CW2001 Program - Computers and Writing

11:15 — 12:30 Session B.2
Gender, Identity, and Community Online
RB 106
Lisa Gerrard, moderator
Danielle DeVoss
“This page is under construction”:
Reading Women Shaping Online Identities
I offer an analysis of the Web sites of several female students: first, to
attend to the gender gap in Web-based research; second, to attend to
the gap in research focused on identity formation in online realms; and,
finally, to offer teachers specific strategies to consider as they integrate
Web-based research and publication into their classrooms. Focusing on
the Web pages these students create leads to a better understanding of
the more general or global actions our students take when they read
and write Web pages. This knowledge will lead us to the productive
techniques we must develop to read and write our own Web pages.
Liz Rohan
Constructing the Public Sphere:
(Web) Publishing As Pedagogy in the 21 st Century
To theorize about the value of this new venue for authorship, I apply
Benedict Anderson’s oft-cited theory of Imagined communities (1991)
to the text making now possible via cyberspace and particularly in my
own classroom. I argue that the imagining of community through
shared texts not only accelerates students’ motivation to communicate
their own experiences and values through words and images, but it
potentially transforms student writers’ relationships to one another
beyond the virtual world. Moreover, this sharing of texts situates the
classroom as part of, and extending into, the public sphere.
Computers & Writing 2001
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