PROPOSAL ABSTRACTS - Computers and Writing

PROPOSAL ABSTRACTS
from
The Fifth Computers and Writing Conference
May 12-14,1989 - .Unlverslty of Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Sponsored by:
The University of Minnesota
Gallaudet University
and
The Bread Loaf School of English
With Funding From:
The Annenberg/CPB Project
Apple Computer, Inc.
IBM
Chairs:
Trent Batson, Gallaudet University
Geoffrey Slrc, The University of Minnesota
William Wright, The Bread Loaf School
Abstracts published by Gallaudet University, Washington, DC

PROPOSAL ABSTRACTS
from
The Fifth Computers and Writing Conference
May 12-14, 1989 - University of Minnesota
MinneapoUs, Minnesota
Sponsored by:
The University of Minnesota
Gallaudet University
and
The Bread Loaf School of English
With Funding From:
The Annenberg/CPB Project
Apple Computer, Inc.
IBM
Chairs:
Trent Batson, Gallaudet University
Geoffrey Slrc, The University of Minnesota
William Wright, The Bread Loaf School
Conference Coordinator:
Leslie A. Denny
Department of Prolessiooal Development and
Conference Services
The University of Minnesota
216 Nolte Center, 315 Pillsbury Drive SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
For addidional copies of Proposal Abstracts, contact:
Dr. Trent Batson
HMB 120
Gallaudet University
Washington, DC 20002
(202)651-5494
Abstracts published by Gaffaudet University, Washington, DC

NOTES ABOUT ABSTRACfS
The abstracts that are included in this publication are those that were submitted to the conference
review panel for acceptance to the program. They are printed as is, without editing. Since they
were written to the review panel as proposals, they are now presented out of context and may
therefore contain puzzling references or seemingly inappropriate comments. However, we felt that
the usefulness of having abstracts handy at the Conference outweighed whatever minor confusion
may ensue from allowing ourselves no time for editing.
The abstracts are alphabetically arranged by nrst author or contact person; they are not cross·
indexed, so if you can't find an author, check the program for other names to look under.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Or. Edward E. Corbett, Jr., and Ms. Leslie Proctor at the Program/Conference Support
Unit in the CoUege for Continuing Education at GaUaudet University for their work in preparing
and printing these abstracts and to Dr. Ann Davidson, Provost, for providing funds to support the
work.
II

TABLE OF CONTENTS
NOTES ABOUT ABSTRACTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ADAMS, BARBARA
Empowering the Unde"epresented Student
ANDERSEN, WALLIS MAY
Using Learning Tool With the Novice WnOter
ANSON, CHRIS M.
Computer Deep Cases for Writing Instruction
BALESTER, VALERIE
BUTLER, WAYNE
HALASEK, KAY
PETERSON, NANCY
Panel _. Empowering Students as Readers, Writers, and Thinkers
BARKER, THOMAS
From Classroom to Network: Issues for Instructors
BARTON, ELLEN
RAY,RUTH
Computer Literacy From Bottom to Top
BENJAMIN, JAMES
The Use of PC Style Programs to Teach Business Communication
BERTCH, JULIE
English Composition on the Conference:
Creating a Community of Distance Students With CoSy
II
II
1
2
2
3
10
11
13
14
BETZA, RUTH
CROW, CONNIE
The Writer, the Editor, and the Macintosh as Collaborators in Technical Writing 15
III

BLACK, LAUREL
ROULEAU, KATIIY
Teaching Around Technology: An Ethnographic Study of a
Computer·Based College Composition Class
BODE,JAMES
REDMAN, TIM
Genesis of the LANWRJTER PROJECT AT OHIO STATE AT LIMA
BROSNAHAN, LEGER
A Poor Man's Network System for Computer-Assisted Camp Classrooms
BUMP, JEROME
Testing Computer-Assisted Class Discussion
CHATFIELD, HALE
The Potential of INRAC as a Language for
Designing CAl Tutorials: An Exnmple Involving Poetry
COLLINS, TERRENCE
Learning Disabled Writers Using Word Processing:
Attitude and Performance Change
CREW, LOUIS
Computing Stepladders, Demon Traps, Cock's Feathers and Black Patches
CUSTER, DAVID
Turbulence of Flow: Observations on Watching Writing
DAVIS, KEN
Toward a Hypertext on Writing
DiMATTEO, ANTIIONY J.
Under Erasure: A Theory for Network Writing in the Basic English Classroom
DiPARDO, ANNE
DiPARDO, MIKE
Towards the Metapersonal Essay: Exploring the
Potential of Hypertext in tile Composition Class
17
19
21
22
24
25
25
27
27
27
28
iv

DUIN, ANN HILL
Collaborative Writing and Telecommunications:
University to University -- Course to Course
FAIRCHILD, KIM MICHAEL
MEREDITH, L. GREG
WEXELBLAT, ALAN D.
A Metaphorically Organized Interface Environment for the
Development of Large Software Systems by Teams of Designers
GALICA, GREGORY
HUGHES, BRADLEY
LADINSKY, JACK
Extending the Discussion: A Bulletin Board System for
Integra/ing In/omwl Writing Into Classes
31
33
35
GEORGE, LAURIE
KREMERS, MARSHALL
COOPER, ELIZABETH
Panel: Computers, Authon°ty, and the TeaChing of Writing -- Three Perspectives 37
GERRARD, LISA
Computers, Writing FaCUlty, and the Politics of Marginality
GREENLEAF, CYNTHIA
Changing a Writing Classroom Into a Community of WnOters
HAWISHER, GAIL
Writing. TeChnology, and the Activity of Teaching
HERRMANN, ANDREA W.
Evaluation in the Electronic Classroom: A Double Edge Sword -- Or Is It
mLLIGOSS, SUSAN
BARNES, KAREN
BENSON, CHRIS
CRENSHAW, DIANE
MARTIN, ESTHER
POSTON, BILL
Panel -- Becoming Insiders: Computer Conferencing in a Graduate Seminar
38
39
42
44
45
v

HOULETfE, FORREST
Software That Knows How You Write: An IntelJigent Assistant for Writers
HUNTLEY, JOHN
Starting Up a Macintosh Network for Writing Ins/ruction:
Caveats, Problems, Promises, Pitfalls, and Modest Successes
KAPLAN, NANCY
As We May Teach: Some Problems With Computer-Supported
Collaboration in the Writing Cum'culum
47
48
49
KEMP, FRED
Computer-Based Collaborative Wn'ting Instruction Withoul a Computer Network 50
KOZMA, ROBERT B.
The Impact of Computer-Based Tools and
Rhetorical Prompts on Writing Processes and Products
LANNOM, REBECCA
Creating a Computer Classroom for Teaching Wn'ting
LAZARUS,KATHLEEN
Finding an Audience for English 1 Essays:
Using Computers for Cross-Cultural Communication
LeBLANC, PAUL
The Development of Computer Software for Wn'ting
LOGAN, SHIRLEY W.
Socia/Interaction Among Writers, Tutors, and
Teachers in a Writing Computer Lab for Undergraduates
LOUTH, RICHARD
McALUSTER, CAROLE
The Effect of Word Processing on the Quality of Able Writers' Compositions
McDAID, JOHN
Breaking Frames: Toward an Ecology of Hypennedia
51
52
52
54
55
56
58
vi

MARX, MICHAEL STEVEN
NYDAHL, JOEL
Peer Critiquing Through Telecommunications:
The Intercollegiate Collaborative Writing Class
60
MOULTIIROP, STUART
Sharing the Fantasy: Creating a Discourse Community With Interactive Fiction 62
KAUFER, DAVID
NEUWIRTII, CHRISTINE
PALMQUIST, MICHAEL
Panel -- Network Support for Col/aborative Writing Curricula: Theory and Practice 63
O'CONNOR, JOHN
Teaching Collaborative Writing on a Computer
PARLETT, JAMES
CONFER: A Prototype System for Knowledge-Based Prewn·ting
PEEK, GEORGE S.
Developing an Overall Composition Environment
Under MS-DOS: Putting Pieces Together
PEYTON, JOy KREEFT
Technological Innovation Meets Institution:
Birth of Creativity or Murder of a Great Idea
RALEIGH, DONNA
A Study of the Effects of Word Processing
Expen·ence on the Revising Strategies of Inexperienced
Writers at the University of WlSconsin, Eau Claire
KANDALL,NEIL
The Influence on Writers of the User Interfaces of Composition Software
REYNOLDS, TOM
SIRC, GEOFFREY
Is On-Line On-Task
ROSS, DONALD
Beyond NeXT
65
66
68
69
70
71
72
73
vii

SAYERS, DENNIS
Language Attitude Change of Students in US. Upper Elementary
Bilingual Program Classrooms Participating in Computer-Based
Exchanges With Puerto Rican Sister Classes
SCHWARTZ, HELEN J.
BALESTRJ, DIANE
GALLAGHER, BRJAN
KAPLAN, NANCY
NEUWIRTH, CHRJSTINE
HARJNG-SMITH, TORJ
Na/loMi Panel on Writing Instruction
SCfUPKE, RAE C.
Understanding Student Success in the Electronic Collaborative
Writing Classroom: A Study of Learning Styles and Temperament Types
SELFE, CYNTHIA L
Creating Computer-Based Forums for Academic Discourse:
Electronic Spaces for Community, Dissent, and Learning
SHIRK, HENRIETTA NICKELS
Hype"hetoric: Teaching Students to Develop Hypertext Discourse Models
SMITH, CATHERJNE F.
Reconsidering Hypertext
SNYDER, ILANA
A Genre Approach to the Evaluation of Computer Writing
SNYDER, !LANA
Writing With Word Processors:
The Relationship Between Writing Genre and Writing Quality
SUDOL, RONALD A.
Generic Word Processing: Teaching Word Processed
Composing Without a Computer Lab
SUGANO, MIYOKO
Integrating Word ProceSSing Into College Writing Courses
74
76
78
79
80
82
84
86
88
89
viii

TAYLOR, PAUL H.
Computer Networks, Discourse, Communities, and Chaos
TOBIN, LAD
Wn"ting Between the Lines: Embedded Text in Collaborative Essays
91
92
TUMAN, MYRON
~Cavems Measureless /0 Man~:
The Prospects for Pos/-Typographical Literacy
94
WAYMAN, WENDY
HULL, GLYNDA
GREENLEAF, CYNDY
Student-Centered Software Development
WERIER, CLIFFORD
Computer lAb as a Classroom
WRESCH, WILLIAM
Computer Analysis of Writing: How Did We Get Here of All Places
ZARABOZO, GLORIA
CODDINGTON, LYNN
Exp/oring the Creation of Hypertexts: Three Case Studies of Col/ege Writers
96
98
99
101
ix

Adams, Barbara -- Ithaca College
EMPQWERING THE UNDERREPRESENTED STUDENT
For the past 16 years at Ithaca College, entering EOP /HEOP freshmen [those students
assisted by the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) and the Higher Education Opportunity
Program (HEOP)] (who by race or economic status are underrepresented in the college community)
have had the advantage of a five-week, non-credit program held on campus the summer before they
enter college. Current students follow an intensive schedule of developmental and college prep
courses in Writing, and computer classes. In a series of four one-hour sessions during their first
three or four weeks on campus, EOP/HEOP students are taught, as a separate training, the
essentials of word processing. In small groups of seven to 10, students learn the basics of
WordPerfect 5.0 including spell-check and thesaurus, with an emphasis on moving text.
Reinforcement is provided by both freewriting and focused exercises, as well as by the immediate
application of the newly acquired skill in the students' others courses. The training course is
conducted by three instructors (a writing professor and two undergraduate assistants), so extensive
individual attention is assured.
Through faculty observation, a pre- and post-training student questionnaire, as well as a
recent follow-up study based on the self-assessments of EOP /HEOP freshmen, sophomores, and
juniors continuing at the college, we have acquired a strong sense of the effectiveness of teaching
traditionally under-represented students word processing before they enter college. Although half
of each year's freshmen group have had some word processing experience, only a sma ll number are
proficient, and many are not familiar with WordPerfect, the program widely used at the college.
Most of these students enter with a strong belief in the value of computer applications, if not yet
the skills to use them. They initially welcome word processing as an easily-mastered tool that
enables them to minimize any handwriting, readability, typing, and spelling problems that may have
hindered their composing process in the past. Virtually all continue to use word processing in their
subsequent college courses, and the majority believe that using word processing helps them to be
more comfortable, efficient, and logical thinkers and writers. The fact that current writing research
does not clearly confirm such efficacy does not undermine the confidence that acquiring word
processing skills clearly gives under-represented and underprepared students. In their selfassessments,
those students who have completed from one to five semesters of college courses
describe at length the specific effects they believe using word processing has had on their writing
habits and revising strategies.
Learning word processing early provides these students with a psychological as well as a
practical edge. An expensive, potentially inaccessible, and power-conferring technology is now
accessible to them. They enter college with a skiJI that the majority of our entering freshmen have
not yet mastered or even acquired; in their required first-year writing courses they often assist their
professor in the class' one-hour word processing training session. For many EOP IHEOP students,
learning word processing first is the most effective way to approach other computer applications;
familiarity with basic computer functions reduces their apprehension about learning more
sophisticated programs. Most cite their early experience with word processing as a significant factor
in deciding to take subsequent computer courses.

Andersen. Wallis May -- Oakland University
USING LEARNING TOOL WITH THE NQVlCE WRITER
Beginning in fall 1987, coordinated studies examining how computer software affects novice
writers' work have been conducted under the sponsorship of the National Center for Research to
Improve Postsecondary Teaching and Learning (NCRIPTAL) at the University of Michigan.
Preliminary results of this study will be presented at the March 1989 Conference on College
Composition and Communication. My focus within this study has been on the hypertext program
Learning Tool (Macintosh 512K minimum hardware configuration). My talk at the ecce will
emphasize how certain prompts embedded in Learning Tool affect student writing products, with
comparisons of how novice and intermediate writers use the software.
Using examples from the protocol transcripts from this same study (which I am to get by
January 31), at the May Computers and Writing Conference I would like to talk about what
Learning Tool is, how it could be adapted for writing classroom use, and what its strengths and
weaknesses are in relation to other tools that can be used for prompting such as outliners and word
processors. My paper would, essentially, continue interpreting the results of the NCRJPTAL study
in the context of previous work I have done on various kinds of Prompting programs (CCCC 1988,
MComputer Invention Programs Today: Accessible and Authorable"). Since I don't yet have the
protocol transcripts, this abstract is necessarily general. Hypertext software, however, as it combines
the features of text-based prompting programs and graphics systems, seems appropriate to support
the differing learning styles of student writers and to assist them in atomatizing planning processes.
Anson, Chris M. -- University of Minnesota
CQMPUTER DEEP CASES FOR WRITING INSTRUCTION
Rhetorical cases for writing have been used in the past to help students learn about the
relationship between context and particular choices in language as they write. A rhetorical case
places the student in the role of someone trying to solve a problem, through writing, in a realistic
setting. Most published cases (e.g., Tedlock & Jarvie; Field & Weiss) are very static, providing little
background information. In a typical case for technical writing. for example, the writer plays the
role of an engineer working in the R&D division of a large company. A project has developed
unforseen problems and the writer must send a memo to colleagues in upper management
explaining why the project has been delayed and requesting more time and funds to continue.
Because the writer has no more information than that which is provided in the brief description,
further knowledge about the context cannot inform his or her choices of words, syntax, content,
voice or persona, or audience appeals.
In a project funded by Apple computers and the University of Minnesota, I have been
developing "deep cases" -- complex and descriptively rich scenarios -- by building banks of
information accessible by the user of the program. The user moves back and forth between the
information (organized by a hierarchy of menus) and an editor where she is composing a response
to the case. I developed a prototype deep case on the IBM PC using Ross and Fossum's ACCESS
2

program; in the process, I also created a tutorial to acquaint students with the program. Under the
provisions of the grant, I am presently expanding the concept of computer deep cases by using
Hypercard on the MacIntosh to create several types of cases for different writing courses.
Essentially, the program involves a dynamic interplay of writing and learning. The student
is provided with a BACKGROUND to the case, available by scrolling through several pages of
descriptive material. This background information culminates in a rhetorical PROBLEM; for
example, in the role of a veterinarian, the student must write a letter to a client, elderly and wealthy
Mrs. Thompson, who is recovering from the recent loss of her husband by vacationing at her remote
cottage in the Turks and Caicos Islands, communicable only by mail. In this letter, the writer must
explain to Mrs. Thompson why her aging English Spaniel Beckett, which she had boarded at the
clinic, has died suddenly following an emergency operation for bladder stones. The student may
begin writing this letter by moving to the EDITOR, the word·processing part of the software; or
she may begin learning more about the context by accessing information about the client or the
dog. about the history of the clinic, about the circumstances surrounding the dog's death, and so
on. Not all the information is directly relevant to the task, which makes the program instructionally
powerful, since teachers and students can talk about how certain kinds of information led to certain
rhetorical and linguistic decisions.
The information is organized hierarchically, first by entering the INFORMATION BANK
and then by opening up specific DEPOSIT BOXES (e.g., background on Mrs. Thompson; files from
the State Department of Health specifying how long an animal's corpse may be kept in a clinic
before burial; billing and partnership agreements; etc.). Each deposit box contains several ITEMS,
which in turn contain from five to twenty screens of information and documents. Students may
return to the Information Bank within the Box, or may return to the Editor to work on the task.
Before entering each deposit box, the user is asked to type in a brief justification for wanting
the information. After receiving the information, the user is then asked how it might figure in the
creation of the text. These purpose statements may be used instructionally to illustrate the
relationships between context, purpose and language in the writing process.
In this presentation, I will provide a brief background on casebook rhetoric and the theory
of deep cases; describe and demonstrate the program; offer implications for other CAl in writing;
and suggest some avenues for research using these sorts of programs. The audience will be
provided with hand·outs and a bibliography.
Balester, Valerie •• Texas A&M University
Butler, Wayne;
Halasek, Kay;
and
Peterson, Nancy .• The University of Texas at Austill
PANEL·· EMPQWERING STUDENTS AS READERS. WRITERS. AND THINKERS
Over the past three years, the Computer Research Lab at The University of Texas at Austin
has attempted to enhance traditional English curricula with computer technology. Our computer·
3

