CW2001 Program - Computers and Writing

3:45 — 5:00 Session D.1
Distance Over Time:
A Historical Odyssey of Rhetoric and Distance Education
RB 107
Claudine Keenan, moderator
Kevin Eric DePew
Disrupted Discourse:
The Evolution of Our Rhetorical Expectations in Distance Education
The speaker focuses on the written discourse that is often necessary to
communicate in a computer-mediated distance education context.
Communication through word processing files, Web pages, synchronous
communication and asynchronous communication has been problematic
because each interlocutor–the administrator, the designer, the instructor,
the student–has disparate expectations of how writing shapes the
experience of the “classroom without walls.”
Julia Romberger
Writing Instruction in Distance Education:
Stuck in the Mailbox
This speaker follows in the tracks of many early compositionists and
applies the concepts of audience and social-construction from classical
rhetorical theory to a contemporary pedagogical concern, which in the
case of distance education is the use of synchronous and asynchronous
technologies for communicating. These technologies can not only
enhance the experience, but building communities within them can
enhance the students sense of a context for their writing.
Bridget Ruetenik
Distance Education in the History of Rhetoric:
An Exploration of Values
In many ways, composition studies has evolved out of product-based
pedagogy. But distance education especially calls our attention to particular
values regarding literacy that were perhaps overlooked, or not so relevant,
in the paradigm shift so famously articulated by Maxine Hairston. This presenter
will trace the evolution of existing values about literacy to nineteenth-century
rhetorical practices and suggest ways to investigate their effects on our
teaching practices in distanced writing environments.
Computers & Writing 2001
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