled deeply with the open world of the web with blogs. They also had trouble with the wiki's openness to editing by outside contributors. And by the time she got to Drupal, the very unbound nature of the platform drew her creatively and intellectually, and yet it caused her to give it up for first year college English uses. Her story especially sounds like a tangled web, which we think can be the very best kind. As users of technology, the CoverWeb editorial team places ourselves, somewhat to our surprise, in the middle of a "usage wave." In the academic world, the first users of new technologies start the wave--almost always with full enthusiasm and a courageous willingness to forge the way. The second, or middle, group (of which we generally consider ourselves a part) acts as questioners who point out both the disadvantages of new technologies and their possible uses both in scholarship and educational settings. Professionally, we tend to learn technologies as they begin entering the mainstream, but before they are at the peak of popularity (or, is it notoriety?)--at which point we often turn to other mid-point technologies. Finally, it is the popularity and/or notoriety of technologies for rhetoric and composition professionals that seem to attract the third wave of users, in which at times we certainly must count ourselves (like Beth's recent uses of hypertext authoring software and Cheryl's blog encounter). For us, this CoverWeb is a sign that we have come to the beginning of the second wave of online writing spaces. Our call for webtexts asked authors to question as well as to present their research and use of online spaces. Those questions are a part of the rhetorical processes that we must undergo to appreciate the affordances (and disadvantages) that these technologies hold both theoretically and practically for writing studies. The questions that we brought to this issue came directly out of our experiences as teachers, learners, scholars, and editors. Our questions included:
The issues inherent in this last question were demonstrated most specifically for us in the editorial process for this CoverWeb issue, especially in relation to two webtexts: Anders Fagerjord's "Prescripts: Authoring with Templates" and Susan Loudermilk Garza and Tommy Hern's "Something Wiki This Way Comes--Or Not!" Fagerjord's javascripted text quickly taught us how rapidly changing technologies can affect our reading processes; for example, his webtext could not be viewed in older browsers, making a significant portion of it unreadable for some users and, initially, for two of us editors. While this webtext doesn't overtly address the catch-phrases of blogs, wikis, and Drupal, the artifact of javascript-as-design presents readers with a different online writing (and reading) space, thus raising the larger issue of how readers determine and negotiate what is important in a scholarly text. Garza and Hern's webtext also caused us to rethink our scholarly editorial processes. Because the text about educational uses of wikis was written in a wiki , the editorial team debated whether to make that open, editable version the one we published or whether to publish a static version of the site. (As it turned out, the Kairos server doesn't yet support active wikis--so our options included linking to the offsite server from within the journal's framework.) We questioned the possible effects of publishing the editable version. For example, what would be our impetus for proofreading and editing the text when in practice any reader could change it to suit her taste, style, or even her own content? Indeed, what editorial process should we use? Our decision, one that we only now are articulating, was made by virtue of our ultimate indecision. We edited the wiki using the wiki's editorial affordances, returned it to the authors for their review, and now we post it to our readers, who have many of the same editorial abilities and responsibilities as we have had in this publication process. Readers have the ability to see, for example, the revision suggestions we asked the authors to make, as well as our shift in tone as we crafted those suggestions over time--from first, immediate reactions to the text, which are a reflection of us as reader-editors (and specifically of Cheryl, she admits, who was the first to start editing it), to (we hope) rhetorically sophisticated, author-friendly responses more appropriate to a traditional author query. The openness of a wiki, is, in fact, a specific affordance that Leah first raised as potentially problematic in relation to composition classrooms. In one correspondence, she wrote:
As teachers and scholars, we find ourselves wondering whether such technology that can be used to great advantage in more advanced composition, professional writing, technical communication, and creative writing classes simply does not belong in the first-year college writing curriculum. With these varied questions and issues in mind, we bring this collection to you, our readers. We invite you to read the CoverWeb with questions of your own and use the webtexts to challenge your budding or closely-held concepts of this new era of online writing. The Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center Collective (Bill Hart-Davidson, Ellen Cushman, Jeff Grabill, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, and Jim Porter) start us off with the question many writing instructors have begun to face: "Why Teach Digital Writing?" The authors take us through arguments faculty members can use to empower their own positions for incorporating digital literacy in the writing classroom. The webtext encourages readers to question their level of tech-willingness and invites focused consideration of physical and online spaces in writing pedagogy. In addition, the authors invite readers to take the next step in the process: "This webtext is as much toolbox as it is anything else. We present it in a variety of forms and in various voices and registers, choices we have made to make sure that everything here can be appropriated. Used, that is, by you." In "Prescripts: Authoring with Templates" Anders Fagerjord considers the way web authoring templates affect the teaching of writing as well as the writing itself. "We cannot escape templates and their prescripts, but every user should ideally be aware of them, be able to choose to work with them or against them, and then also choose alternative templates when available and suitable," Fagerjord posits. And by making us aware of the technology behind the curtain, Fagerjord asks us to keep questioning how we teach with and about such tools. In "Something Wiki This Way Comes--Or Not," Susan Loudermilk Garza and Tommy Hern present their argument that wikis, by virtue of being open source, help students reach a fuller understanding of "[t]heories of writing as process and of knowledge and language as social constructs." They also address the issue of how wikis can help students learn to collaborate because of the open-editing feature wikis have. [NOTE: You will need a password to enter and read the text. It is *wiki* (with no asterisks).] Tim Lindgren presents the world of blogging communities in "Blogging Places: Locating Pedagogy in the Whereness of Weblogs," focusing on the Ecotone blog as a model for place-based communities of writers. These blog writers ask, "In what ways can blogging help foster a deeper sense of place and encourage reflection on the relationship between place and identity?" Lindgren explores the genre of place-based writing as a comparative model for teachers who are considering how blogs can be used in composition classrooms. Finally, we'd like to point out that Drupal, although it is not considered in this issue, is a tool that must be on the list of contemporary online writing space technologies. Drupal is open source, but classroom controlled. The administrator can make of it almost anything he or she wants. It can allow for collaboration but also for limiting collaboration. It can be a source of information as well as a connection point to other spaces. As always, there are issues to contend with. For instance, some users consider the learning curve for Drupal too high, exactly because it is so open, so pliable, so blank a slate. We would love to hear feedback from Drupal users (as well as other online writing space users), to fill in the blank slate of that topic in this CoverWeb. We'd be interested in publishing such feedback either as Letters to the Editor or as a webtext, if appropriate. Another avenue of feedback is also Kairosnews, perhaps the most appropriate response mechanism given the topic of this CoverWeb (Kairosnews is built with Drupal.) We believe that this CoverWeb is a sign that new writing technologies have reached the second wave of adoption and use in our profession's scholarship and pedagogy. Wikis, blogs, templates, Drupal, and other online writing spaces have arrived. Questions about them are being asked in earnest, and we invite you to join in that conversation.
Leah Cassorla, Assistant CoverWeb Editor +++++++++ (1) See, e.g. the Rogers Adoption/Innovation curve at <http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_rogers_innovation_adoption_curve.html> |