...
based classroom features a local area network that links individual microcomputers with real-time
and flIe-time communications software, such as electronic mail. This configuration allows not only
for a wider range of instantaneous feedback from a community of teachers but also from a
community of peers within and among classes.
By bringing together social-epistemic rhetoric, collaborative learning pedagogy, and
networked computer technology, we have designed a curriculum that liberates and empowers
students. Historically, the problems of the traditional writing classroom have included passivity,
authority, and conformity. We recognize that recent pedagogical techniques. especially collaborative
learning. have already done much to address these problems by creating interpretive communities
within the classroom and structuring activities that encourage social interaction and thereby
empower the students with authority for their own knowledge. Nevertheless, the traditional
classroom setting creates logistical problems for collaborative learning. The requisite social
interaction requires complex patterns of text sharing and group discussion. Local area networks
ease the logistical problems, making information management and social interaction more efficient
and effective. Our papers -- which describe methods of team teaching, techniques for teaching the
research paper and strategies for creating electronic interpretive communities -- all emphasize how
the computer-based collaborative curriculum helps students develop as writers, readers, and thinkers
by giving them better access to the dialogue of the interpretive community that makes meaning.
Sharing Autllon·ty: Collaborative Teaching in a Computer-Based Writing Course
by Balester, Valerie -- Tews A&M University
and
Halasek, Kay -- The University of Tews at Austin
This essay addresses a practice rarely undertaken and seldom discussed in conversations
about collaborative learning-the collaborative teaching of writing. In the summer of 1987, the
authors and a third colleague each taught one section of Rhetoric and Composition to provisional
students in the Computer Research Lab classroom at The University of Texas at Austin. The
sections, identical in organization, content, instruction, and evaluation, were designed to facilitate
student writing and thinking through the collaborative pedagogy described by Kenneth Bruffee (A
Short Course in Writing). The course was in may respects experimental, and not the least of the
problems was teaching in five weeks the use of the computer network, especially the mail, the word
processing program, and the "real-time" message system. Nevertheless, the students adopted an
active rather than a passive learning style. In teaching the course collaboratively, we redefined our
roles by sharing authority with one another and with the students, creating, as Paulo Freire
advocates, a problem-posing environment in which students became student-teachers and teachers
became teacher-students.
Theoretical Construct
In defining the goals of college-level writing courses, David Bartholomae argues that among
a teacher's primary responsibilities are introducing and acquainting students with the discourse
communities of academia. In his essay, RInventing the University,R he characterizes the teacher as
a representative of the academic discourse community and the student as a novice who must learn
to write Ras though he were a member of the academyR (135). Collaborative learning pedagogy
4

aims at just such an integration, achieved in part by empowering students within groups of peers.
Students realize, with the support of their peers, an individual authority as weU as the authority of
their group. At the same time, they are introduced, through texts and through the person of a
teacher, to a larger and more powerful community that they wish to enter. They aid and support
each other in their attempts to reach this goal, while the teacher guides and evaluates their efforts.
Authority entails the making of meaning or knowledge. In this pedagogy the making of
meaning is neither the sole prerogative nor responsibility of the teacher. As Belenky et. al. have
suggested, we presented a "connected" pedagogy the moved away from the traditional Western
-banking" concept of education condemned by Paulo Freire in which students are filled, like empty
receptacles, with knowledge poured in by the teacher (Womens Ways of Knowing). Instead, students
were actively involved in reading. discussing, and critiquing one another's texts and the texts of
members of the academic community.
The seat of power shifts -- though not completely, for teachers still hold the ultimate
position of power as course designers and evaluators. Belenky, et. at. described a successful teacher
as a "midwife" or "mother' who "assist[s] the students in giving birth to their own ideas, in making
their own tacit knowledge explicit and elaborating it" (217). In a collaborative learning model, the
instructors, as "mothers," are concerned with preserving and fostering growth in their "children" by
assuring them of the importance, relevance, and worth of their ideas. In more familiar metaphors,
the instructors became what Ken Macrorie (Twenty Teachers) has called "enablers" and undertake
what Peter Elbow has described as the "believing game" (Writing Without Teachers).
Yet we were troubled by one aspect of the coUaborative learning model -- the assumption
that one person could embody the academic discourse community. In fact, our experiences and
theory told us that knowledge emerges from struggle for consensus. What better way to model the
academy that to present students with a trio of teachers working actively together to make sense
of texts, assign grades, and guide novices in joining them Such collaboration would have been
virtually impossible without our computer system.
A description or the course: "Collaborative Learning With Computers"
Throughout the five-week session, during which classes met daily, students wrote a series
of essays, peer critiques, and responses to peer critiques, all directed toward a final research paper.
The series of assignments, from Bruffee's Short Course, began with a review and a personal response
to a particular text. In the second assignment, students reviewed that text's critical reception. The
third and fourth assignments required that students accumulate and evaluate secondary sources.
This sequence is an effective means for introducing incoming freshman to the demands and rigors
of the academic discourse community while also reminding them of the importance of their own
experiences and opinions. However, because the Bruffee model provides a lengthy list of primary
texts for review, students have little opportunity for meaningful discussions with peers and teachers
about the issues the texts raise. Furthermore, few teachers are able to read aU the books on the
list, making it more difficult for them to evaluate the book reviews. To alleviate this problem, we
narrowed the list to six texts. Each instructor read two of the six. Because our computer system
allowed communication not only between individuals in each section but also across sections, we
created small communities of peers, each working with the same primary text. The communities
also had at their disposal a "local expert" on the text, the instructor, who became a "participantobserver"
within the small groups (Belenky, et al. Women s Ways of Knowing, 224-25). Finally, the
5

instructors graded collaboratively (i.e., by aU three teachers).
The three sections became a single class through the power of the computer's "file-time M
(LAN e-mail) and "real-time" (instantaneous) messaging systems. Although each section met at
a different time, its small communities were able, electronically, to "discuss" their primary texts. In
addition, instructors regularly communicated about the texts with the small groups they guided. The
classroom was spatially and temporally extended; cross-section communities replaced the traditional
single community of learners, and the single classroom teacher was replaced by three teachers.
We were concerned that three teachers would simply triple the instructor's authority. By
serving as teaching assistants in each other's classes and by using the computer for cross-section
communication, we diffused that authority. We also discovered that we could literally illustrate the
ways in which decisions about writing instruction are made, since we could never be counted upon
to agree. For example, we might, in the classroom or during computer "discussions" openly argue
about a stylistic point or a reading of a text. In other words, we did not attempt to hide from the
students the experimental and experiential nature of the course. In the end, we did not completely
succeed in sharing authority with our students. Fresh from high school, they were not altogether
willing to take responsibility for their learning. But they did adopt active rather than passive
learning styles. And we did successfully diffuse authority among us, modeling for them something
that approaches the true academic discourse community.
The Sounds of Silence: Listening for Difference in the Computer-Networked Collaborative Writing
Classroom
by Peterson, Nancy L. -- The University of Texas at Austill
The purpose of this paper is to examine the unique ways in which a computer-networked,
collaborative learning composition classroom has helped student writers become successful revisers
and rethinkers of what it means to be "culturally literate M citizens. For many years now, writing
teachers have approached composition from the position that writing, like ontological maturity, is
a process and should be taught as such, and that one of the most important components of the
writing process is revision. Though many scholars advocate pedogogies which teach students to use
revision, Linda Flower and John Hayes have also accurately reported that practicing revision does
not guarantee that students' writing will improve; in fact, it may even grow worse. Why is this so
I propose that students' ability to perform successful revision has as much to do with their
understanding of the implications of what they believe and where those beliefs come from as it does
with their cognitive development, ability to work collaboratively in groups, or audience awareness.
The reality is that we live in a political world of personal, professional, and national ideologies. As
a consequence, teachers must be committed to the task of helping their students determine and
refine what they know and how they can most effectively used that knowledge to think and write
critically about their world. Such a task is becoming increasingly complicated by recent attempts
by such educators as E. D. Hirsch, Jr. to homogenize American cultural diversity through simplistic
"culturally literate definitions. My own understanding of Hirsch's positions has lead me to the
University of Texas Computer Research Lab where, for two years, I have been teaching writing
classes examining concepts of cultural literacy in a computer-networked, collaborative learning
classroom. The specific program features of this classroom, which include a mail system, a word-
6

processing program, a real·time discussions forum, and file storage capability, allow my students and
me to create a community of revisers and rethinkers in a relatively low·risk, high--content
atmosphere of collaboration, consensus, and accommodation of difference.
Theoretical Construct
In 1986, David Bartholomae opened his pivotal essay, MInventing the University," with a
quotation from Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge. Part of this quotation states:
-Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of
discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it" (227). This statement has
significant implications for writing teachers whose goal it is to "empower" their students through an
examination of the diverse cultures in which they currently or eventually expect to live. It implies
that student writers need strategies for gaining access to the written, ora~ and political conventions
of language and, by association, the power issues inherent in that language. It also allows that
teachers must relinquish some authority about what constitutes "legitimate" knowledge in their
classrooms. In addition, it complicates the classical educational agenda of rhetoric as a kind of
persuasive learning process for making "good" citizens. In a writing classroom that advocates social·
epistemic models of rhetoric, teachers and students must work out the above issues as best they can.
They must struggle with their fears of speaking aloud, of writing down and duplicating their work
for others to read and analyze, of owning their world views in a public forum. They must hammer
out defmitions for such concepts as "popular" culture, "literate" culture, "dominate" culture, counter·
culture, and marginalized culture. As a consequence, collaborative learning classrooms often
encourage discussion in the classroom community in order to arrive at epistemological agreement.
In other words, reaching consensus reveals to students the presence of different viewpoints, thus
teaching them how to accommodate such differences as they attempt to establish their qualifications
as members of specific discourse communities. In such a context, however, students' learning
processes are at great risk because of the imminent possibility that dissensus can become
marginalized and/or silenced by the majority. Difference of opinion, then, might be viewed as an
aberration, a fluke, or a deviation from the norm, and not a legitimate experience worthy of
consideration.
In the face of such risks, a computer-networked collaborative composition classroom can
offer a writing teacher and her students the occasional advantage of a technologically mediated
discussion mode. In other words, networked computers offer a forum in which students and
teachers can compose written responses to each other in a less confrontational and thereby less
risky context, and from which they can take away permanent transcripts of what and why and how
they thought about specific course issues at particular moments in their educational lives as the
consequence of collaborative interaction with peers. It also allows for those students who might not
otherwise express opinions to be heard by the very physical presence of their computer input.
Networked computer classrooms require that everyone participate in the process of knowledge
creation. Thus, when students are silent in the computer classroom, it is not usuaUy because they
are afraid to speak. They are silent because they are in the process of thinking and composing and
revising on their computers.
Course Description
The specific application of the theoretical construct described above resulted in a course
which centered around E. D. Hirsch's book, Cultural Literacy, as well as a variety of reviews,
7

critiques, and proponent essays of Hirsch's conception of an educational system which can fully and
adequately teach cultural literacy to all American students. The paper assignments as well as the
drafting and revising schedule resulted in some significant revision responses and real-time
computer discussion forums in which students explored the larger context of issues that their
individual papers raised in smaller peer-critique groups. The most significant discussions, whether
in revision or discussion settings, nearly always centered on the students' belief systems about what
they perceived the role of education to be and how that role affected the ways in which individuals
become productive, responsible, "good" citizens. These discussions were honest, direct,
contemplative, diplomatic, but quite often un-self-reOexive. By this, I mean that students were more
likely to apply the rigor of Hirsch's system to those whom they perceived as "not cutting it" in
American culture (Le., undereducated, functionally illiterate, too ethnically diverse, etc.) than they
were to examine where Hirsch's system originated in the fIrst place. As the course progressed and
students became more and more trusting of the computer technology to protect them from faceto
face confrontation, they were less fearful of public sanctions and more willing to state genuine
opinions about cultural literacy and, thus more likely to invite critical responses from their peers.
The computer transcripts from these discussion sessions clearly reveal dialogues whose candidness
and honesty I have yet to encounter in a verbal class discussion, especially from students who
ordinarily will not volunteer opinions in a conventional classroom setting. Because students were
increasingly willing to put their opinions out in the open via the computer system, by the end of the
course they had received a variety of responses from the class and from myself so that they felt the
pressure to qualify many of their more strident, less defensible positions, and thus to revise some
of their beliefs in order to write their final, more philosophical papers on the complexities of
defming cultural literacy in a country as ethnically diverse as the United States. Ultimately, the
transcripts, drafts, response, and fmal papers revealed that substantial revision takes place 1) when
students are honest about what they believe; 2) when students feel safe enough to articulate their
beliefs; and 3) when students value their place in the larger community of thinkers and writers
enough to accommodate others' opinions into their own world views.
The Construction of Meaning in an Electronic lntelpretive Community
by Butler, Wayne M. -- The University of Texas in Austin
In his book Twenty Teachers, Ken Macrorie uses the Moebian Loop as a metaphor of how
successful teachers ("enablers") conduct classrooms in which polar opposites are fused. The
Moebian Loop can also represent the dynamics of the computer-based collaborative learning
literature classroom in which networked microcomputers support social views of literary criticism,
rhetoric and composition, and psycholinguistics; described the goals, objectives and curriculum of
a lower division writing-about-literature class taught in the English Department Computer Research
Lab at the University of Texas; and analyze transcripts of "real-time" discussions to demonstrate
how the social views of meaning-making can move from the theoretical domain to the practical.
In general, I demonstrate how the polarities of readers vs. writers, speakers vs. writers, meaningmakers
vs. meaning-receivers and writing vs. speaking are fused in the computer-based,
collaborative learning writing-about-literature classroom.
In "Composition Theory and Literary Theory" (Perspectives on Research and Scholarship in
8

Composition, MIA, 1985) John Clifford and John Schilb discuss the fusion of the teaching of writing
and the teaching of literature under new theoretical frameworks and note: "Writing emerges as a
process of discovery, enabling students to construct knowledge rather than simply to regurgitate
familiar truths or structural formulas. Literary study ... emerges as a dynamic event, one in which
students can be encouraged to draw upon subjective insights as well as objective perceptions as they
gradually refme their sense of a text. The act of writing and the act of reading literature can
therefore become for students mutually enhancing activities, each bolstering the other's capacity
to help students build and revise their visions of meaning" (45). Among the "new theoretical
frameworks" alluded to by Clifford and Schilb are reader·oriented literary criticism and social
constructionist versions of collaborative learning. [n Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority
of the Intelpretive Community, Stanley Fish argues that "it is interpretive communities, rather than
the text or the reader, that produce meaning" (14). Kenneth Bruffee, a social constructionist and
advocate of collaborative learning argues that collaborative learning is a manifestation ofVygotsky's
theories of language acquisition and development and the pedagogical technique models the way
knowledge is constructed by interpretive communities in the real world. By participating in the
classroom interpretive community, students learn their roles in the meaning·making process, an
experience that will prepare them to take a role in the more sophisticated interpretive communities
they are attempting to join •• the communities of educated, critical readers, writers, and thinkers.
The theories above, especially Fish's, are more descriptive than prescriptive in the sense that
creating an effective, functioning interpretive community in the traditional classroom is difficult due
to the logistics of interaction. The networked classroom, however, serves to link individuals into
the types of interpretive communities that do in fact create meaning.
The course discussed in this paper, based on The Lexington Introduction to Literature, relies
on a reader·oriented approach to literature using a computer·based collaborative pedagogy. The
general goals of the course are to have students move from subjective readers/writers to functioning
individuals in a meaning·making interpretive community. The final paper of the course asked the
students to write a research-based literary interpretation of James Joyce's The Dead in which they
supported their Mreadings" in terms of the meaning-making transaction among the reader, the text,
the local interpretive community, and the professional interpretive community.
The transcripts of one particular stage of the research paper process, the real-time
discussions, reveal the various ways members of the local interpretive community interact to create
meaning. In the development of the analysis, I extract episodes from the transcripts of a two-day
discussion of the title of the story which illustrate members as readers making meaning of peers'
comments and the literary text, members as writers shaping and discovering their meanings through
the live, immediate social interaction, and the interpretive community arriving at a communal
interpretation of the literary text. In addition, I address some of the theoretical issues concerning
writing vs. speaking, and demonstrate how such real-time discussions serve to fuse the polarity
between the two by placing writers in an environment more typical of speaking, that is, live,
immediate feedback from an audience which serves to help speakers shape their meaning. I
conclude that "real-time M microcomputer network technology serves as a research tool in the sense
that the transcripts illustrate prominent psycholinguistic, literary, and rhetorical theories, and
perhaps more importantly, as a pedagogical tool because the networked classroom creates a true
interpretive community by empowering students with access to the meaning-making dialogue.
9

Barker, Thomas •• Texas Tech University
FROM ClASSROOM TO NElWORK: ISSUES FOR INSTRUCTORS
One of the most noticeable directions in computer-assisted compositIOn is that of
networking. Many who now teach in computerized classrooms are considering implementing
networks as the next logical step in computer assistance. OUf computer classroom at Texas Tech
is no exception. After having made the transition from lab (housing 10-15 computers: walk-in
usage) to classroom (housing 25 computers: one per student) it now seems appropriate to expand
the technology to include electronic mail and shared fLies.
The purpose of this talk will be to present an ovelView of the process of making the
transition from computer classroom to networked classroom. It is designed for those now faced
with that transition, and intended to address some of their concerns.
Those concerns fall into three broad categories:
1) What hardware and software is required for networking;
2) What pedagogical differences will the networked classroom allow; and
3) What theoretical approaches are relevant to the networked classroom. The approach
taken in this talk will be practical, but not "how to." The information in it is based on the author's
experience in planning an Ethernet network in the microcomputer classroom at Texas Tech, as well
as published information and research on networks and writing.
What hardware and software are required for networking
In this portion of the talk I will present an overview of the cards, cables, connectors, and
software required for networking. Additionally, this section will include definitions of types of
networks and a brief description of the Daedalus system, a system of invention and word processing
software especially designed for networked classrooms. This section will include an overview of
some of the capabilities networking will provide: shared directories, electronic mail, and new
software. This material will be covered in a handout to the audience.
What pedagogical difTerences will the classroom make
Teachers considering expansion to a networked classroom need to consider what differences
they will face in their new classroom. Thompson (1988) identifies a number of areas where
classroom activities will differ. These include observations on the behavior of students discussing
in an electronic environment, and how that environment affects their sensitivity to error, anonymity,
and attitudes toward other students in the network. Also surveyed is work by Forman (1987) who
identifies 7 "conclusions· from exploratory research into computer.mediated networking in the
workplace. Some of her observations are pertinent to networked classrooms. In addition, writing
instructors need to consider the affect of computers on traditional "proscenium" class set·ups and
on the amount of text students produce.
What theoretical approaches are relevant to the networked classroom
The area of theoretical approaches is a very broad topic. and can only be sketched out in
this talk. Basically. I will try to tie networking in with social constructionist thought as it is currently
articulated by Berlin and Bruffee. In particular, Kremers (1988) gives an interesting view of the
"liberation" of students in networked classrooms. Information in this section will be based on the
experience of teachers in networked classrooms at Gallaudet University, New York Institute of
Technology. and the University of Texas, as well as published work based on current theories of
!O

composing processes. Time permitting, I will begin to sketch out the main principles of a network
theory of writing. based on the use of network technology in writing instruction.
Barton, EDen
and
Ray, Ruth •• Wayne State University
COMPUTER LITERACY FROM BOTTOM TO TOP
Recent research offers a concept of literacy as an empowering and enabling strategy
necessary to succeed within an increasingly complicated society. From this perspective,literacy has
both cognitive and social aspects; it includes not only the cognitive processes of reading, writing,
and calculating, but also the social processes of demonstrating in appropriate ways that one is
knowledgeable in these areas. In this view, literacy is a way of thinking, a way of functioning within
literate communities, and, in general, an approach towards life. (Cook·Gumperz, 1986; Kintgen.
Kroll, and Rose, 1988).
Research on computers and literacy has been characterized by the presentation of diverse
defmitions of "computer literacy." The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, for instance,
claims, "computer literacy is an essential outcome of contemporary education. Each student should
acquire an understanding of the versatility and limitations of the computer through first·hand
experience in a variety of fields: (quoted in Naisbitt. 1982:33). some see computer literacy in terms
of skills: Dreyfus and Dreyfus, for instance, say, "[C]omputer literacy consists in knowing what sort
of skills and what level of skills can and should be taught using computers.- (1986: 156) Others
connect those skills to larger issues; Papert, for instance, qualifies his definition of computer
literacy, saying "true computer literacy is not just knowing how to make use of computers and
computational ideas. It is knowing when it is appropriate to do so" (1980: 155).
The common characteristic underlying these definitions is their assumptions of authority.
Each one reflects a top·down model: educators, administrators, and researchers speak from the
perspective of their individual fields, establish themselves as authorities, and teD what computer
literacy would be and how it should be demonstrated. Such top·down definitions are impositions
of one view without fuD consideration of alternative views, and thus are destined to fail. Freire
(1970) convincingly argues that top·down definitions are unsuccessful because they do not respond
to the every day needs of people. What is needed for successful literacy education is a bottom-up
approach •• one that is defined and generated by people rather than leaders, students rather than
administrators, learners rather than experts. Ohmann talks about the effectiveness of bottom-up
approaches to literacy education, such as the Cuban literacy campaign in which Cuban illiterates
-learned to read and write in the context of a revolution, and with the aim of becoming fuD
participants in it, not of passing from third grade into fourth grade or of meeting a coDege
requirement ... people responded with energy because they saw the revolution as theirs, and
literacy as contributing to it" (1985: 686.87). Similarly, computer literacy movements will be
effective when they are defined in terms of a particular social context and when learners see
11

themselves as full contributing members within that context. People will respond to calls for
computer literacy when they perceive that knowledge of computers will make an essential
contribution to their lives.
We propose that future research on computer literacy incorporate a bottom-up perspective.
In this view, computer literacy is based on how one lives and works with computers. A bottomup
perspective takes into account the fact that different communities define computer literacy in
their own ways and for their own purposes. It also responds to one of the central concepts of
literacy as presented in recent research, namely, that literacy is a way of living. In this paper, we
will report on a pilot study aimed at discovering different perspectives on computer literacy and
suggesting new directions for research in theory and pedagogy. The project is an interview study
which examines how non-academics define computer literacy. This project elicits perspectives which
have not been fully represented in previous debates on computer literacy.
The study will survey a small group of people (approximately 10-15) who have had varying
amounts of experience with computers in their lives. Some of our respondents have had extensive
experience with computers on the job, through programming or using complex software programs.
Others have made computers a part of their personal lives, using personal computers at home for
a variety of tasks. Some respondents have had little experience with computers at work or at home.
We will question respondents about the place computers play in their lives, asking them to
consciously formulate and then articulate their views on literacy in general and computer literacy
in particular. We will determine whether and how they use computers; how they learned or plan
to learn about computers; whether learning about and using computers is easy or difficult for them;
what, if anything, they feel is important to know about computers; and what is important for others,
such as their children, to know about computers. We also will ask them whether they believe
computers have changed their lives, their habits, their ways of working, and their ways of thinking.
Finally, we will ask our respondents to project views of the way individuals and society might be
affected by the continuing use of computers. We believe that these interviews will elicit ideas,
opinions, and information that will inform future research and practice.
In this abstract, we have not presented a new or revised definition of computer literacy. By
looking outside the academy, our research will provide an alternative view of computer literacy,
one that will shift authority over computer literacy from a small group of educators to a larger
group of citizens. We see a definition of computer literacy for the 1990's arising from the active
collaboration of diverse groups who are living and working with computers.
References
Barton, E. & R. Ray. (Forthcoming). Developing connections: Computers and literacy. Computers
and Composition.
Cook-Gumperz, J. (1986). Introduction. In J. Cook-Gumperz (Ed.), The social construction of
literacy (pp.l-IS). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dreyfus, H. L. & Dreyfus, S. E. (1986). Mind over machine: The power of human intuition and
expertise in the era of the computer. NY: The Free Press.
Freire, Paulo. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
Kintgen, E., Kroll, B., Rose, M. (Eds.). (1988). Perspective 011 literacy. Carbondale, lL: Southern
illinois University Press.
Naisbitt, J. (1982). Megatrends: Ten new directions transforming our lives. NY: Warner Books.
12

