CW2001 Program - Computers and Writing

5:15 — 6:30 Session E.2
Is There an Author in This Text
RB 107
Danielle DeVoss, moderator
Paula Rosinski
Erasing the Subject in Computer-Composition:
Towards a Theory of Situated Authorship
This paper examines computer-composition cultural artifacts (textbooks
and handbooks) and theoretical lore (journals and edited compilations)
and argues — based on the anxieties they reveal about students; the
assumptions they make about teaching writing and textuality; and their
rhetoric of technology — that teaching writing in computer-mediated
environments still tends to discipline students as modernist subjects
in need of some type of empowerment (cultural, social, or personal).
Kathleen Gillis-Barnhill
“User-Centered” Documents:
Radical Departure or More of the Same
This presentation considers whether or not our acceptance of the term
“user-centered” lulls us into believing that a user can be easily defined.
It also examines the question of whether “user-centered” represents a
radical departure from prior conception of audience or merely is more
of the same.
Jessica Reyman
Computer-Assisted Collaborative Writing
and the Emerging Context for an “Egoless” Approach
This paper is an exploration of such changes and how the redefinition
of the author affects students’ understanding of writing. My argument
relies on a classroom study of the collaborative efforts and perceptions
of students in an introductory technical writing classroom. The study
explores the effects of several computer-assisted co-authoring strategies,
such as participation in electronic discussion lists to explore ideas and
resolve conflict and the sharing and revising text online, on fostering
more dialogic collaborative writing models in place of the hierarchical
and linear.
Computers & Writing 2001
61