Ohmann, R. (1985. Literacy, technology, and monopoly capital. College English, !Z. 675-689.
Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers andpowerful ideas. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Benjamin, James -- The University of Toledo
THE USE OF PC STYLE PROGRAMS TO TEACH BUSINESS COMMUNICATION
While text analysis has been available on mainframe computers for over a decade, only
recently have test analysis programs become generally available for use with personal computers.
Business and industry increasingly use commercially available "style" programs to evaluate written
communication. This study provides a comparative analysis of the commercially available PC
programs for style analysis. The paper examines the usefulness and pedagogical limitations of
a variety of programs including GRAMMATIK II, PC STYLE, MICRO TEXT ANALYSIS
SYSTEM, MICROCOMPlITER PROGRAMS FOR LITERARY ANALYSIS, PC-READ, and
RIGHTWRITER.
Students in an American Management Association course on ~Communication skills for
Managers~ were asked to compose a written assignment in the unit on written communication. The
text of these memos and the American Management Association guideline memo served as the
material analyzed using a variety of style programs. The results of these analyses are compared for
pedagogical factors including speed, accuracy, support documentation and usefulness of feedback.
References
Abercrombie, John. Computer Programs for Literary Analysis. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1984.
Bingaman, Christine, R. Graham, and M. Wheeler. Communication Skills for Managers. New
York: American Management Association, 1983.
Burke, E., Ed. Computers in Humanistic Research. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967.
Creasy, William C. Microcomputers and Literary Scholarship. Los Angeles: University of California,
1986.
Daiute, C. Writing and Computers. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1985.
Day, A. Colin. Text Processing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Feldman, Paula R. The Wordworlhy Computer. New York: Random House, 1987.
Hockey, Susan. A Guide to Computer Applications in the Humanities. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 1980.
Howard-Hill, T. H. Literary Concordances: A Guide to the Preparation of Manual and Computer
Concordances. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979.
Joshi, A., B. L. Webber, and I. A. Sag, Eds. Elements of Discourse Understanding. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Kren, George M. and George Christakes. Scholars and Personal Computers. New York: Human
Science Press, 1988.
Lang, Bere!. Philosophy and the Art of Writing. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1983.
Mitchell, J. L., Ed. Computers in the Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974.
13

Oakman, Robert. Computer Methods for Literary Research. Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 1980.
Patton, P. C. and R. A Holoien. Computing in the HU/1Ulllities. Lexington, MA: Lexington, 1981.
Rudell, B. H. Computers and Literature. Cambridge, MA: Abacus Press, 1985.
Tankard, Jim. "The Literary Detective," Byte, 11 (February 1986), 231-238.
Wisbey, R. A, Ed. The Computer in Literary and Linguistic Research. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1971.
Bertch, Julie -- Rio Saldo Community Col/ege
ENGLISH COMPOSITION ON mE CONFERENCE;
DISTANCE STUDENTS WITH CoSy
CREATING A COMMUNITY OF
The distance learner presents a special challenge in the community college, even in a
college-without-walls where fmding new ways to meet unique needs is an everyday event. In the
Department of Instructional Technology at Rio Salado Community College (one of the Maricopa
Community Colleges in Phoenix), traditional correspondence courses have been effectively enhanced
with audio tapes and teleconferences, but neither of these provides the ongoing, always accessible
classroom interaction that we know enables learning and encourages persistence. Computer
conferencing has become a useful alternative, one we feel has tremendous possibilities for
instruction in writing.
There are predictable problems in distance education: isolation can lead to procrastination
and undermine motivation; confusion can result in wasted study time and effort. Busy schedules
change priorities, and the quiet demands made by a textbook and a study guide are too easily
ignored.
The computer conference, on the other hand, can provide a dynamic, compelling
environment for the distance student. Distance learners are still separated by time and space, but
their personal computers and modems connect them into a single community and provides a
stimulating opportunity for participation. No matter where they live or what their work schedules
are, a simple sign-on means that class is now in session.
CoSy, the computer conferencing system software developed by the University of Guelph
in Ontario, provides the structure for our Freshman Composition courses (English 101 and 102).
It allows for presentation of material that augments the traditional study guide and lets the
instructor personalize and lead the discussion of course content. (An earlier experiment that
presented entire study guide "lessons" on the computer proved cumbersome--the students preferred
to read longer passages in print, and as an instructor who encourages students to annotate their
material and review it regularly, J found screen delivery unsatisfactory.)
CoSy doesn't replace the traditional distance course any more than teachers' words in
classrooms replace textbooks. Instead, CoSy becomes the vehicle for class discussion. Also, it
provides the means for small group interactions, where three or four (or more) students can work
together on a class activity. And CoSy's easy and confidential MAlL function lets students interact
individually with the instructor, asking questions that can be answered almost immediately and
14

sending assignments which can be evaluated and returned as quickly as any classroom-based course.
(Often more so, as almost all of the instructor's time is spent "in conference" rather than in other
kinds of teaching activities.)
After having discussed the rationale for offering the computer conferencing alternative in
distance education, this presentation will explain the three major modes of CoSY: the
CONFERENCE, where the teacher can initiate class discussions, make further explanations, and
where students can respond, make comments, and ask questions; the CONVERSATIONS, where
small groups can engage in classroom activities, work together on writing assignments, and engage
in peer evaluations; and MAIL, where any member of the group can send and receive messages to
any other member. The operations of each mode will be described as well as the specific uses to
which each is put in the writing classes, including types of assignments and methods of presenting
them.
The presentation will conclude by showing examples of student participation in all three
modes of the computer conferences, emphasizing the advantages each aspect of the system brings
to distance learning and the benefits the conference as a whole offers to non-traditional learners.
The session will end by inviting audience discussion.
Betza, Ruth
and
Crow, Connie -- Microsoft Corporation
THE WRITER, THE EDITOR, AND THE MACINTOSH AS COLLABORATORS IN TECHNICAL
WRmNG
A networked publication system requires collaboration beyond writer to writer, or even write
to editor. In an on-line publication system the document file itself is the key point of ownership.
The writer originates the ownership of the electronic me and hands it off, to be locked out of his
or her own work.
Recently, the Applications Division of Microsoft Corporation switched to an on-line
publication system we call -Mac Pubs." This system uses Microsoft Word on networked Macintosh
computers to produce documentation and courseware for its application software.
This on-line publication system changed the way writers, editors, artists, and production staff
work together. In our presentation for the Fifth Computers and Writing Conference, we will
discuss how networking is a method for collaboration. particularly between writer and editor.
The Players in a Networked Publication System
In our networked publication system, people with different skills collaborate to produce
fmished documentation. Our players include designers who design the page layout, paste-up artist
who work with art, and marketing people who commission and review the document. The key
players we will discuss are the writer, the editor, and the computer network itself.
The writer. The first draft is the writer'S responsibility; that much hasn't changed.
However, because the writer writes with a template of the page layout, the page formatting is also
the writer's responsibility. He or she must create the document as it will look, long before the
15

ewriting and editing tum the words into the final document. In addition, the writer requests and
sometimes even produces the art required in the writer's portion of a document. The writer also
uses the network to draw information from several sources, such as a spec to answer technical
questions, a style guide to answer terminology questions, and ftles of other writers working on
related topics.
The editor. The editor ensures that the writer's words make sense and are accurately
written. The editor is responsible for updating the me to reflect any changes in the software. In
the software industry, accuracy is a moving target because software under development is always
changing. In addition, the editor in a networked system takes over the responsibilities of overseeing
art at it is created, and ensures that the writer's page layout is correct.
The network. The network consists of individual Macintoshes and a server. A server is
simply a Macintosh with plenty of memory and a hard disk. A computer security system ensures
that document files have owners who can grant permission to others to use the document files, or
keep the fLIes strictly to themselves. The server is the central point in the question of ownership
in the collaborative system.
Handing OIT Ownership
In academic publishing, when a writer considers a document finished enough to be passed
on the writer usually mails a manuscript to a publisher or editor. Normally the writer receives
the manuscript back with comments, and has final say over the manuscript itself. That is, the writer
owns the manuscript completely, throughout the publication process.
In contrast, in our networked publication process, the writer passes off a manuscript by
placing the document me in the editor's folder on the server. At this point, the writer gives up
ownership of the manuscript. The use of the network dictates a complete transfer of ownership.
One and only one individual must have complete ownership over th e computer file, to track any
changes in it. Otherwise, several people might make changes to the document at the same time,
and only one version will be kept. Or, worse, an older version of the document may appear after
others have done their work, and work will be lost.
For a writer, there is a finality of being locked out of one's own meso The writer still feels
responsible for the accuracy of the files, for example for making changes if the topic (computer
software) changes in development. But the editor now owns the document, and it becomes the
editor's responsibility to make any changes he or she feels necessary to maintain the accuracy of
the document.
Implications or Ownership
Our talk will discuss issues of ownership, and the very personal emotional and professional
feelings it elicits in scores of writers and editors who work with the Mac Pubs process.
Frequently in publication, the writer and editor never meet, or exchange conversation by
phone from a distance of three thousand miles. Our in·house networked publication system is more
like a classroom, where people discuss and critique writing constantly and still have to meet and talk
and get along during the next class period.
Trust is a central component. As in all publishing systems, trust involves language, tone, and
creativity .. the stuff of potential arguments between any writer and editor. In a networked system,
an editor has, in effect, carte blanche to change anything the writer has done.
In our industry, trust also involves accuracy, or the belief that the owner of the files --
16

whether writer or editor .- is equally capable of maintaining accuracy. An editor may feel that
writers do not trust the editor's ability to maintain accuracy, or to have as much expertise over the
topic as the writer. Yet the editor must update documentation as the software changes. Essentially,
the editor becomes editor, writer, and software tester all in one.
Implications for the Classroom
During the 1980's, instructors have spoken of making sure that students have ownership over
their classroom writing. Studies of student writers, from fLTst grade through college, show that
students can make great strides as writers once they develop that sense of ownership. Ownership
is simply another way of feeling that writing is something worth doing. A collaborative writer has
to feel ownership to do good work. Paradoxically, a collaborative writer must also be prepared to
give up the writing when it must be handed off. This is particularly true in an on· line system
where ownership is given off before the final result is produced.
We've found that collaboration produces good work. In our presentation we'd like to
encourage collaborative classroom writing activities to develop both the ownership and the flexibility
necessary in collaborative writing.
Black, Laurel
and
Rouleau, Kathy •• Miami University
TEACHING ARQUND TECHNQLOGY: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF A COMPUTER·
BASED COLLEGE COMPOSITION CLASS
We will present the results of an ethnographic study in which we each spent one month in
two composition classrooms. One class was a computer.based class taught in an IBM laboratory.
The other was taught by the same instructor and followed the same syllabus but was taught in a
more traditional classroom setting. While observing we used log sheets indicating time·on·task and
number of students involved in each activity, and supplemented these data with field notes and
interviews of the instructor and other instructors who teach or hc:.ve taught the same class in the
mM laboratory.
Our findings indicate that the presence of computers may affect the classroom environment
in very subtle ways. The technology, with all it comprises physically and potentially for the
composition student, becomes both an attraction and a distraction. We found large group
discussions to be significantly and negatively affected, and observed between the two classes very
different patterns in the ways in which students interacted with each other and with the instructor.
A sense of "classroom chemistry" and hence collaborative approaches to learning and teaching
appeared to be more difficult to establish and maintain in the computer·based composition class.
In our presentation we will include specific descriptive examples of classroom observations
and will use an overhead and provide handouts to discuss the laboratory design and significant
rmdings.
Ten years ago, an intruder barged into the composition classroom. Teachers were fascinated
and lost at the same time. How was one supposed to introduce this new addition Was it friend
17

or foe As the years have gone by. more and more teachers are convinced that the computer is
composition's friend. A plethora of studies have been done, looking at how students write with
computers. Yet, until very recently, little attention has been given to the context of the computer
composition classroom, to the effect this technology has on the complex relationships that develop
between students and between teacher and students. It is this environment that our study explores.
In order to understand the context of a computer·based English class, we chose to observe
two classes: a regular first-year ENG 111 class taught in a traditional classroom and a section of
ENG t11.e taught in the mM laboratory. Both were taught by the same instructor on the same
days using the same syllabus. The IBM laboratory is arranged in a "double U" shape: a small U of
computers within a large U.
A total of four weeks of class meetings were observed. Researchers used log sheets divided
into five minutes periods which allowed us to record the time spent in various activities in each
class. This was supplemented by observation sheets on which we noted the number of students
involved in the assigned activity. and as well by extensive field notes. Interviews with the instructor
were done informally throughout the study and formally mid-way through and at the end. Other
instructors utilizing the TBM lab were also interviewed.
Our findings indicated that while the amount of time spent on writing activities was not
significantly different for the two classes (21% of time in ENG 111 and 23% of time in the
computer-based ENG 111.C). far less whole class discussion took place in the computer-based class.
In its place we observed "lecture/discussion." which describes a situation where the instructor
attempts to generate classroom discussion but is unsuccessful. While the intent is not to lecture
formally, nonetheless, the instructor does most of the talking. In the computer-based class, 115
minutes of lecture/formal presentation and lecture/discussion took place in the total observed time
of 434.5 minutes; in the regular classroom, only 45 minutes of similar activity took place: 26% of
all class time as compared to 10%.
The students were blocked by their equipment from seeing all of their classmates, and so
directed their comments to the instructor. They began to rely on the instructor to speak for them
to other students whom they could not see directly. The instructor was forced to stand in the center
of the laboratory in order to be seen by all the students and naturally became a focus. With less
whole group discussion occurring, students seemed reluctant to speak and unsure of their
relationships with one another and the value of their individual statements; the instructor was
forced to repeatedly prompt them in order to receive responses. Students had difficulty working
in groups, and developed unequal relationships when working in pairs on collaborative papers, as
one student was able to use her computer while another wasn't. Almost twice as much writing in
groups took place in the non-computer composition class as in the computer-based class: 72.5
minutes in ENG 111 and 37.5 minutes in ENG lI1.e
Students were distracted from discussion by their computers: it is difficult for a student who
can't see all her classmates to garner enough enthusiasm to exchange ideas and beliefs, especially
when instead she can more easily effect a change with one keystroke on the screen in front of her.
When we discussed these fmdings with the instructors, we touched upon the idea of "classroom
chemistry" and how that develops; whether students necessarily concerned with learning to use the
technology in front of them, instead of learning their fellow students' names, had begun early to
concentrate on their computers rather than their classmates.
18

If we believe that students learn best when they learn together, face to face -- through
collaborative papers, peer group workshops and whole class discussion -- then we must think about
the constraints that a computer classroom places upon our efforts to facilitate such learning. If we
believe that the instructor functions as a weU-informed facilitator for such learning, then we must
look at how a computer classroom may make such a role difficult to establish and maintain. Our
research supported aU the evidence that students enjoy using a computer to write: students arrived
early and immediately began typing, and many stayed later. But we have to ask ourselves what we
want to occur within the context of the classroom itself. What sparks that desire to write -- with
a keyboard or a pencil -- may weU be the quality and quantity of discussion that occurs in that
composition classroom. What this study suggests-limited though it may be -- is that this technology
which so invites our students to write may at times hinder them from discovering-from learning
from one another-what it is that they want and need to write about.
Bode, James
and
Redman, Tim -- Ohio State University at Lima
GENESIS OF THE LANWRITER PROJECT AT QHIO SIAn; AT LIMA
Dissatisfaction with the classroom limits of stand-alone computers and the fortunate
confluence of two external factors (outside funding from an Ohio Board of Regents' grant and a
change in our registration system) with our work in computer-assisted pedagogy led to the
development of the LANWR1TER Project at the Lima Campus of the Ohio State University. This
LAN-based writing laboratory will enable students to engage in peer group conferencing even when
they are unable to meet together. In addition, in a traditional classroom setting, the system will
enable the instructor to observe the student's work, intervene with suggestions, or display the work
to the entire class.
Of course Trent Batson's pioneering research at GaUaudet University. as reported in his
ENFILOG newsletter and several articles on the subject, inspired the direction of our own work
took. The type of networked computer laboratory they describe, developed by CompuTeach in
Washington, D.C., has existed in the coUege of Agriculture at OSU-Columbus for several years.
CaUed the LINK system, it was developed by Applied Computer Systems of Johnstown, Ohio. Of
course. instead of being used specifically for writing instruction, the Columbus classroom was used
for any application where it wou ld be useful for an instructor to take an image from any of the
linked computer and display it on any or all of the other monitors in the LINK system.
We visited the classroom in the College of Agriculture and read the materials provided by
compuTeach and the articles describing the writing networks at Gallaudet and Northern Virginia
Community College. While we remained enthusiastic about the potential for LANs in writing
instruction, we were less happy with the hardware choices adopted. The implementation of
networking in place at those schools is decidedly non-standard. Additional cabling is used to
electronically switch the video inputs from local to global feed, and the software allows only minimal
message sending on a separate window. We wished to make possible a much more elaborate
19

interaction among the participants using only the standard cabling and software available on a
standard LAN.
The lAN-based writing laboratory at Ohio state Lima will enable students to offer
suggestions on revisions to each other even when they are never able to meet together. The
proposed revisions will be keyed to specific text and will be easily reviewed by either part. In
addition, if they are working at the same time, students will be able to "chat" with each other
through a window on their screens. Instructors will be able to make similar notes. In addition,
when students are using the system, the instructor will be able to observe their work, "chat" with
them, and intervene by moving the cursor and making changes in their text. The software under
development to enable this interaction is intended to make use of any lAN-based system that
conforms to the NETBIOS protocol. since many different lANs support NETBIOS, this offers the
widest possible latitude in the LANs the program will support. No additional wiring or software
would be needed.
Two "external" developments aided our progress with this project. The second biennium of
the Ohio Board of Regents' Selective Excellence Program occurred last year, and our campus was
eligible to apply for S50,Ooo a year in funding from the Board under their Academic Challenge
Program, designed to support the expansion of campus programs that had already demonstrated
excellence. A computer project was a natural for our campus, and we were able to gain outside
support for the next six years with a grant from the OBR for S 102,000.
The second development was an administrative need for equipment to allow the installation
of the new OSU registration system. There were two methods to achieve that end, a dedicated
mini-computer with connected terminals or a local area network, and vendors were invited to
campus to bid on both possibilities. Each would cost roughly the same amount of money, but the
lAN, in addition to alleviating the immediate concern over the new registration system, also had
the potential to serve as the foundation for a campus-wide LAN with broader application. Thus
the administrative need for a new registration system leveraged the start of a LAN for the entire
campus.
Of course, one decision necessitated many others. The new LAN had to hook into the only
other lAN on campus, the Novell system in the library. in place for the purpose of cataloging the
holdings. Based on the recommendation of several specialists at OSU-Columbus. the Banyan
system was selected. The primary rationale was that Banyan supported the TCP lIP protocol. the
protocol used in the university-wide SONNET (System of Neighboring Networks) system already
in place. Banyan also had the reputation of being user-friendly, and of having one of the best
electronic mail systems available.
The use of peer groups for commentary and discussion about student writing has been
shown to be a successful approach for teaching composition. We believe that pioneering work by
Batson and others has already demonstrated the potential of LANs for writing instruction. But
existing systems involve the use of a video-switching box with additional cables and only minimal
interchange. By developing a fully interactive editor package, which uses only the cabling and
software available on a standard LAN, our LANWRlTER system allows more extensive interaction
among students and teachers and could be adopted at other institutions without modifications to
existing LANs which support NETBIOS.
20

Brosnahan, Leger ~. lIJinois State University
A POOR MAN'S NE1WQRK SYSTEM FOR COMPUTER-ASSISTED COMP CLASSROOMS
Perhaps a number of composition teachers already have a number of computers or perhaps
even a classroom full to aid them in the teaching of composition. Illinois State University, perhaps
alone, has ten classrooms equipped with twenty-one Zeniths with Citizen printers each and requires
that all of its freshman composition courses be taught on/with the computer.
Aside from the problem that this arrangement creates for the small but significant number
of computerphobe students who are compelled to take the only required course in the university
on the computers they hate, the relatively recent arrangement of the classrooms poses problems not
only for the small but significant number of computerphobe instructors required to teach the course
on/ with computers but also for instructors who welcome the computers but are still trying to
discover a method of teaching composition courses on the computer without subverting either the
machines or the instructors.
The problem is that. if the students compose on the machines during class time. which is
enormously expensive however you figure it, the instructor is subverted by being deprived of any
spread-effect in his instruction, the basic reason for having classes in the beginning. by being limited
to instructing one student at a time, or the machines are collectively subverted by lecturing or
discussion with the whole class and maximum spread-effect at the cost of subverting the machines.
Dividing class time into part lecture and part use of the machines does not solve the problem but
simply divides the subversions, half of one, then half of the other perhaps.
My composition-teaching experience has convinced me of a number of perhaps not universal
convictions that underlie my attempt at solving this problem and should be mentioned before
suggesting my solution. First, I became convinced that all correction or reading of students' papers
out of the presence of the writers was conscientious busy-work and responsible for the unreasonable
and unprofitable work-load in teaching composition which accounts for its popularity. Second, if
an instructor really knows more about composition than freshmen, and most do, then that
difference is what should be shown constantly to the students and not hidden or dispersed in the
form of notes written in isolation and read, if at all, in isolation by the individual student. This is
especially true because so many improvements in freshman writing are problems not just for the
individual but for a large part of every class, so that spread-effect is extremely valuable. Third,
individual conferences, whether in the office or in the classroom, are extremely unsatisfactory,
inadequate, and wastefully repetitive, rather like notes on individual students' papers. Fourth, the
best solution seems to be to hold individual conferences, or their equivalent, in the classroom but
in the hearing and with the cooperation of the entire class. Fifth, for this to be effective, the
individual student's paper must be reproduced and distributed to the entire class so that they can
read along with the instructor, or perhaps another student, and make and hear explained in some
detail the suggestions for improvement or the corrections of the paper. This is my current best
guess about the best possible use, for both students and instructors, that can be made of class time,
which is extremely expensive however you figure it, since it allows for individual instruction with
flexible and adequate time for explanation combined with maximum spread-effect of the instruction.
In the past, this method has demanded that students submit typed copy, the typed copy be
xeroxed, the xerox copy be used to make a thermofax ditto master, the master be run for twenty-
21

some individual copies, the copies be distributed berore the class was prepared to read. A
considerable expense of time and materials. When the classrooms were converted to computers,
this process could be slightly streamlined by having the students cut ditto masters on their printers,
the dittos then simply being run off and copies distributed, but still a considerable expense of time
and material.
Of course, the solution, which has already occurred to you, is to network the machines and
avoid all the paper, but it is easy enough to get the machines perhaps, while networking is extremely
expensive and hardly feasible for less than a c1assroomful of machines. What is needed is a
poorman's networking system compatible with few or may machines as they are collected and that
allows use of the machines for reading papers without introducing paper.
My suggestion is that students submit their work on disks. The disks for the whole class be
put on a single disk (twenty minutes), the collective disk be diskcopied onto twenty~some other
disks (twenty~some minutes), the students' work disks and collective disks be distributed to the
students. Then all students call up, for instance, laSmith, i.e., Smith's first draft of paper number
one, and the class collectively, under guidance of the instructor or one of the students, read and
suggest improvements for revision, or edit later revisions, on the tube. To preserve the original text,
changed parts are bracketed and changes are underlined while shifted blocks are bracketed in
original position and reproduced and underlined in the new positions.
I propose this as a flexible solution to the dilemma of subverting either the instructor or the
machines in computer~equipped but un-networked composition classrooms after the one to six hour
of class time reasonably devoted to teaching the machine.
Bump, Jerome ~- The University of Texas at Austin
TESTING COMPUTER-ASSISTED CLASS DISCUSSIQN
Last year at the Computer and Composition conference in Duluth I spoke about how we
used our networked classroom and our collaborative software, now called INTERCHANGE, for
computer~assisted class discussion (CACD) in a two-semester freshman literature and composition
class and a graduate course in computers and the humanities. We were able to let students draw
on visual and writing skills to improve thinking in class discussion and to provide electronic and
written transcripts for instruction and for a database for literary and rhetorical research and for
software evaluation. We used pseudonyms in INTERCHANGE to prevent stereotyping and
encourage students to try out daring new roles and innovative thoughts; to talk to new people; to
provide more evidence for assertions; and to facilitate debate. We also found that pseudonyms
released inhibitions and increased emotional honesty and self-disclosure. I reported on our tests
of collaborative exams, collaborative writing, group grading, and gender bias and sex role
stereotyping in CAl and in readers' responses to literature. I also summarized how we used
INTERCHANGE to conduct real time experiments which radicaUy changed the speed, focus, and
response of readers to literary texts.
We have just completed another test of INTERCHANGE which should appeal more to those
oriented to the social sciences, as it involves a larger, more statistically significant group of students
22

and this time we arranged for control groups in the experiment. The same questions were asked
of these students and there were some interesting deviations from our previous results, only a few
of which can be discussed in this limited space. In addition, established psychological measures
were used to determine personality types for experiments in conference organization. The impact
of INTERCHANGE on composition was tested by having students write analyses of the transcripts
of the INTERCHANGE sessions and compare those experiences to other writing assignments.
Like the freshman class discussed last year, our experiment was quite unusual in that our
subject was a course which focused primarily on literature rather than on composition: "Family in
the Victorian Novel.- We stressed the psychology of family system, as represented in literature,
and access to emotion in reader response. Where the previous courses had eighteen and nine
students respectively, this course had thirty-three students of widely varying backgrounds. Most of
the students were seniors yet 33% of them had never used a computer before for verbal rather than
mathematical experience, and an additional 12% had used one only very infrequently for that
purpose. Nevertheless, instead of experiencing technostress, most students in this class felt that,
as one put it, "the computer network is an interesting new mode of emotional analysis" which in fact
helps release stress.
The students read five novels over the course of the semester and began discussion of each
novel with the class meeting as a whole. For subsequent classes we split into two groups, with the
fIrst half of the alphabet going to the computer classroom to discuss the novel in conferences of
four or five students on our networked computer system, while the second half of the alphabet
met in small groups of four or five students and discussed the novel face to face. For the next class
meeting, we wou ld switch, with the second half of the alphabet going to the computer classroom
10 discuss the same novel and the first half meeting face to face. Thus each of the five novels was
discussed both ways by all students, giving them ample opportunity to compare. At the end of the
class the students responded to seventy questions about their experience. For instance, they were
asked to rate ·the most valuable technique in the course·: 41 % chose the computer-assisted small
group discussions, 20% chose face-to-face small group discussions, 20% chose discussion with the
class as a whole, and 17% chose watching psychologists discuss family systems on videotape. That
INTERCHANGE would be more popular than small face-to-face and whole class discussions
combined was perhaps the most remarkable result of our experiment. One of those who voted that
way added, •• felt that I could express my opinions a lot more openly. I also felt like everyone had
more of a chance to say what they wanted and however much they wanted without having someone
interrupt them." Another simply said, ftI was more apt to express my feelings using the computer
than I was in group or face-to-face discussion."
The results of previous experiments with gender segregation in conferencingwas confirmed:
despite the size of this class, the vote was still unanimous in favor of mixing the sexes rather than
segregating them in INTERCHANGE conferences. We also e)({Jerimented with conference
organization on the basis of introvert and extrovert, using the Myers-Briggs scale, and on the basis
of four categories of dependence, using a measure developed by our counseling center. We focused
on the impact of ftflaming,ft of the ·share, not compare" rule used in the treatment of dependent
personalities. Most students preferred introvert/extrovert conference organization with the share,
not compare rule, and 42 percent preferred it with pseudonyms. Introverts felt most strongly about
this; one student said, "'The interchange between the students was much more open with the
23

computers, especially for the introverted members of the class, including myself." In fact, at one
point the introverts thought an extrovert had entered their conference and stated their resentment.
As one student put it, "My favorite aspect of this class was the computer.assisted discussions. This
allowed me to discuss my feelings more freely. It is hard for me to tell my feelings and emotions
to a bunch of people. Also, I liked the use of the pseudonyms better; it made me feel safer in
expressing my feelings." Others found the share, not compare rule even more effective; one student
wrote that "it gave me more freedom to express what I felt about the novel even more so than using
the pseudonyms."
Basing writing assignments on the computer printouts of the INTERCHANGE sessions also
changed student response. As in the previous courses, these students rated the primary advantage
of INTERCHANGE its ability to allow all students to participate in class discussion. However, for
the second most important advantage, where the other classes chose the small group interaction in
the conferences, this class chose the availability of written transcripts of the discus·
sion.
The two page limit of this abstract prevents discussion of the many other variations in the
responses of these students to the computer network, compared to previous classes. Suffice it to
say we gathered more information about the relationships between the use of pseudonyms and the
dehumanization attributed to computers; between computers and aggression; between networked
computers and individualized·instruction; between computers and voice communication; between
the size of the class and the need for pseudonyms; and between computers, literature, and
psychotherapy generally. We also learned more about how minorities can be liberated by truly
student-centered CACD, how it facilitates the feminist model of receptive rather than aggressive
reading, how the synergistic effect of CACD implies a radically new model of creativity, and more
about the limits of keyboarding and room arrangement, and the status of transcripts of CACD as
a new genre, a via media between speaking and formal prose.
Chatfield, Hale .. Hiram College
THE POTENTIAL OF INRAC AS A LANGUAGE FOR DESIGNING CAl TUTORIALS: AN
EXAMPLE INVOLVING POETRY
INRAC is a compiled language designed specifically for applications in which the most
appropriate or desirable inputs and outputs are natural English. It is the language of Racter, the
computer·"author" of "the first book ever written by a computer," The Policeman's Beard is Half
Constructed (Warner, 1984) .. and of course the novelty disk Racter (Mindscape, 1984).
These zany early applications of INRAC serve somewhat to obscure the fact that it is a
serious Artificial Intelligence language offering manifold possibilities for both education and
industry.
"Star Alpha" is an INRAC program I have been working on for about a year. INRAC
enables a program on poetry to analyze, interpret, and make authentic responses to all kinds of
inputs, including poetry itself. Thus an INRAC program seldom requires "Yes/No" answers or
menu selections, but instead "listens to" whatever the user says.
24

·Star Alpha" is an INRAC program which enables a kind of authentic exchange between the
student poet and the computer, which may continue to proffer new options and ideas--including the
study of specific forms like the sonnet or villanelle, or prosodies like the pantoum or the Welsh
cynghanned. At all points the user is asked meaningful and challenging questions, and his or her
answers influence the directions offered by the program.
Collins, Terrence -- University of Minnesota
LEARNING DISABLED WRITERS USING WORD PROCESSING:
PERfORMANCE CHANGE
ATIITUDE AND
I propose to report on a three-year study supported by a demonstration project grant from
the U.S. Department of Education-Postsecondary Programs for the Handicapped. The focus of the
study was the impact of microcomputer word processing on performance and attitudes among
learning disabled writers in college who use word processors to complete required writing courses.
The study took place in the General College of the University of Minnesota, August, 1985 -
September, 1988. Interim results have been reported previously in a number of working papers and
articles. This will be the fIrst presentation to combine aggregate three-year statistical data and
interview data.
The presentation will go through several steps:
(1) Background: (a) the Learning Disabled Writers Project will be profiled; (b) features
of the writing of learning disabled writes will be outlined in brief; (c) the hypotheses of the study
and its methods will be outlined.
(2) Statistical information cuUed from three 20-week replications of the word-processing
intervention (total n = 61 learning disabled, 160 non-learning disabled subjects) will be presented.
Criteria include course completion rates, grade point average, pre-post scores on a writing sample,
fluency as measured by total words produced, control as measured by frequency of speUing errors,
and change scores on the Daly-Miller Scale of Writing Apprehension.
3. Reflective commentary culled from interviews with a large subset of the 61 learning
disabled students studied.
4. Generalization from the study to the effects and limits of word processing as an
accommodation of the writing difficulties most frequently encountered among learning disabled
college students.
Crew, Louis -- Claflin Col/ege
COMPUTING STEPLAIJDERS. DEMON TRAPS. COCK'S FEATHERS AND BLACK PATCHES
In the last decade we've done a fairly good job studying writers' processes, documenting
professionals' fits and starts, as known before we began to count:
Most writers-poets in especial -- prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of
fine frenzy -- an ecstatic intuition-and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep
behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vaCillating crudities of thought -- at the purpose seized
25

only at the last moment -- at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity
of full view -- at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable -- at the
cautious selections and rejections -- at the painful erasures and interpolations -- in a word, at
the wheels and pinions -- the tackle for scene-shifting -- the stepladders and demon-traps -- the
cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which in ninety-nine cases of a hundred,
constitute the properties of the literary histrio.
--Edgar Allen Poe
Programmers have only partially tapped what we know about writer's processes. I propose
to "take a peep behind the scenes" to suggest more than two dozen programs not yet written, to
help with the real "properties of the literary histrio." For example, programs to
> play with multiple combinations of prefixes and suffixes to a root which the user supplies
> chart densities of assonance. consonance, and alliteration in a text
> monitor Chinglish (Chinese interference with English)
> supply random words as prompts when blocked
> prompt the blocked writer for a creative use of on-line thesauruses such as WordFinder
and TUrbo Lightning
> generate puns
> rearrange words, sentences, and/or paragraphs and so forth.
Professional writers will suggest other programs. I will query them through various
electronic networks for writers.
As background, I will review more than two dozen more writers' programs already available,
most of them shareware, popular with professional writers, as they attest to one another, as through
the journalists' forum of Compu-Serve and various SIG newsletters for writers. Examples:
UST (Buerg). Views, searches, and copies.
FGREP (Dunford). Searches & clones.
FOG INDEX. Monitors pomposity.
PARSE (PC Magazine). Counts printable characters; words with three or more
syllables; sentences; average characters/word; average words/sentence.
PCOutline. Arranges.
I will also draw insights from my own work as review editor of Computers & Composition
and as a programmer. Sample programs:
BASICENG. Helps you write for ESL readers
CANTONESE. Teaches spoken Cantonese. An earlier version, "MailMerge Cantonese,"
won best-article-of-1985 by the Hong Kong Computer Society, reprinted in the Journal of the
Chinese Language Teachers' Association, May 1986.
INVENT. Helps you invent fresh metaphors.
MUSES. Circulates manuscripts, catalogs publishers, monitors queries,
writes letters, prints manuscripts, summarizes data, tallies circulation, specializes bibliographies,
and more.
MYLOG. Documents how you use your computer--for IRS, for clients, etc.
POETEASE. Generates assonance, consonance, and rhyme.
STYLED. Graphs sentence length, word length, punctuation, syntax, weak verbs, and
nominalization.
I will focus mainly on directions for new programs.
26

Custer, David -- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
TURBULENCE OF FLOW; OBSERVATIONS ON WATCHING WRITING
For the past year, instructors at MIT, using EOS, the Educational On-line System, which
has introduced computers into the writing classes, have been recording students' writing keystroke
by keystroke as they type. These keystroke records can be replayed character by character allowing
instructors and students to watch the writing process in action.
I would like to describe how we have used this record/replay technology in the classroom
and share some of my observations from watching replays.
Davis, Ken -- Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis
TOWARD A HYPERTEXT ON WRITING
As both research and most teachers' experience suggest, little about writing can be taught
and learned consciously and directly. Most of a writer's fluency comes from extensive exposure to
written language, through extensive self-motivated reading. From such reading, writers
unconsciously "acquire" the code.
But as Krashen points out, code acquisition, based as it is on fmished documents, is only
a necessary, not sufficient, condition for becoming a good writer. Writers also need to learn,
directly and consciously, about the process that produced those documents. Such information is not
available from the documents themselves, so it must come from practice or instruction.
Hypertext, as a medium, seems uniquely suited for such instruction. Because it is nonlinear
or multidimensional, hypertext can allow student writers to see "behind" fmished documents to the
processes that produced them. Hypertext thus has the potential-- not achievable by normal, linear
textbooks -- to truly relate process and product.
I am currently using MaxThink, Houdini, and PC-Hypertext to write such a hypertext, with
the goal of giving students flexible, individualized access to various stages in the writing of various
documents. I propose to present a rationale for such an effort, share examples from my work in
progress, and offer suggestions for other authors, teachers, and researchers.
DiMatteo, Anthony 1. -- New York Institute of Technology
UNDER ERASURE; A THEORY FOR NElliORK WRITING IN THE BASIC ENGLISH
CLASSROOM
From my first threatening experience with a local area network in a developmental writing
and reading course, I knew the talk-writing my students were doing challenged their and my
understanding of the teacher'S role. The cause of this anxiety was immediately clear to me - the
technology my students were using to write had called in doubt the status of the text. In fact, the
text, traditionally understood as a stable place of organized and fixed meanings, had disappeared.
27

It sudden invisibility resulted in the erasure of the teacher's authority. In the clear absence of text
and author, my students had to confront a writing situation that was now focussed on their own
speech. Their otn language has become intensely visible when they had expected to learn how to
comment on and recall a teacher's. This disturbing scenario, more exposed than created by the use
of a network in the classroom, demands theoretical consideration for what it tells us about the
process of developmental learning.
A viable theory of learning must account for several features of the network classroom.
First, my students, divided into groups of talk-writers, had to face the otherness of language directly
-- no longer just a medium of self-expression, their words now had to project a self whose power
resides not in separation from others but in an ability to collaborate with them. This empowerment
of the individual within an enabling group demands a reorientation of thinking about the
conventional deHnitions of the writer and his or her audience of readers as discrete entities.
Secondly, besides opening up notions of the autonomous self to critical pressure, the group unit,
emerging from the erasure of the isolated selves of its individual members, must converse to write,
a collective activity that makes thinking, listening and speaking nearly synonymous acts. The writing
of such interactive selves requires a different evaluation from the teacher who now must consider
the work for its effectiveness as a vehicle of group discovery. How well students integrate
themselves within their group, not how well they standout, becomes the focus of grading.
That the network in the classroom and the talk-writing it requires should elicit a
deconstructive approach to thinking about learning should not surprise teachers who have felt the
novel challenge of establishing a text in such a classroom. But how and why this approach is
warranted are issues for careful examination. By reviewing what happens to traditional topicoriented
exercises when introduced to the network enhanced classroom, we will be in a position to
observe the new directions that student composition is forced to take. A sampling of the results
of such work would help reveal the ways in which teachers must rethink basic concepts of authority
and textuality. I will offer a sample as well as a preliminary theory that accounts for the new
dimensions of developmental learning evidenced by network writing.
DiPardo, Anne -- University of California at Berkeley
and
DiPardo, Mike -- Sonoma State University
TOWARDS THE METAPERSONAL ESSAY: EXPLORING THE POTENTIAL OF HYPERTEXT
IN THE CQMPOSITION CLASS
In an article which charts the enduring discord between teachers who endorse "personal"
writing versus those interested in the "impersonal," Robert Connors (1987) strikes a potentially
powerful but rather vaguely delineated compromise. Setting aside such disagreements, he argues
the need to nudge students toward the "next step" -- "to go beyond merely personal accounts, either
outside into encompassing the world in discourse, or inside into shaping our personal observations
into the touching, deeply empathetic and finaUy meta personal stuff of which the greatest writing is
made" (p. 181).
28
"ONL-______________ _

We agree that the particularities of what we've done and felt inform in significant ways the
more abstract, generalized avenues of inquiry we pursue in our academic and professional lives (see
DiPardo, 1989)--that, as Harold Rosen (1984, p. 12) argues, "Inside every non-narrative kind of
discourse there stalk the ghosts of narrative" while, conversely, "inside every narrative there stalk
the ghosts of non-narrative discourse." We believe that one of the major challenges before any
teacher, but especially a teacher of writing, is to locate those dynamic points of connection where
experience gives rise to inquiry--to meet students on their own turf, yes, but also guide them to a
vision of how their own worlds connect to the larger human experience. Often obscuring this
mission is the schism which holds fast in the minds of many: abstract, reasoned, "serious" exposition
on the one hand, "just stories," "mere anecdotes" on the other.
At first glance, the computer seems an odd antidote indeed. To progressive educators
interested in supporting the writing process, computers have seldom connotated such integration
0 0 embraced as invaluable for word processing, but othelWise associated with drill and practice
(Becker, 1984; Littlejohn, Ross & Gump, 1984: Sheingold, Kane, & Endreweit, 1983), with efficient,
linear thought (O'Shea & Self, 1983), with science and mathematics (Hawkins, 1987), with
exacerbating our tendency to split the self into thinking and feeling components (Turkle, 1984). But
meanwhile, the advent of Hypermedia is promising to transform our old conceptions of how
computers might enhance the writing class.
Fascinated by HyperCard's potential to support writing instruction, we began work some
months ago on an application which addresses the idea that expository and narrative discourse
represent poles of a dialectic. We have nearly completed an initial version of the application.
While we have targeted a population of college freshmen, the application is sufficiently flexible to
be used as well in high schools. In the coming months we plan to ask some undergraduates to try
it out, and to gather a bank of sample essays and recordings of students talking about their
composing process (Anne DiPardo has authored the samples currently included). We are interested
in student collaboration around writing (see DiPardo & Freedman, 1988), and intend that this
application encourage a richly social, richly collaborative classroom environment. We envision
students brainstorming the assignments together, one entering ideas at the keyboard while another
thinks aloud -- aided, where they become stuck, by pointers and tips stored in accompanying "helpH
stacks. With work-in-progress collected in a classroom data bank, response to rough drafts could
be on-going, abundant, and varied. Finished products could be easily compiled into a classroom
magazine and accessed, along with samples of professional writing, by future groups of students.
Links could be provided to highlight similarities among key features of these essays--for instance,
the various ways in which writers navigate between their grounding in personal experience and their
discussion of larger human issues and concerns. Finally, students could maintain an on-going,
collective idea log to help stimulate thought about future essays and engage in written dialogue with
one another.
We have designed a series of assignments which encourage students to explore the
relationship between personal experience and public inquiry, with the final goal of integrating the
two into the "metapersonal" essay. The initial assignments ("Narrative" and "Two Track") ask
students to first write a personal narrative, then an impersonal expository piece on a related theme,
linking the two essays with buttons where similar ideas or concerns are addressed. Then, students
would further explore this shape-shifting between narrative and expository prose by writing
29

Hypertexts with two different emphases ("Nar-Exp"). The first assignment in this series asks
students to write a narrative, but with buttons linked to pop-up windows containing expository
asides; the second essay would be a work of exposition on a similar topic, this time punctuated by
narrative pop-up windows. Finally, having explored at some length the relationships between their
public interests and personal experiences, students would be guided toward writing which integrates
the two into exploratory (Zeiger, 1985), recursive, "meta personal" prose.
In addition to helps and exercises which guide students through each assignment, the stacks
will also contain a fLle of pictures to inspire essay brainstorming (with pop-up windows for recording
notes to be referenced later); extensive files of sample essays, supplemented by recordings of the
authors describing their composing processes; a suggestion box in which ideas and complaints can
be registered and the instructor can leave response; help stacks offering technical assistance; and
space in which student ideas can be stored and fellow students can offer feedback. While the
assignments are quite open-ended as we've conceived them, a semester-length course could easily
be designed by moving through a series of such exercises, each series exploring a distinct theme
or issue.
The emergence of relatively accessible new technologies like HyperCard provides writing
teachers the opportunity to become more closely involved than ever before in designing software
for use in their classrooms. How to adapt this technology in ways informed by the vision of
educational theorists and the experience of practitioners remains, however, an open question. In
bringing together our own technical and educational knowledge to create this application, we've had
an opportunity to explore first hand the challenge of achieving a graceful synthesis. Can Hypertext
be adapted in ways that will help students negotiate between inner and outer worlds We believe
that it can; but perhaps even more significantly, our work can demonstrate to writing teachers
Hypermedia's potential to address key pedagogic issues in uniquely useful ways, and practitioners'
emerging power to shape the increasingly accessible new technologies. We look forward to putting
the appUcation into use this winter and spring, and to the possibility of sharing our ideas,
experiences, and stackware at this year's computers and Writing Conference.
References
Becker, H. (1984). Computers in schools today: Some basic considerations. AmericanJoumalo/
Education, 93, 22-39.
Connors, R. (1987). Personal writing assignments. Col/ege Composition and Communication. 38,
166-183.
DiPardo, A. (1989). Narrative knowers, expository knowledge: Discourse as a dialectic. Occasional
Paper #6. University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie-Mellon: Center for the Study of
Writing.
DiPardo, A. & Freedman, S. W. (1988). Peer response in the writing classroom: Theoretic
foundations and new directions. Review of Educational Research, 58, 119-149.
Hawkins, J. 1987). Computers and girls: Rethinking the issues. In Roy D. Pea and Karen
Sheingold (Eds.), Mirrors of miruis: Patterns of experience in educational computing. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex (pp. 242-257).
Littlejohn, T. D., Ross, R. P., & Gump, P. V. ( 1984). Using microcomputers in elementary schools:
Implementation issues. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association, New
Orleans.
30

O'Shea, T., & Self, J. (1983). Learning and Teaching with Computers: Artificial Intelligence in
Education. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Rosen, H. (1984). Stories and their meanings. Sheffield, England: NATE.
Sheingold, K., Kane, J. & Endreweit, M. (1983). Microcomputer use in schools: Developing a
research agenda. Harvard Educational Review, 4, 412-432.
Turlde, S. (1984). The second self" Computers and the human spirit. New York: Touchstone/Simon
& Schuster.
Zeiger, W. (1985). The exploratory essay: Enfranchising the spirit of inquiry in college
composition. College English, 47, 454-466.
Duin, Ann Hill
COLlABORATIVE WRITING AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS: UNIVERSITY TO UNIVER·
SlIT .. COURSE TO COURSE
Researchers studying non-academic writing have found that on-the-job writing involves a
great deal of collaboration (Faigley & Miller, 1982). Allen, et a1., (1987) note that professional
collaborative writing tasks include a range of activities involving: a supervisor's (Paradis, Dobrin,
& Miller, 1986), group planning of a document that is drafted and revised individually (Odell, 1985),
individual planning and drafting of a document that is revised coUaboratively (Doheny-Farina,
1986), peer reviews of co-workers' drafts (Anderson, 1985), and co-authoring of documents (Ede
& Lunsford, in press). Even though surveys indicate that about 75% of professionals write
coUaboratively on the job (Anderson, 1985), college instructors assign primarily individuallyauthored
documents.
The main goals of this project are to help students learn how to collaborate, work in teams,
and use telecommunications as a means toward generating a transitional language to bridge the gap
from school to workplace. As part of a design team, I developed Collaborative Writing (CW)
software which helps students learn how to coauthor and develop via telecommunications such
things as memos proposals, reports, and instructions. Collaborative Writing is an interactive
learning and productivity tool that enhances the process of collaborative writing. CW allows
students the Dexibility to integrate knowledge acquisition from tutorials with a word processing tool
for practice and performance. Students can at any time take their notes generated in the CW
tutorial, rework them in the CW word processor, incorporate them into existing documents, or send
their notes/documents to their collaborative group members and/or instructor. Via an Appleshare
File Server, the students collaborate first with other students in a technical communication course,
and later with students at other universities and with people in busiriess and industry. Faculty, via
telecommunications, monitor and coach students throughout the collaborative process. Figures
1-5 attached to this abstract show the Collaborative Writing Dow diagram, the main menu, the
tutorial menu and note-taking facility, the word processor, and a screen shot of a collaborative
group accessing the file server. [NOTE: Figures 1-5 are not included here, Ed.]
Over 400 students in a myriad of majors have used this courseware over the past year, each
student generating an average of 44 pages worth of messages. In a series of six studies I have
31

investigated the effects of the courseware and telecommunications on students' writing processes,
their attitudes toward computers and writing, the quality of their collaborative documents, and
their use of telecommunications technology. We have found this technology to enhance teaching
and learning as students and instructors view writing as a social process involving numerous
transactions. The courseware and use of telecommunications facilitates collaboration as students
share not only their fmal written products but also their processes and their struggles .. their
documents in the making.
Because the courseware is actively used in the computer classroom, students do not view
it as an outside·of.·class assignment, but rather as an aid to help them discuss and enhance their
writing and collaborative processes. Each class period students ask questions based on tutorial
information, and instructors direct the majority of class discussions from the courseware itself. In
short, the courseware and telecommunications helps students confront the complexities of
collaborating .. developing an equitable division of labor, subtly supervising peers, sharing ill·formed
information, and coordinating writing that is continually evolving (Kraut, Galegher, & Carmen,
1988).
]n this presentation, I will do the following:
* briefly note current research on non·academic writing processes that shows the need
for this type of non· traditional classroom and classwork
* demonstrate the courseware and Appleshare telecommunications system
• describe how students work in teams with other students and with people in business
and industry, designing appropriate documents based on their collaborative work
• describe the students' use of telecommunications, and the effects of such collaboration
on students' writing processes and the quality of subsequent documents, and
• document how faculty monitor the collaoorative process and teamwork, and how they
share their disciplinary expertise via telecommunications.
In terms of the suggested topics for presentations or demonstrations, this presentation
relates to the following:
* computer support for collaooration
• computer·mediated discourse communities
* empirical studies of computers and writing, and
* approaches to evaluation.
References
Allen, N., Atkinson, D., Morgan, M., Moore, T., & Snow, C. (1987). What experienced collaoo·
rators say aoout collaborative writing. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 1..
70-90.
Anderson, P. (1985). What sUlVey research tells us about writing at work. In L. Odell and D.
Goswami (Eds.), Wn·ting in nonacademic settings, (pp. 3·83). New York: Guilford Press.
Doheny·Farina, S. (1986). Writing in an emerging organization: An ethnographic study. Written
Communication, 1. 158·184.
Ede, L., & Lunsford, A. (In press). Collaborative learning. Writing Programs Administrator.
Faigley, L., & Miller, T. (1982). What we ie .. lrn from writing on the job. College English, 44, 557·
569.
Kraut, R. E., Galegher, J., & Carmen, E. (1988). Relationships and tasks in scientific research
32

collaboration. Human-Computer Interaction, l 31-58.
Odell, L. (1985). Beyond the text: Relations between writing and social context. In L. Odell and
D. Goswami (Eds.), Writing in nonacademic settings, (pp.249-280). New York: Guilford Press.
Paradis, J., Dobrin, D., & Miller, R. (1985). Writing at Exxon lTD: Notes on the writing
environment of an R&D organization. In L. Odell and D. Goswami (Eds.), Writing in
nonacademic settings, (pp. 281-307). New York: Guilford Press.
Fairchild, Kim Michael;
Meredith, L. Greg;
and
WexeJblat, Alan D. -- Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation
A METAPHORICALLY ORGANIZED INTERFACE ENVIRONMENT FOR THE DEVELOPMENT
OF LARGE SOFIWARE SYSTEMS BY TEAMS OF DESIGNERS
Mini-Abstract: This paper describes a prototype system designed to meet the needs of the next
generation of user interfaces. We address research questions of multiple shared semanticallyoriented
views, information complexity, and customizable tool environments. Our domain of
interest is software systems that require interfaces for teams of people to large bodies of design
art ifacts. This prototype is built around the metaphor of tourists and tour guides.
Implementations of metaphorically organized human interfaces continue to enjoy
commercial success but computer researchers commonly believe these interfaces are useful only for
novice users and for specific applications such as word processing. At present these interfaces do
not address problems of multiple simultaneous users, information overload, and dynamic interface
extension. Here at MCC we are addressing these questions and building a next-generation software
environment to dramaticaUy increase the size of software systems that can be built by teams of
software professionals. The interface for this system produces customizable views of a central,
metaphorically-organized, persistent design space. This space is populated by design artifacts;
heterogeneous chunks of interrelated data, including specifications, design decisions, change
requests, previous version of the software, corporate formalisms for coordinating the development,
and more.
To begin work, a designer logs in and a view of the design space is supplied. The view
consists of windows depicting subsets of the design space encoded into interconnected iconic forms.
Tools associated with the forms allow modification of the underlying information and tools stored
in a view called the too/belt allow modification of the views themselves. Designers navigation
methods provided by the system to move about in the design space.
Many metaphors for interaction can be used. We have crafted one called the Tourist
Metaphor which uses the roles of "tourists and guide." This metaphor contains behaviors where one
guide may take one or many tourists on a tour of interesting sites in the design space. As noted by
Triggl and Bush 2 the idea of guided tours through hypermedia webs has a long ancestry.
In the Tourist Metaphor, aU users have an explicit presence in the design space and tools
33

support communication between them and sharing representations. Any designer may be turned
into a guide; the designer/tourist gets the same view of the design space as the guide and aUows
the guide to control any aspect of the tourist's remote interfaces to enhance the tourist's
appreciation of the tour. The guide can move the group to different areas of the space and can
change the representation of the space by modifying the current tour or by selecting a new one.
Interesting objects may be investigated in detail by opening them up to inspection or modification.
The tourist has tools such as virtual notebook and a camera to collect pointers to interesting objects
and produce a recording of the entire trip for later reflection. A speakerphone connection and
common graphical display provide the context for communication.
Tourists can also be active. When a view is presented by a guide, tourists may request a
delay so that they can inspect particular objects more closely. They can select objects and view
them in editors. Figure 1 shows such an activity; the user has used a tool called magnifier to
enlarge a section of a view, and has opened up an object for detailed inspection. In Figure I, the
dark arrows represent the sequence of events; they do not actually appear on the user's screen.
The principal building blocks of the environment are called automatic icons!. Objects in the
design space are represented by automatic icons which graphically represent the semantic
information in the objects. Automatic icons apply semantic and representational functions,
predefined by the user or the application, to the objects to generate pictorial representations on the
fly.
The resultant icons represents a subset of the underlying semantic content of the associated
object, and the form and content of this subset can be manipulated by the user. If another subset
View
(if Klr
netlo world~
nil))
Figure 1 • Example Composite View from Tour
34

is required, either the current model used to compose the automatic icon is modified or another
automatic icon is substituted. The user is given control over what information is represented, how
it is represented, and how the representation changes when the information changes.
When the number of objects to be displayed in a view becomes too large for a designer to
comprehend easily, the system supports information reduction strategies called generalized fisheye
views.f.. Fisheye views display details near a focal point and onJy more important landmarks further
away. Such views attempt to give a useful balance of detail and surrounding context. These views
are implemented by computing a degree-of-interest value for every object and then displaying -- using
automatic icons -- those objects that have a higher degree-of-interest value than a predefmed
threshold. The degree-of-interest value for any object increases as the a priori. importance of the
object increases, and it decreases as distance increases from the object to the point where the user
is currently focused.
In summary, we have built a prototype to address the multiple user, complexity, and
extensibility problems with existing metaphorically organized interfaces. This prototype consists of
a persistent space of the design artifacts produced and used by teams of software designers. Users
may bring their tools into and navigate in this design space. The system, using the concepts of
automatic icons, provides customized views of the information. When the complexity of the
resultant displays saturates the perceptual abilities of the designers fisheye views, giving a balance
of high detail and global context, are produced. Various metaphors for faciEtating communication
are possible and we have implemented one based on the metaphor of tourists and tour guides.
Rererences
I Trigg, R. H. "Guided Tours and Tabletops: Tools for Communicating in a Hypertext
Environment," CSCW'88 Conference Proceedings, Portland, OR, pp. 216-226.
2 Bush, V. "As We May Think," The Atlantic Monthly, August, 1945.
3 Fairchild, K. M., L. G. Meredith, and A. D. WexelbJat. A Formal Structure for Automatic
Icons, MCC Technical Report Number STP-311-88, September, 1988.
4 Furnas, G. W. "Generalized Fisheye Views", CHl'86 Conference Proceedings, Boston, MA,
pp. 16-23.
Galica, Gregory;
Hughes, Bradley;
and
Ladinsky, Jack -- University of WlSconsin, Madison
EXTENDING THE DISCUSSION; A BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM FOR INTEGRATING
INFORMAL WRITING INTO CLASSES
While it is generally recognized that informal and ungraded writing, as well as peer-group
collaboration, can be used to improve learning and comprehension in college classes, we also know
that there are problems with trying to use writing and group work in our classes. In the flfst place,
lecture and class discussion time are generally filled by activities that make it impossible to add any
35

substantial amount of writing during those times. So it is necessary to provide the time and
opportunity for students to write about course material and to engage in an ongoing discussion
with other students. Second, an important element in the success of both informal writing and peer·
group discussion is guidance and direction provided by the professor/instructor, coupled with some
substantive response both to individual student writing and to the peer-group discussion. So it is
necessary to fmd a way to give professors easy access to all student writing and to allow for the
professor's input without placing an excessive burden on either the students or the professor. Are
computers going to help us We think so.
We designed Comp-U-Talk to solve some of these problems. Here is how the program
works. Students using the Comp-V-Talk program do two kinds of writing on a regular weekly basis:
(1) Responses to questions or prompts given by the professor
(2) Open discussion or written conversation with other students and with
the professor
[n responding to questions or prompts, the students can be directed by the professor to write
about specific material being taught that week, and they can be directed to connect that material
to other course material. The professor can also direct the open discussion toward the major issues
raised in the course and ask the students to form judgments or opinions about those issues, and
they can share those opinions with other students and with the professor. Once the students and
the professor are on Comp-U-Talk, an effective conversation loop is established. In that loop,
students learn by writing responses to specific questions about course material, by reading other
student responses to the same questions, by commenting on their own and other students' responses
in the open discussion, and by reading and responding to the professor's comments in both the
prompts and the open discussion. The program effectively extends the discussion beyond the walls
of the classroom.
Comp-V-Talk was assembled during the summer of 1988 with funds for the computers from
mM Corporation and funds for software and programming from UW-Madison's College of Letters
and Science. To test and perfect the program, Comp-U-Talk was used in the Fall of 1988 in
Sociology 131, Criminal Justice in America, taught by Professor Ladinsky, and it is being used again
this spring in that same class. The program is operating on an IBM PS/2 Model 60 computer, and
students gain access to the program from computers wired into the University'S computer network,
or they can log on by modem from computers at home or elsewhere.
By the conference date, we will have had two full semesters of experience using the program
in Professor Ladinsky's course. We have learned a lot while developing and using this program and
discuss some of our experiences with it. We are also anxious to get input from others at the
conference who may have had some experience with using computers in similar ways. Specifically.
we see our presentation in two parts:
(1) Explanation of the Comp-V-Talk program and its implementation -- both the hardware
and the software ends of it, but most specifically the special features of this modified bulletin board
program.
(2) A discussion of our experiences both in developing and using the program, including:
(a) samples of students' writing -- with comments/discussion of the value of the use of writing in
this class (including some preliminary e mpirical data comparing the performance of Comp-U-Talk
students to that of other students in the class). (b) Professor Ladinsky's observations and comments
36

on his experience using Comp-V-Talk to bring more writing into his class.
Anyone who has ever used, or considered using, computers in this manner to "extend the
discussion" and to "stretch the boundaries of the traditional college classroom" should find this
presentation and discussion interesting and enlightening.
George, Laurie;
Kremers, Marshall -- New York Institute of Technology
and
Cooper, Elizabeth -- Lehman College, The City University of New York
PANEL; COMPUTERS. AUTHORITY. AND THE TEACHING OF WRITING " THREE
PERSPECTIVES
Taking Women Professors Seriously: Female Authority in the Classroom
by George, Laurie -- New York Institute of Technology
Drawing upon my experience as a female humanities professor in a predominately male
technological college, I will address the issues of classroom authority raised in recent feminist
pedagogical studies, such as those in Susan Stanford Freedman's "Authority in the Feminist
Classroom: A Contradiction in Terms"; Barbara Hillyer Davis' "Teaching the Feminist Minority";
Margo Culley, et aI., "The Politics of Nurturance"; and Cynthia Selfe's "Rethinking Computers
and Literary Technology, Theory and Praxis" (an essay on the relation between feminist theory
and computer technology). These studies correspond to the various classroom contexts I have
taught in, allowing me to address two fundamental questions arising from attempts to infuse
feminist pedagogy into the classrooms of a patriarchal institution: (1) In classes filled
predominately with males indoctrinated with patriarchal values, can a female professor escape
maternal stereotyping while employing the popular feminist pedagogy of "nurturing" and
Wfacilitating" And if she can, is she able still to encourage vigorous, excellent work (2) Does the
shift from the traditional composition classroom into the more depersonalized computer-lab
classroom empower or impede female authority If the latter, must the female professor turn from
teacher into tyrant
~Riding the Beast" in the Computer Lab: The Need for a New Assessment of Authority
by Kremers, Marshall -- New York Institute of Technology
By giving our writing students powerful new computer technologies, particularly the Local
Area Network (LAN), we are altering the traditional foundation of our authority. A computerized
classroom designed to give students new freedom opens up new opportunities, but it also poses a
threat to teachers who are used to control. This sudden loss of authority may lead to subtle
countermeasures which end up subverting any real notion of student liberation.
There are two ways to resolve such a dilemma: either admit that we never agreed to give
up authority over our students' writing in the first place (continue to domesticate the beast), or
decide that we want to encourage, share in, and build upon the empowerment that computers make
37

possible as never before (ride the beast -- even if we don't know where it might take us). Beginning
with Peter Elbow's argument for the teacherless classroom, I will briefly review the problem of
authority as an inhibiting force, and I will describe how the lAN radically alters the traditional role
of the writing teacher as an authority figure.
Then I will attempt to answer these two questions: (1) What are the possibilities for
responsible and productive risk-taking in this new environment -- for teachers as well as students
(2) Why does it make sense to say that real "authority" occurs when we give our students more, not
less, freedom to write
Changing the Work and Role of the Teacher of Writing, and Maybe the Leamer Too
by COOPER, EUzabeth -- Lehman Col/ege, The City University of New York
Students have often perceived writing teachers as guardians of the correct written word
(somewhat like stereotypical librarians who worry about someone stealing or marking in the books)
or as the worst kinds of athletic coaches, always yelling at them for making mistakes or for losing
a game.
My experience has been that teaching writing in the computer classroom has changed my
work as a teacher and that my students have developed as learners of writing as they have
perceived me more as facilitator, counselor, and mentor.
My paper describes the various opportunities for students to take control of (Le.,
responsibility for) their own development as thinkers, composers, and revisers. The nature of those
opportunities varies in the three kinds of writing classes often taught in computer classrooms
(freshman/developmental; technical/business; advanced/professional). In any case, no matter how
much or little students do learn to take control, the work of the writing teacher changes
significantly, I think, for the better.
Gerrard, Lisa -- University of California at Los Angeles
COMPUTERS, WRITING FACULTY, AND THE POLITICS OF MARGINALITY
This presentation will focus on the relationship between computer-assisted composition and
the faculty who use a computer-based pedagogy. Several critics have already commented on the
professional risks taken by untenured faculty who devote time to computers. If they develop
software or do research in computers and composition, their efforts are unlikely to be regarded as
serious scholarship when they apply for tenure. This is partly because courseware design is a
relatively new endeavor and few English departments understand it, let alone have a mechanism
for evaluating it. Perhaps more to the point, especially in research institutions, is that software
development and research on computers and writing are related to teaching, usuaUy undergraduate
teaching -- a low status activity in universities that count their prestige in Nobel Prizes and
megadoUar research grants. And as most of us know aU too well, composition -- the course students
"shouldn't need" .- is the humblest of undergraduate offerings and thus offers the least status to its
practitioners.
38

The university can find itself in a bit of a contradiction here. Though no one has won a
Nobel Prize for courseware, such development can garner sufficient prestige and royalties to the
institution that the institution (especially one that prides itself on being ~state of the art") will
encourage computer·based projects. Hence, it is quite possible for faculty to receive small grants,
equipment, even course release time to design and test software that will ultimately count against
them at tenure time.
More often, however, writing faculty at such schools may decline computer projects not
because they expect an adverse tenure review, but because they never expect to come up for tenure
at all. It is, in fact, the marginal status of most writing faculty that is most likely to inhibit
computer·assisted composition at such schools. However personally interested they may be in a
computer project, they are the faculty most likely to lack the time and the incentives to do it. This
is unfortunate because writing faculty are the ones best qualified to design writing software and the
curriculum to go with it and to observe and test its effects in the classroom. Yet they are typically
part-timers commuting to three different institutions; they're too busy making a living to redesign
their courses, let alone develop software.
Instructors who work full·time are likely to have temporary positions, and therefore spend their
nonteaching hours looking for permanent work elsewhere. They lack not only time, but also the
incentive to add to their (already heavy) teaching load: they won't be around long enough to
complete a development project or to enjoy the computer lab they campaigned for. And if they
renovate their courses to include computers, their institution is unlikely to reward such zeal with
an offer of permanent employment. Besides, their contracts may expire before they've learned
enough about computers to use them. Furthermore, faculty interest in computers may be thwarted
by lack of clout •• the untenured may have little say about when, where, or how the computer lab
will materialize. At our school, where computers are plentiful and the administration supportive,
during any academic year, our lab can unexpectedly expand, contract, migrate, or vanish entirely.
Lab monitors and schedules are similarly unpredictable, and often no one is entirely sure who is
running the show. Faculty don't feel they have much control over these matters, and find it easier
to avoid computers than to commit themselves to a project they can't control. This state of affairs
works against what the research (and common sense) suggests _. that the most effective
computer-based composition projects depend on faculty training and support. Computer.assisted
composition is one of the most exciting and dynamic fields in composition. In some cases, it has
utterly transformed the classroom and the experience of learning to write. Yet its universal
acceptance as a teaching tool is being retarded partly because of the retrograde status of
composition faculty. At many schools, the computer revolution will require far more than a lab
down the hall. It will require a revolution in the profession.
Greenleaf, Cynthia .- University of California, Berkeley
CHANGING A WRITING CLASSROOM INTO A COMMUNITY OF WRITERS
For the most part, educators have conceived of computers and word processors as tools
intervening between the writer and her text. allowing the writer to invent new and more productive
39

writing processes and strategies. FoUowing this notion, many educational researchers have
conducted studies of the effects of using computers for writing by measuring various properties of
the texts written with and without the computer (see Hawisher, 1988 for a review of these studies).
The vast majority of these studies ignore the context in which the writing takes place (but see
Michaels, 1985, Dickinson, 1986, and Herrmann, 1987 for more contextualized views). An
alternative view of the computer follows from a social-cultural framework, where the computer is
seen as a tool that intervenes not between actors and artifacts (i.e., writers and texts) but between
actors and activities that are historically- and socially-defined (e.g., Bruce, 1986; Cole & Griffm,
1987; Heap, 1986; Pea & Kurland, 1987). Central to this view is the recognition that writing. as
Scribner and Cole (1981) and Street (1984) argue, is embedded in, and expressive of, the social
values of particular communities that use writing to fulfill specific functions and purposes.
Therefore, studies of writing. and of the use of computers for writing. must take into account the
value-laden nature of writing activities, their meanings for writers, and the roles computers play in
realizing those values and meanings. In effect, before talking about the ways computers change
writing. researchers must define what counts as writing in the particular contexts they encounter.
This paper reports on a year-long ethnographic study of a ninth-grade, low-track English
classroom in an urban high school. Minorities make up 68% of the student population of the
school, but 85% of the students placed into this class, the lowest academic track of ninth-grade
English. Seventy percent of the students in the class were Black, 8% Hispanic, and 15% white, with
one Vietnamese and one Iranian immigrant. In this classroom, the teacher and I collaborated to
introduce computers and word processors, and integrate them into her curriculum, mid-way into
the year. At that point, I trained the teacher and students to use the computers, IBM PCjr's with
256K of memory and single disk drives, and the word processor, WordPerfect 4.0, and remained
in the classroom as a technical assistant throughout the rest of the study. The study focuses on the
changes wrought by the introduction of the new technology. The questions the study aims to
address are two: What are the writing practices the teacher promotes, as defined by the way she
talks about and structures writing activities, before and after the computers enter the classroom
and How do students participate in and view these practices, as measured by their writing
behaviors, their talk, and their texts, before and after the computers enter the classroom I present
the results of this study in this paper.
I found that the classroom teacher adapted the writing practices she promoted as she
integrated the computer. Significantly more writing occurred in the classroom in Phase II, and this
simple fact influenced the kinds of help students were offered with their writing, as well as the
contexts in which they wrote. After the computers entered the curriculum, the teacher no longer
had students meet in peer groups to read and correct their drafts of papers. Instead, she allowed
students to interact informally with their peers as they actually wrote. The teacher and her student
teacher also worked collaboratively with students as they composed at the computers, sitting down
with students, taking the keyboard, and helping students to think of what to write or to put their
thoughts into words, or to edit what they had written. The context for classroom writing shifted
away from whole class to more individualized activity.
In Phase II, the teacher expected students to write and rewrite during a writing session on
the computers, rather than segmenting these aspects of composing into separate activities as she
had before the computers entered the classroom. She also increased her expectations of the
40

students, demanding more from them, because they had computer tools at their disposal. She
created new writing practices, new opportunities for students to use the computers, and diversified
the curriculum to allow several activities to occur simultaneously in the classroom. Interestingly,
not all writing done in Phase II involved the use of computers, however. Only writing practices that
were essentially tied to teaching writing received the benefit of computer writing tools. Other
writing practices, serving other functions and not necessarily tied to writing instruction, per se, did
not.
I also found that the students showed more engagement in their writing in Phase II of the
study, compared to the resigned compliance with teacher demands that they demonstrated in Phase
I. This increased engagement was observable in the amount and nature of their talking about their
writing, and in the frequent, voluntary writing sessions at the computer that took place before
school, at lunch time, or during other academic periods. Writing took on new and personal
meaning for the students, where it had been merely a "school task M
before. Importantly, the
students wrote longer pieces at the computer, but tended to do so by adding on to the ends of their
texts rather than by revising internaUy to their texts. Only with the help of the classroom teacher
did they begin to revise on the computer. Thus, under the impact of the computers, the learning
environment for students in this classroom shifted from a lock-step, whole class curriculum to a
more individualized, diverse and active classroom. The classroom teacher, once a direction-giver
and a compliance-checker, became a coUaborator on writing tasks. With this shift in their learning
environment, students themselves engaged enthusiastically in their own writing and in the writing
of their peers, seeking and giving help frequently as they wrote at the computers.
Many educators engaged in teaching and research in literacy share the noble goal of wanting
to make technological resources work for students. Despite this shared goal, educators can differ
strikingly in the ways they conduct research to investigate the use of computers and in the ways they
set up the classroom to facilitate the goal of making technology transformatory for students.
Whereas most researchers in computers and writing conduct pre- and post-measures of student
writing to measure the effects of computer use, in this study, 1 conducted an ethnography of the
classroom, paying attention to how the computer was introduced and how writing practices occurred
in the classroom before the computers arrived, as weU as how the teacher allowed the classroom
to change and how students responded to the changes with the introduction of the computers.
While computers did change the writing processes and texts of the students, they did so by radically
changing the social context in which students were asked to write, and by helping to create of this
writing classroom a community of writers. It seems to me that this social context is the allimportant
factor determining what, ultimately, technology wLU do for students. This study,
therefore, has implications not only for research, but also for how computers are introduced and
used in classrooms.
References
Bruce, C. 1986. Information technologies and written expression. Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, International
Conference of National Representatives and Experts. October, Paris.
Cole, M. & Griffin, P. 1987. Contextual Factors in Education: Improving Science and Mathematics
Education for Minorities and Women. Wisconsin Center for Education Research, School of
Education, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Madison, WI.
41

Dickinson, D. 1986. "Cooperation, collaboration, and a computer: Integrating a computer into
a first-second grade writing program." Research in the Teaching of English, 2Q, 141-159.
Hawisher, G. 1988. "Research in computers and writing: Findings and Implications." Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April,
New Orleans, lAo
Heap, J. 1986. "Collaborative practices during computer writing in a first grade classroom." Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April, San
Francisco, CA.
Herrmann, 1987. "An ethnographic study of a high school writing class using computers: Marginal,
technically proficient, and productive learners." In L. Gerrard (Ed.), Wrin'ng at Century's End:
Essays in Computer-assisted Composition. New York: Random House.
Michaels, S. 1985. "'The Link between written products and classroom processes: A study of text
development in a sixth grade classroom." Paper presented at the University of California,
Berkeley.
Pea, R. & Kurland, M. 1987. "Cognitive technologies for writing." Review of Research in Education,
14.
Scribner, S. & Cole, M. 1981. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Street, B. 1984. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hawisher, Gail -- Illinois State University
WRITING. TECHNOLOGY. AND THE ACTIVITY OF TEACHING
Introduction
Despite extensive research in computers and composition since 1981, there have been few
attempts to document how computers interact with the teaching of writing. In an effort to
investigate teaching in relation to writing and technology, we are conducting research to examine
not only how teachers use computers for composition instruction but also how computers work to
shape the learning environment of a classroom. My paper at the 1989 Computers and Writing
Conference, if accepted, would discuss preliminary findings of this qualitative research.
The research I intend to discuss explores the ways in which computers are used to teach
writing and how these approaches may differ from those in conventional writing classes.
Specifically, it addresses the following questions: (1) How do teachers adapt composition
instruction to computers And how are traditional notions of a process-oriented writing class
affected by the presence of computers (2) How are such classroom activities as lecturing, talking
about writing, composing. and sharing writing influenced by the presence of computers (3) How
are the social structures of a class -- student-to-student, students-to-instructor ~- shaped by
technology What sorts of classroom discourse characterize writing classes taught on computers
(4) Do computers change the metaphor of the traditional classroom Marshall (1989) in a recent
article in the Educational Researcher suggests that a workplace metaphor is insufficient for
classroom research in general. We wonder if it doesn't have particular limitations for computer
42

writing classes in particular. By examining answers to these questions, we can begin to construct
writing and teaching environments that respond to the challenge of teaching students with advanced
technology.
Studies in word processing and writing over the past several years have failed to
demonstrate with any certainty that technology can help students develop their writing abilities (e.g.,
Collier, 1983; Daiute, 1984, 1985, 1986; Harris, 1985; Hawisher, 1987; Hawisher & Fortune, 1988).
But up to now research in computers and composition has concentrated on how technology interacts
with writers, their processes, and products. No research of which I am aware has looked specifically
at how computers may shape the learning environment of a writing class.
Some studies, however, support the observation that the social interactions of young students
may change with the introduction of computers (Dickinson, 1986) and that cooperation and
collaboration among writers is common in computer-equipped settings (Selfe & Wahlstrom, 1986;
Kurth, 1987). If this is so, and if, as other studies indicate, computers tend to motivate students
(Rodrigues, 1985), the teaching task becomes one of capitalizing on computers and the improved
social milieu within the classroom. Yet there is no documentation of the kinds of pedagogical or
social changes that occur and upon which we might base new strategies for teaching writing.
Results
Preliminary results of this current study indicate that instructors like teaching writing with
computers and believe that the advantages of teaching with technology outweigh the disadvantages.
Yet observational data show a range of practices surrounding the use of computers, suggesting that
there is no such thing as a typical computer writing class. Some classes were conducted with
students writing at computers the entire period and instructors conferring with individual students;
other classes seemed to make minimal use of technology during class but required that students
submit assignments written at computers. Despite this variance, however, a higher proportion of
class time was spent in sharing writing in computer classes than we observed in conventional writing
classes. Perhaps most interesting were the characteristics of some of the teacher talk recorded
during observations. When teachers instructed about computers their discourse was authoritative
and directive, but when they conferred with students at computers about writing, they often talked
of their own composing and computing problems. Further analysis revealed that teaching with
computers may alter the power and control structures within classrooms. We are currently trying
to determine whether this alteration is influenced by the physical changes of a computer-equipped
classroom or more a result of a change in sociality among students and instructors who write
together at computers.
Conclusion
If we are to use new technologies to teach wntlOg, we must discover the strengths and
weaknesses of the medium for various tasks that make up the activity of teaching writing. We need
to learn under what circumstances and in what ways computers are especiaUy useful in establishing
a context that is conducive to learning. My paper at the Minnesota Computers and Writing
Conference is intended to complement important research in writing and computers and, in a small
way, to begin the important task of studying technology in relation to pedagogy.
43

Herrmann, Andrea W. -- University of Arkansas at Little Rock
EVALUATION IN THE ELECTRONIC CLASSROOM; A DQUBLE EDGE SWORD •• OR IS ITI
Teachers who teach writing in computer classrooms -- whether it's freshman composition,
technical writing, or expository writing -- recognize that the goals and content of these writing
courses have changed since precomputer days. While teachers continue to teach writing, they also
teach, to one degree or another, computer skills. At the minimum this means teaching students
how to use a word processing program and how to integrate it into their writing processes. But
teachers include other software as well, from spelling checkers to desktop publishing (DTP). In
short, we teach both writing and technological skills in today's electronic classrooms. Yet how well
do our evaluation processes reflect the content of our courses Do we assess student's
technological expertise For most of us, the answer is no. Why not Should we be And, if so,
how
For many writing teachers, if not most, such questions expose our Achilles' heeL We do not
see ourselves as teachers of mechanical skills. We rightly identify with the world of humanistic
concerns: ideas, values, philosophical questions, the search for truth, and so on. Yet the daily life
of many writing teachers involves instruction in technological areas; computers are bumping our
heads against a hard reality.
Both the process of composing and the nature of the finished product are changing. In
particular the Mshift from text-based to graphics-based word-processing software," as John
Ruszkiewicz describes desktop publishing (1988, p. 9) brings to the fore the question of what we
are teaching and how we are evaluating it. In DTP relationships between form and content take
on new meaning when writers integrate ideas with words, font size, or graphics, and the other
features involved in the production of publications with a high level of visual impact.
Visually informative prose is pervasive and, according to Steve Bernhardt, we need to teach
it. He believes that "classroom practice which ignores the increasingly visual, localized qualities
of information exchange can only become increasingly irrelevant~ (1986, p. 77). According to
Ruszkiewicz, Mthe graphics revolution could lead to the reconceptualization of composing as a
thinking act that enables more human beings to exercise more faculties, skill and imagination than
was ever possible before" (1988, p. 14-15). And as Billie Wahlstrom states, "What the computer
only hinted at, DTP makes clear: fundamental alterations in the word/print relationship resulting
from digital communication technologies~ (in press, p. 163).
If Bernhardt, Ruszkiewicz, and Wahlstrom are correct, the challenges of teaching and
learning within these more complex technological environments should mean that evaluation
becomes even more significant. We must be receptive to new ways of evaluating students and their
texts, ways that capture the entirety of what is being taught and learned. Without effective
evaluation how can we know how welJ we are teaching the emerging technological skills How can
we know how well students are using them Evaluation may need to encompass more than finished
written products; it may need to include the student's skill in using the technology.
In this paper I discuss reasons why computers and writing teachers have traditionally ignored
the evaluation of technological skills. I show reasons why we should not continue to ignore wider
views of assessment in computers and writing classrooms. I look at the double-edged sword of
evaluation: technological skills versus writing. I maintain that changes within the field of computer
44

technology are bringing about changes in the nature of written texts, actually making the evaluation
of technological skills versus the evaluation of writing a single, not a double, issue. And I conclude
with recommendations concerning the kinds of evaluations of students and text teachers should be
making in our changing electronic classrooms.
Works Cited
Bernhardt, S. A. (1986). "Seeing the text." College Composition and Communication,;rz, 66-78.
Ruszkiewicz, 1. (1988). "Word and image: The next revolution." Computers and Composition,
5.3, 9-15.
Wahlstrom, B. 1. (in press). "Desktop publishing: Perspectives, potentials, and politics." In G. E.
Hawisher & c. L Selfe (Eds.), Coming of Age: New perspectives on Computers in Composition.
NY: Teachers College Press.
Hilligoss, Susan;
Barnes, Karen;
Benson, Chris;
Crenshaw, Diane;
Martin, Esther;
and
Poston, Bill -- Clemron University
PANEL -- BECOMING INSIDERS: COMPUTER CONFERENCING IN A GRADUATE SEMINAR
As part of a fall 1988 seminar in nonacademic and academic writing, six masters' degree
students and five faculty and staff at Clemson used computer conferencing to explore the topic of
·social theories and writing in the professions." We -- six of the participants -- propose to describe
how the conferencing worked in this case and to analyze its effects on our writing and learning.
We're basing our presentation on the approximately 160 pages of writing generated by the
conference, plus interviews with the participants conducted in December 1988.
First we will briefly describe how conferencing fit into the course: assignments, goals, and
training on the computer. (That section is given nearly in full below.) Then we will present three
aspects of the experience: formation of the discourse community and a survey of members'
attitudes toward conferencing; analysis of features of the writing generated; and problems
encountered that affected learning and writing. Though working from solid data, we plan to speak
informally and give different viewpoints as participant-observers.
How conferencing fit into the course. Computer conferencing on the system V AXNOTES
replaced the week1y, informal response papers usually expected in a graduate course. I, Susan
Hill igoss, asked each seminar member to write about the assigned readings once a week. As
inst ructor I had several goals for conferencing: to create an electronic network like those
increasingly found in the workplace, prompt more written exchange of ideas than paper responses
did, and draw attention to our own discourse community as we read about and observed other such
communities. The readings in social construction were difficult and crossed many fields -­
anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, the sociology of science, and feminism -- so I was particularly
45

interested in how graduate students in literature came to terms with these new ideas as they read
and observed themselves. I hypothesized that conferencing would make that process easier, or
more evident.
We were introduced to V AXNOTES during the second class session by three computing
staff members. Several of the participants had no experience with computers; no one was more than
dimly acquainted with electronic conferencing. Although there had been another university
conferencing system available for several years, V AXNOTES was new in July 1988. As the first rea1
users of the system, we received ample support from Clemson Computer Center's Drew Smith, who
not only wrote and revised a manual that we used, but monitored our sessions and participated as
a writer. After midsemester three more faculty joined the conference, two in English and one in
history.
How writers used and perceived con[erencing. Based on her interviews with participants
and a case study of "insiders and outsiders," Esther Martin will discuss formation of the electronic
discourse community. She will also survey members' attitudes toward conferencing and compare
that with actual use. She'U discuss "heavy" and "light" use, and writing versus "lurking," that is,
simply reading on the system. One recurring issue was whether and how to extend the number of
respondents to people not in the class. Some of these users did not meet until the final class
session. The most common comment, from early on in the course, was that the network had a
strong social impact on participants; we felt that we knew each other, and several became friends
outside class.
Analysis of responses. "Heavy user" Chris Benson and I will analyze some features of the
responses generated. These range from social features such as the ways that we negotiated forms
of address between students and faculty, to features that bear on learning and writing. Unfamiliar
ideas were naturalized through humor and other strategies. Some topics "caught fire," leading to
particularly lengthy exchanges between writers and giving writers ideas for research projects. One
of these was feminism and gender bias in academic writing. We'U also compare attitudes that we
expressed, such as those concerning jargon, with our own usage. Other patterns will be traced and
compared to th e initial goals for the course. We'll also describe how conferencing led to other
computer communication, through electronic mail and a "phone" service, and whether these served
different functions from conferencing.
Problems. A self-proclaimed computerphobe and user with military experience, Bill Poston
will discuss problems that affected learning and writing. These included physical constraints, such
as the location of terminals and the inability to edit prior notes; social issues in computer
transactions, such as the lack of face-to-face discussion and the question of implicit or explicit
censorship; and academic issues, such as the role of the instructor and the problem of evaluating
performance on such systems. Karen Barnes and Diane Crenshaw wiU be respondents.
CQnclusions. We will raise questions and answer a few. If conferencing is a main course
activity, what should classroom time be devoted to'! How might conferencing of this type be
extended to collaborative research projects How can problems be addressed How, and under
what conditions, does conferencing change the social relations of teachers and students, and thus
the nature of learning
46

Houlette, Forrest -- Ball Stale University
SOFlWARE THAT KNOWS HOW YOU WRITE;
WRITERS
AN INTELLIGENT ASSISTANT FOR
Applications of artificial intelligence in software for writers follow two threads. One
approach emphasizes text analysis, seeking to provide the writer expert advice about grammatical,
stylistic, and punctuation issues. The other approach envisions software that will converse with
writers, much the way a peer evaluator might, in order to prompt and shape the process and
product. While these two approaches tantalize both writers and teachers with possibilities, they
both depend on breakthroughs in technology or software design in order to become practical for
writers. Even the best of grammar and style checkers cannot tell the difference between a good
nominalization and a bad nominalization. Current conversational programs require a rather
extensive willing suspension of disbelief in order to be functional. There is, however, a different
strategy from artificial intelligence which can be implemented immediately to create an intelligent
assistant for writers. It is a technique of knowledge representation called procedural knowledge.
This presentation will describe how to implement procedural knowledge in software and will
demonstrate how it has been implemented in a piece of software under development, Write
Environment.
Procedural knowledge refers to a means of encoding a knowledge of process as a set of
computer language instructions. For instance, any routine that can sort a list alphabetically contains
code that mimics what the human mind does when it performs the same task. Humans collect an
inventory of items to compare; the computer does so as well. Humans compare pairs letter by
letter from left to right; the computer code performs the same task. Humans decide the ordering
of the pair on the basis of the comparison; the computer code makes the same decision. Humans
repeat the examination of pairs until the list of items is arranged alphabetically; the computer code
also iterates the process until the list is sorted. Since the code executes the same procedures a
human would, it is said to represent a knowledge of how to alphabetize.
Representing a knowledge of the writing process is certainly a more complex task than
representing a knowledge of how to alphabetize. Flower and Hayes' description of the writing
process. however, greatly simplifies the task. Using Flower and Hayes' model, a software designer
can create an inventory of activities that writers perform when they write. Planning is one such
activity. Code can easily be written which mimics the planning activities writers are observed to
perform. Freewriting is one such activity that can easily be coded. After inventorying activities and
implementing them in code, however, a software designer has to decide how the activities relate to
one another. For instance, only one activity may have the writer's attention at any given time, but
other processes may be simultaneously in execution unconsciously. The writer must be able to
suspend one task and turn attention to another at any time as well. And, more importantly, the
writer must be able to sequence tasks in any order. The question of how to accommodate these
procedural issues seems especially complex.
The apparent complexity is an illusion produced, however. by the usual focus on linear
computer programs, each with full control of the CPU. With a shift in perspective, resolving the
issues of how programs should relate to one another in an intelligent assistant for writers is rather
simple. The software designer needs the techniques associated with a multitasking environment.
47

Once this shift in perspective occurs, implementing a writer's procedural knowledge in code is easy.
Write Environment is such an implementation. Its plan of development will be offered as
a template for the design of such systems. The techniques of using such a system as a shell for
implementing other strategies from artificial intelligence will also be explained, as will be the
decision support mechanisms that have been included in the Write Environment system.
Huntley. John .• University of Iowa
STARTING UP A MACINTOSH NEJWORK FOR WRITING INSTRUCTION;
PROBLEMS. PROMISES. PITFALLS. AND MODEST SUCCESSES
CAVEATS.
Major Points:
What might a local area network of Macintosh computers contribute to the work of teaching
or learning the writer's craft
With University funds matching a gift from Apple, we at the University of 10wa installed
earlier this year a network of 25 Macintosh SE's, some in faculty offices, others in a student work
area. We call it The Word Shop and l'd like to share with you some of the hills and valleys we've
been into while chasing its tail.
Has it made the teacher's life easier Or the student's progress quicker and more as·
sured
What did we think the new technology could or should do for us that the Xerox machine
couldn't do
What problems did we encounter What interim solutions have we applied What kind
of exploration are we engaged in to learn the uses of this new tool
Points to think about as you imagine the benefits of networked computers (or seek funds
from administrators and other benefactors).
Dealing with the University and Computer Center .. planning, installing, budgeting the
whole operation: caveats, advice, warnings.
Installation and setup A student "writing lab," a computerized classroom Faculty access
Printing facilities and hard·copy dependency What's the most efficient disposition of all this
machinery
Dealing with faculty who are four years into using 256K PC's with version 2.4 of PC·Write,
quite grateful for the technology, and wonder where the energy and time will come from to learn
a whole new system .. how do you stimulate exploration and playfulness How do you gather and
refocus the consequences of scattered insight Some suggestions from our experience.
Students .. what problems do they encounter when you tell them that all the writing in the
course will take place on networked computers . ~ and so will all the commentary and criticism
How to get them into the machinery in order to get them into the habit of writing confidently.
The Classroom .~ what can an instructor do in class with a computer, a projector panel
(Sharp. Kodak), and an overhead projector
Software: In addition to a word processor, what kinds of software have proved useful
Might soon be useful How to get it, learn it, use it.
48

Research: What can we learn about teaching and learning to write And how How might
we demonstrate the effects of LANs and computers on the conduct of teachers or students or the
quality of their writing Can or should cost be justified in terms of demonstrable benefits
Kaplan, Nancy •• Cornell University
AS WE MAY TEACH: SOME PROBLEMS WITH COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COLLABORA­
TION IN THE WRITING CURRICULUM
Whether we position ourselves with those who see the writing classroom as a gateway to one
or more discourse communities or with those who see it as rehearsal space for what Douglas
Englebart calls "knowledge workers," we can use computer technology to challenge the romantic
view of the writer as a solitary soul banging out inspired words alone. Computer support for
collaborative work, which often translates to "computer support for multiple authorship,· opens
exciting prospects for writing teachers, especially in institutions where writing is taught in all
disciplines, as it is at Cornell. A networked classroom, for example, enables students to write, edit,
and read in groups, to carry on the discourse of a discipline both orally and in writing, both during
class hours and during the remaining 165 hours of the week. Using this classroom, its network, and
its connection to other computer systems on campus, students can and do initiate writing among
themselves, conducting themselves as real authors and real audiences and discovering an identity
as a group pursuing common goals.
But the shift in writing instruction the classroom permits, the move away from the individual
and into the group, out of the writer and into the social context, challenges cherished assumptions.
And not just those of literary and philosophic traditions. This move confronts, perhaps even
threatens, a prevailing notion of the role of the learner (and the role of the teacher), a notion
deeply embedded in the hierarchies and power structures of educational institutions and enacted
even in such humble elements as the architecture and economics of classroom spaces. In this paper,
I will discuss some of the political implications of electronic classrooms, focusing on both
pedagogical and political perils.
In pedagogical terms, computer supported collaborative learning works against traditional
systems of evaluation, discomfiting many teachers by undermining their authority to set standards
and to apply those standards to individual students and by setting new dynamics into motion within
the classroom itself. many enlightened teachers will, of course, embrace such changes, consonant
as they are with emerging theory. Yet, in a curriculum driven by externally set standards ..
numbers of assignments per term, minimum competence as measured either by grades earned or
by success on exit tests •• the pedagogy of collaboration will find inhospitable soil.
In institutional terms, computer.supported coUaborative classrooms displace the sort of
~broadcast" education to which we are accustomed, threatening economics of the educational
delivery system. In an economy dependent on the lecture format or the book •• one speaker/many
auditors, one author/many readers •• the collaborative classroom with its expensive hardware and
even costlier human support looks unattractive, especiaUy when it must accommodate one of the
49

largest teaching programs in the institution, the writing program. But the economic problem may
simply mask a deeper, ideological one. Just as the individual teacher often fears that he will lose
his function if he no longer grades individual performance on measurable tasks, so too the
institution may resist a pedagogy which genuinely invests in collaboration among students and
teachers, in which traditional hierarchies of authority and power begin to crumble.
Kemp, Fred -- Texas Tech University
COMPUTER-BASED COLLABORATIVE WRITING INSTRUCTION WITHOUT A COMPUTER
NE'lWORK
The English Department Microcomputer Classroom at Texas Tech University has 25
sophisticated PC System II microcomputers, but no local area network (although S20,000 has been
allocated for such a network to be in place by Fall, 1989). When I came to Tech in the Fall of
1988, I realized that in order to adapt much of the writing pedagogy and the software I had helped
develop as the Associate Director of the Computer Research Lab at the University of Texas for
three years, I would have to take software and methods originally developed for networks and
somehow adapt them to a classroom of non-networked PCs. Such a change required many hours
of syllabus adjustment, re-programming (in Turbo Pascal), and classroom management re-emphasis.
The classes I taught in the Texas Tech Microcomputer Classroom, two sections of Basic
Writing, were successful in terms of my formal surveys, university classroom evaluations, and scores
on departmental Basic Writing skiUs exams. I would like, during my presentation at the Fifth
Computers and Writing Conference, to describe the following in some specificity.
(1) The software components which comprised my syllabus, including electronic mail,
invention heuristics, evaluation heuristics, and task-directed word processing;
(2) The specific adjustments I needed to make in such software and the pedagogy which
supported them in order to shift from a local area network to a diskette-based network;
(3) And the specific instructional and technical guidelines I have generated for those who
seek to emphasize microcomputers as communication and collaborative devices but who do not
have microcomputer networks.
In brief, I used a PC System II Model 50 with a 20 megabyte harddisk as a database for
both text sharing and mail messages. Where, on a LAN, uploaded text and mail is transmitted
directly into the database, I was required to write software which strips such data from program
diskettes that the students use, compacts it, and then recopies it onto the program disks so that at
the next class session each student will have full access to aU the mail and shared text produced at
the previous session. The coUaborative impact well documented by both the University of Texas
and the ENFI project schools was clearly evident in the measured results of both sections, although
the debilitating absence of a LAN was nevertheless noted.
I believe that a local area network is quite important for those wishing to use
microcomputers for peer critiquing and the communal discourse advantages thoroughly discussed
by theorists such as Bruffee, BazeU, and Weiner. But I believe that a committed instructor using
50

•
...
computer~based instruction may still tap into many of those advantages without a microcomputer
network by using the instructional methods I will present.
In effect, I was forced to develop answers to many of the questions] have been asked these
last three years, aU based upon the same concern: is there some way for a computer lab to
incorporate collaborative pedagogy without having in place a local area net. My presentation is
based on the answers I have come up with in my own classes incorporating both significant current
pedagogical theory and the equipment I was provided. In my presentation, I will use a PC and a
datashow projector to demonstrate the more conceputaUy difficult elements of my syllabus and
software.
Kozma, Robert B. -- University of Michigan
THE IMPACf OF COMPUTER-BASED TOOLS AND RHETORICAL PROMPTS ON WRITING
PROCESSES AND PRODUCTS
How can the power of computers be employed to improve the writing skills of students
While research on word processing has shown an increase in the amount of revision, few studies
have shown an improvement in the quality of writing. The presentation reports on a set of studies
which examine computer-based writing tools that incorporate features more likely to meet the
cognitive needs of novice writers than the features found in simple word processors. The studies
compare the effects of pen and paper, with word processor, idea-outliner, and hypertext software
writing tools on both the written products and the composing processes of writers. Rhetorical
prompts which address the topic, audience, and goals of the written assignment were also embedded
in the software for some of the treatment groups. The impact of these aids is compared for novice
and intermediate writers.
Study 1 examines the various ways rhetorical prompts might be used to facilitate
composition. Groups of students were either given the prompts with paper and pen or with word
processors and asked to write their responses to the prompts and their compositions. The impact
of these prompts and the contribution of the word processor on the products and processes of
writing are compared. Study 2 examines the ways and extent to which beginning writing students
used an idea out(jner with and without embedded prompts. The study analyzes their responses to
the prompts and how their outlining influences their written products and composing processes.
In Study 3, students used a hypertext packaging, Learning Tool, to respond to embedded rhetorical
prompts and to write an essay. This package uses graphics and an outliner to aUow writers to build
ideas into complex networks and interrelated structures. This presentation examines how beginning
students use their package; how this, in turn, influences their writing processes and products; and
whether longer-term use of the package results in "internalization" of planning strategies
characteristic of more advanced writers. The presentation also examines the use of hypertext
without prompts.
51

Lannom, Rebecca -- Central Missouri State University
CREATING A COMPUTER CLASSROOM FOR TEACHING WRITING
The presentation discusses how a cost-effective computer classroom was designed for the
composition classes in the Educational Development Center at Central Missouri State University.
It explains how the department chair and the composition instructors (with the aid of the
university's microcomputer coordinator) first managed to convince the administration of the need
for such a facility and then proceeded to develop this classroom within the confmes of a rather
strict budget.
Details about suitable hardware and software were obtained, and then the relative merits
of each were examined. Such matters as cost, durability, compatibility with other equipment (within
the department and belonging to the instructors), ease and cost of maintenance, numbers of
computers and printers needed for the classroom and for the instructors, kind of furniture required,
and the design of the room itself were dealt with. In short, the presentation explores the myriad
considerations involved in undertaking such a project and offers others the benefits of these labors.
Since the classroom had to be cost effective, it does not contain aU of the technological
teaching aids currently avaiJable, but it does provide a site where students can use computers to
work with materials designed to improve sentence structure and to help them overcome
troublesome grammatical problems, to coUaborate with one another and with their instructor, to
edit with ease, and most importantly to produce better papers.
Lazarus, Kathleen -- Daytona Beach Community College
FINDING AN AUDIENCE FOR ENGLISH I ESSAYS:
CULTURAL COMMUNICATION
USING COMPUTERS FOR CROSS­
Freshman English I composition students were easily able to communicate with Engljsh as
a Foreign Language students using the computer writing lab. As a result of this communication,
both classes gathered fascinating material for their compositions and both found a receptive
audience for their finished composition. In short, students found that writing with a specific
purpose and for a receptive audience could be enjoyable. It would have been very difficult to
accomplish this without access to the computer lab.
The basis of this experiment in cross-cultural communication was suggested to me by talks
with Dr. Dennis Sayers, formerly with Harvard University and now with the New England
Multifunctional Resource Center. Dr. Sayers has used the "sister class" idea in this country to pair
American students with students from classes in other countries to stimulate student writing. In
his research, he found that this concept, designed by Celestin Freinet, has been used successfuUy
in France for 60 years.
The English I students that I worked with were enrolled in the first basic composition course
which is required of all students at Daytona Beach Community CoUege. The foreign students were
52

enrolled in the English Language Institute, an intensive language program offered at the College
for students who have not yet passed the TOEFL test.
Both classes had been taught to use a word processing program and both classes had access
to the computers in the classroom and in several computer Jabs on campus. I had taught both types
of classes and thus was familiar with the curriculum of both programs.
I began this exercise in cross-cultural communication during Fall semester, 1987, with two
classes which were not using computers because the labs were not available to us. I paired each
of my Freshman English I students with a foreign partner and asked my students to interview the
foreign students to gather material for a comparison/contrast essay. The interviews were somewhat
awkward and slow; my students were not accustomed to listening to foreign accents. The English
I students felt they could have few common interests with these strange.sounding people. For
example, it wasn't until the third hour of interviewing that a U.s. student realized he might have
something in common with a boy from Bahrain. (It was rock music.) After aU, most U.S. students
had no idea such a place even existed. My students struggled to get enough information for a 500
word essay. Nevertheless, the U.S. students enjoyed the cultural exchange exercise and some
formed lasting friendships. My students told me it was the best lesson of the semester.
When my Freshman English I classes and the English Language Institute classes gained
access to computers (Fall semester, 1988), I was eager to try the cultural exchange program again.
1 have been a firm believer that the computer simplifies communication with non·native English
speakers since I worked with Dr. Sayers.
The exercise was a resounding success in the computer classroom. First, the students didn't
worry about accents interrupting the conversation. Problem words were quickly typed onto the
screen and even a phonetic spelling got the idea across. Second, students immediately found a
common ground .. computers. IBM is universal. Most students were crazy about computers and
eagerly chatted about how much they did or did not know, what games were popular, and how
computers fit into their future careers. From this common ground, students moved easily into
discussions of other topics and the classroom was filled with laughter, computer sounds, and other
good noises. As students talked, they took notes on the computer and wrote rough drafts. The
students revised their drafts together since the foreign students usually knew more grammar.
My students gained enough material for three essays. Students exchanged printed essays
with the other class and the foreign students worked their information into a newspaper format.
Since this experiment was such a success, I decided to expand the project with one class this
semester. My English I students now have a sister class from the English Language Institute. The
foreign students will submit questions about life in the u.S. to my students who will answer with
material from their own lives. The students will meet, and my students will write essays to the
foreign students based on their questions. My students will then write their own questions and
develop essays from the answers they receive. The foreign students will also suggest topics for
library research papers for the American students. The students will maintain a dialogue
throughout the semester, and the information the students accumulate will be the basis for their
graded essays. Thus, my students will have a real purpose for writing and an eager audience for
their compositions. They will also learn to communicate with people from another culture, a
valuable skill for the future.
53

I will monitor this project closely and compare these English I students with another English
I class also using computers. I will assess the students' feelings about writing and about the English
I class. I will also compare their levels of skill improvement. [hope to submit the results of this
research to you in May.
LeBlanc, Paul -- Spdngfield Col/ege
THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTER SOFIWARE FOR WRITING
I am in the middle of researching and writing my dissertation at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst under the guidance of Anne Herrington, Peter Elbow, and Charlie
Moran. My topic is the development of computer software for writing, and it is structured around
a series of interviews I have been conducting with computer software designers in composition,
people like Hugh Burns and Fred Kemp. By May, I will have completed the follow-up interviews,
interpreted the findings, and will have much of my writing completed. Some of that work has
already been completed and based on some early conclusions, I will be presenting a paper at the
CCCCS on one area of concern in my research, what [ call the ideological challenge for software
development. I would like to present at the Computers and Wdting Conference, and while I have
some sense of what my research indicates, it would be premature for me to now outline what I will
say in May. J can instead give you a brief sense of my thesis, and list some of the questions I have
been addressing.
My argument is that computers are not only going to revolutionize writing, but they are
likely to force a reconceptualizing of what we might call good writing. Using the arguments of
Lewis Mumford; Joseph Weizenbaum, and David Bolter, I would argue that using tools such as
computers alters the user as much as the task. When tools widen the gap between our direct
experience of reality and its reconceptualization, we risk an almost unalterable commitment to this
new way of seeing reality. Computer-based learning software for writing poses such a risk, and
my research attempts to identify the forces that act upon that software design in order for us to
better control and guide it. In particular, I am looking at the models for good writing that program
designers work with and the ways their programs work in accordance with those models or are
altered by other forces. The questions I am addressing are:
I. What bases do program designers have for their program designs Do programmers
work with a model for the writing process in mind
2. What factors create distance or discrepancies between the model and the final product
3. Do these factors favor one model for the writing process over another What models
are included within that framework and what models are likely to be left out
4. What are the implications for a reconceptualization of writing and for the way we teach
writing
I fear that this proposal may be too abstract or imprecise for your decision-making process,
so if I can answer any questions for you or elaborate further, please contact me. Perhaps I have
fallen victim to Maslow's aphorism that the whole world looks like a nail to man who has a
hammer, but in my research I have become convinced that software design may be the most
54

important issue for assessing the future impact of the computer on composition, and I would look
forward to discussing the subject at the conference.
Logan, Shirley W. -- University of Maryland
SOCIAL INTERACTION AMONG WRITERS. TUTORS. AND TEACHERS IN A WRITING
COMPUTER LAB fOR UNDERGRADUATES
Objectives:
1. To examine the nature and frequency of interactions among students, tutors, and
instructor in a computer writing lab in order to understand this unique environment where persons
come together outside of the traditional classroom to develop written documents using the
computer.
2. To consider the implications of such an environment as an important factor in the
successful teaching of writing.
The goal was not simply to look at this environment but to consider the question. "Does
such an environment promote writing" and if so, "How does it" Other questions asked in
approaching this study were "How does the presence of the computer shape the nature of
interactions among persons" and "What impact does technology have in the broader arena of
person to person communication"
Perspective
Most of the research into the use of computers for writing has looked at the finished
products and at the processes in which writers engage to produce those products. This study
examined the social environment in which those products are produced. It examined the social and
rhetorical benefits of having students gather in one place for the sole purpose of producing written
communication, communication which is usually preceded by discussion. The setting examined was
one containing student writers enrolled in a computer-assisted advanced composition course, peer
tutors who had taken the computer-assisted writing course during a previous semester, and the
course instructor. On the campus of a large state university, there is little opportunity for the kind
of intimate interaction which this setting offered. It seemed important that such a unique
environment be studied to determine what benefits it could offer -- computer supported benefits
as well as meta-computer benefits. A number of researchers have pointed out that much of what
happens in such a setting is not directly related to computer use -- thus my choice of the term
"meta-computer benefits."
Methods and Data Sources
One of the most effective ways of getting at the kinds of information associated with these
issues was through ethnographic research. The study employed the ethnographic techniques of
interviewing, participant-observation, and document analysis of "solicited compositions" in which
students were asked to reflect on their daily experiences in the computer writing lab. The students
in this study were enrolled in a semester's course in upper-level writing for juniors and seniors. The
course required the writing of a series of argumentative essays developed around topics of
55

pre.professional interest. The lab contained seven networked Sperry/Unix system terminals
connected to a hard disk for storing files. Classes were held in a traditional classroom, with writers
using the lab on their own time. As writing instructor and coordinator of the computer writing lab,
I served as participant observer, collecting data while interacting with students and tutors whom I
also supervised.
Data came from interviews with students conducted over two semesters and from field
notes. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed by the researcher.
Implications of Research
At least two previous studies have documented the positive social changes associated with
the introduction of computers into the elementary school class. This study expands upon those by
exploring the social and rhetorical implications of computers in a computer writing Jab for college
undergraduates. The findings from this study offer pedagogical possibilities in the following areas:
1. The computer writing lab environment as a promoter of teacher*students,
students· teacher exchanges, resulting in a setting in which students and teacher become co·learners.
2. The computer writing lab as a source of student empowerment, allowing students to take
risks in a non·threatening writing environment where they are opened to new ways of relating to
the world.
3. The computer lab as a means of promoting the communicative nature of writing,
providing interactive readers who can respond immediately to what has been said through peer
evaluation.
4. The computer lab as a setting which will help to reduce the technophobia experienced
by many as they attempt to participate in the technological revolution.
5. The computer lab as an environment which reasserts the primacy of persons over
technology, keeping open its instrumental power in a proper human context.
Louth, Richard
and
McAllister, Carole _. Southeastern Louisiana University
THE EFFECT OF WORD PROCESSING ON THE OUALllY OF ABLE WRITERS'
COMPOSITIONS
Although computer-assisted composition has become increasingly popular, there is little
empirical evidence that it improves the writing quality of able writers. (Able writers are defmed
as college writers above the basic writer level and professional writers.) Though an ample amount
of research has been conducted on the effect of word processing on able writers, most of that
research has focused on the kinds of revisions writers make rather than on the quality of writing
and quality of revisions. When the focus of previous research has been on quality of writing and
revision, findings have been either deceptive or contradictory. Moreover, to date no one has
focused on the effect of the word processor over varying lengths of usage. Our question was not
"Does the word processor effect the quality of writing and revision in able writers" but instead the
more specific question "To what degree do different amounts of usage affect the quality of writing
56

and revision in able writers~ The results of our study suggest that there is a direct correlation
between the amount of time spent writing on the computer and the quality of writing and revision.
Back&rOund
Much of the research on the effect of word processing on the quality of writing and revision
has involved young subjects and basic writers. Using 57 junior high school subjects in a year-long
study, Daiute (1986) reported that computers improved the overall quality of revisions more than
did the pen. However, most of the revisions made by the experimental group were additive, and
the additions for the most part were tacked onto the ends of texts where they did not fit. Although
Daiute reported the quality of computer-written pieces was judged superior to the handwritten
pieces, she noted that her quality fmdings might be flawed because her evaluators constantly give
higher grades to longer texts. The reports on basic writers have produced contradictory findings.
Rodrigues (1985) could not report any substantive change in the quality of basic writers' work
caused by the word processor while King, Birnbaum and Wageman (1984), Pivarnick (1985), and
cirello (1986) found that the word processor had a positive effect on the quality of basic writers'
composition. None of these studies, however, focused convincingly on the effect of the word
processor on the quality of revision. While McAllister and Louth (1988) found that the word
processor had a positive effect on the quality of basic writers' revisions, their study did not focus
on how variations in the amount of usage effected revision.
Research on the effects of the word processor on able writers has varied widely in its
method, purpose, and conclusion. Many studies have been informal, lacking statistical evidence,
or have involved small numbers of subjects over small amounts of time. Reports by Collier (1983),
Balkena (1984), Pollock (1985), Harris (1985), Greenland (1985) and Hawisher (1986) concluded
that the word processor did not seem to improve the quality of students' writing and revision more
than did pen and paper. However, these studies leave the reader with doubts -- in some cases due
to their informality, in other cases due to their methods. Moreover, none of the studies focuses on
the computer's effect on writing over varying amounts of usage.
Purpose/Methods/Results
We believe that part of the difficulty in drawing conclusions about studies of the word
processor's effect on writing may be that past research has not involved enough exposure to the
computer. The advantages of word processing may not become evident until after the writer has
become comfortable with the technique. The present experiment systematically explored the effect
of word processing on the quality of able writers' writing and revision over a wide range of usage.
Subjects included students from six sections of freshman composition. The sections differed in the
amount of weekly computer usage during class time -- 2 hrs., 1 hr., or none. In addition to writing
in class, students were required each week to write an essay in the writing lab. Subjects from each
section were randomly assigned to either high computer usage (10 of 12 essays written on the
computer) or low computer usage (2 of 12 essays written on the computer). Of the 12 essays
written, half were original drafts and half revisions. Our study examined the relationship between
the first revision (paper 2) of the semester and the last revision (paper 12). The dependent
measure was the quality of the final revision as graded by trained graders blind to the experimental
conditions. Results show that there was a significant effect for the amount of in-class computer
usage with the 2 hrs. a week condition producing the highest quality and the "none~ condition the
lowest quality. There was also a significant effect for the amount of outside computer usage with
57

the high outside usage condition producing higher quality than the low. The results of this study
suggest that there is a direct correlation between the amount of time spent writing on the computer
and the quality of writing achieved. Since the writing examined took the form of revisions, the
results also suggest that not only in compositions but also in revisions is there a direct correlation
between amount of time spent writing and quality of writing achieved. Further study (in progress)
will de!ermine the more specific relationship between revisions done early in the semester and late
in the semester (or, the relationship between Papers 1 and 2 as compared to the relationship
between Papers 11 and 12).
Works Cited
Balkena, S. (1984) "The composing activities of computer literate writers," DAf, 45, 12A.
Cirello, V. J. (1986) "The effect of word processing on the abilities of tenth grade remedial
students, DAf, 1L 07A.
Collier, R. (1983) "The word processor and revision strategies." CCC, M, 149-155.
Daiute, C. (1986) "Physical and cognitive factors in revising: Insights from studies with computers.
RTE,2Q, 141·159.
Greenland, L. (1985) "The effect of microcomputers on writing ability and attitude toward business
communication classes." DAf,1Q, 08A.
Harris, J. (1985) "Student writers and word processing: A preliminary evaluation." CCC, ~
323·330.
Hawisher, G. (1986) "The effects of word processing on the revision strategies of college
freshmen." RTE, 21, 145-159.
King, B., Birnbaum, J., & Wageman, I. (1984) "Word processing and the basic college writer."
In Martinez (Ed.), The WriUen Word and the Word Processor. Philadelphia, PA: Delaware
Valley Writing Council.
McAllister, C. & Louth, R. "The effect of word processing on the quality of basic writer'S revisions."
RTE, 22, 417·427.
Pivarnick, B. (1985). "The effect of training in word processing on the writing quality of eleventh
grade students." DAf, 46, 07A.
Rodrigues, D. (1985) "Computers and basic writers." CCC, 35, 336-339.
Pollock, S. (1985) "Exploratory study of the use of the computer for revision
to improve student writing." DAf, 46, 09A.
McDaid, John -- New York University
BREAKING FRAMES: TOWARD AN ECOLOGY OF HYPERMEDIA
Electric Technology does not need words any more than the digital computer needs numbers.
Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world scale,
and without any verbalization whatever.
--Marshall McLuhan
Human evolution has passed through three broad phases, each corresponding to a dominant
technological paradigm. Orality, literacy, and now, digitality. Each of these technologies has had
far-reaching impacts on the cognitive organization .- and hence the epistemologies and social
58

structures of its users. [Ong, 1982; Eisenstein, 1979; Postman, 1982, 1985] Media theory has
devoted itself almost exclusively to the first two; digitality is in its incunabula, and the first
generation grown up whoUy within its sphere of influence has yet to reach adulthood. But there
is reason, nonetheless, to suspect that an investigation of digitality's effects may be appropriate and
useful to theorists of composition. For while electronic communications technologies have hitherto
borrowed heavily from the metaphors and methodologies of the oral world and the printed page,
there has arisen what promises to be this technology's definitive medium: hypertext.
Hypertext (Nelson, 1965) is the term for computer-mediated presentation of information
in non-linear fashion, aUowing for complex linking and referencing; hypertext systems provide the
user or reader with tools for navigation and exploration in these non-linear information spaces.
Hypermedia is an extension of Nelson's earlier term to include the presentation of material stored
in any medium: text, graphics, sound, music, video -- in short, any digital or digitalizable
information.
If McLuhan's epigraph above is suggestive of the impact of digitality, there is ample
justification for composition theorists to be concerned. And although McLuhan usuaUy means his
words as a probe rather than a prediction, what can we make of the promise or threat of a medium
which can dispense with words entirely Is this the next stage in the electronic erosion of discourse
documented by Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death
Or could it be that this technological form represents a counterblast against precisely this
decline. Could the electronic forms we currently mistage for digitality's essence be analogous to
the intermediate phases of literacy described by Walter Ong Is television, for all its power, merely
scribal digitality
This presentation address these important questions for the computer composition field
from a media-ecological perspective.
The presentation is divided into three sections: the first describing the media ecological
perspective, the second discerning the form of hypermedia, and the third analyzing two specific
examples of hypermedia technology, StorySpace and Hypercard and their place in the writing
curriculum.
I) Ulhat is media eCOlOgy Media ecology is a branch of media theory acutely concerned
with the symbolic environment in the way that ecologists are concerned about the natural
environment. As McLuhan pointed out, media are powerful shapers and transformers of
experience, and to assume that any new medium like hypertext is simply doing the same things
faster or better is to ignore the lessons of the printed word.
This presentation wiu attempt to locate hypertext within a symbolic ecology that extends
from ideas through language through writing. The purpose is to demonstrate hypertext's essentially
recursive nature: new media are recursive in that they take the content of the previous medium for
the building blocks upon which they perform recombination and re-reification. In the same way
that the information overload inherent in remembered orality created the pressures for the
recursive technology of literacy, the information explosion of literacy has set the stage for a digital
recursIOn.
2) What is IIypemledia The roots of hypermedia are intertwined with the computer in the
same way that literacy's are linked to the printing press. So it is, in some sense, a technical and
ironic reversal that the technique of photolithography grows out of printing to spawn the
59

microprocessor with its printed circuit. But hypermedia is anticipated (as all technologies are) by
art and science: postmodernism and quantum physics have both presented a vision of a mediated
reality where the subject is an active participant who determines flow and structure. In effect,
hypermedia is an attempt to replicate the sensory and cognitive biases inherent in a certain
world-view.
3) What is going on On the pragmatic level, hypertext systems are already here. The Apple
Macintosh, and HyperCard have acquired a cult status and other computer companies rush to foUow.
The difficult problem for educators in general and composition specialists in particular is to take
advantage of this medium. It is not print; attempting to force it to fit print's constraints is
disastrous. We are faced with one of those everything you know is wrong scenarios. The primary
task is to begin thinking about hypertext in the right way, and then, based on these theoretical
foundations, to deploy it in service of its ends. And the bonus is that these are the ends we have
been striving towards as teachers of composition: multiplicity of perspective, coUaboration,
re-vision, negotiation. h is as if we have been trying to teach against the medium of print itself,
attempting to convey the living, active process of writing while working within a paper and print
technology at odds with these goals. Hypertext is the enactment of the process paradigm. In this
context, the New York University Expository Writing Program has recently begun working
exclusively with hypermedia -- both HyperCard and StorySpace in two dedicated writing labs serving
16 classes of freshman writers each semester. Not as a tool for presenting information, but as an
enabling environment for the construction of texts. This presentation draws both on the theory of
media and the lessons provided by the students and instructors who have spent time working with
and thinking about this medium.
Marx, Michael Steven -- Skidmore College
and
Nydahl, Joel -- Babson College
PEER CRITIOUING THROUGH TELECOMMUNICATIONS;
COLLABORATIVE WRITING CLASS
THE INTERCOLLEGIATE
Backeround
Establishing a community of student writers within the composition classroom has become
a traditional practice in introductory coUege writing courses. While the intensified and concentrated
focus of such an approach may enrich the learning environment for the student writer, students tend
to localize this unique learning situation to their particular writing class. Limited in their writing
experience, they are unaware that a larger community of academic and professional writers shares
these same practices and concerns about writing and often engages in coUaboration with coUeagues
and editors. Our presentation, "Peer Critiquing Through Telecommunications: The IntercoUegiate
Collaborative Writing Class," will describe how the boundaries of the traditional coUege writing
course can be expanded and enhanced by using microcomputers and an intercollegiate computer
network to join two coUege writing classes using peer critiquing. For the 1989 Spring semester, by
using word processing and the transmission capacities of the BiTnet intercoUegiate network, we
60

have linked two paraUel composition classes: one at Babson College, Wellesley, MA and the other
at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY in order to create a larger writing community for
students. Using students as peer critics became prominent in composition pedagogy in the
mid-1980s. As introduced by Kenneth Bruffee of Brooklyn College, peer critiquing programs -- an
established part of both Babson and Skidmore's curriculum -- allow students to strengthen and
refine both their writing and critical reading skills by reading each other's compositions and offering
criticism in response to questions or protocols established by the course instructors. Students then
use these critiques to revise their drafts. In theory, part of the success of this peer interaction
comes from the student being intellectual peers. In addition, Bruffee and his followers claim that
this relationship allows students to write honest and thorough critiques because, being classmates
and friends, they have an investment in the success of their peers.
TheProiect
Our project challenges the effectiveness of the personal dimension in peer critiquing and
argues that critiquing conducted over a network makes students more objective in their critiques.
The personal component of peer critiquing often interferes with the critiquing process and prevents
students from being as thorough and honest as they should be. Instructors have long recognized
the potential interference of personality in assessing and evaluating student writing. To overcome
this, many have adopted methods for reading papers blindly. The telecommunications transmission
between the parallel composition classes at Skidmore and Babson will replicate such a "blind"
environment; it will eliminate the interference from the personal component. In addition, having
the student writer and critic in two separate institutions will put greater emphasis on the written
critique itself as a legitimate form of writing and will place greater responsibility on the student
critics for clearly conveying their ideas in writing.
In the Phaedrus, Plato argues that writing, unlike speech, is a limited form of communication
because it cannot explain or defend itself. Rather than rising to meet the challenge of this
particular mode of communication, the student critic -- when peer critiquing occurs within a single
classroom -- tends to supplement the written critique with conversation to clarify and elaborate
upon his/her ideas. This robs the students of additional practice in learning to write
comprehensive, responsible, transactional prose for a specific audience and rhetorical purpose.
The Presentation
The first half of our presentation will discuss the logistics of establishing parallel composition
courses linked via BITnet. In addition to examining the mundane issues of college calendars and
the assessment of students' writing abilities, we will discuss the procedures and protocols we have
designed over the past ten months for transferring student essays and critiques from documents
prepared on two different word processing systems (Microsoft Word at Babson and WordPerfect
at Skidmore) to BITnet file and then transmitting these over BITnet. This portion of the
presentation will also explore the politics of intercoUegiate networks: should students have access
to such systems If so, for what uses
The second half of the presentation will report preliminary results of the Spring term
parallel class exchange. To evaluate the quality and comprehensiveness of the critiques written in
this project, we will use a third, non-networked course at Babson College as a control group. Using
the same curriculum and word processing, the control classroom will follow traditional, in-class
peer critiquing procedures. By employing techniques from discourse analysis, primary trait analysis,
61

and holistic assessment methods, we will compare the network critiques to the non·network
critiques. We are hypothesizing that students will write longer and more constructive critiques when
free of personality interferences. We anticipate that receiving papers and critiques over BITnet
from students who exist only as college writers of shared assignments should force student critics
to devote their full attention to the text itself.
Moulthrop, Stuart •. Yale Ulliversity
SHARING THE fANTASY; CREATING A DISCOURSE COMMUNITY WITH INTERACTIVE
FICTION
Interactive fiction is a type of narrative in which the discourse delivered to the reader is
determined in some measure by the reader's decisions and responses. In computer.based writing,
where the old textual model of the bound volume is replaced by the random·access database,
interactive fiction is the most natural and powerful way to tell a story. Current microcomputer
environments contain a rich repertoire of possibilities for reader interaction with fictional texts.
And yet readers and writers alike have been slow to recognize interactive fiction as a form
of literature. Writing in 1984, Anthony Niesz and Norman Holland concluded that interactive
fiction as literature was itself a fiction. The genre was then dominated by "text adventures" ..
imitations of the original "Adventure," a narrative computer game written at Stanford in the 1960's.
Rather than exploring the boundless potential of variable narratives, these texts set problem·solving
puzzles, challenging readers to find a "successful" strategy in a maze of "incorrect" alternatives.
Since, 1984, computer·based narrative has made important advances. In the first interactive
fictions, the writer most often supplied modules of text to be set into a programmer's framework.
As Robert Pinsky has said of his own work on the interactive fiction Milldwheel, neither
programmer nor writer fully understood the other's methods, which may explain why early
interactive fiction was more game.like than literary. But with the coming of simplified hypertext
systems (e.g., GUIDE, HyperCard, and Storyspace) writers become their own programmers,
allowing them to create texts that are not goal.directed. We are beginning to see true "multiple
fictions" where the object is not to solve empirical problems but to explore themes, allusions, and
verbal textures.
This new generation of interactive fiction seems a promising resource for courses in writing
about literature. We presented a series of these texts to a section of Cornell University'S English
165, "'The Literature of Fantasy," an introductory reading.and·writing course. Members of the class,
who were already accustomed to computer·based composition, spent a month encountering four
interactive fictions. They wrote response statements, kept journals, and produced final projects,
which were in some cases critical essays and in others original interactive texts. The authors of the
fictions met with the class twice to answer questions about their work and discuss its implications,
after which they produced a position paper on the future of interactive narrative.
The results of this experiment reveal much about the discourse community that interactive
fiction creates. Students were initially displeased because the texts lacked traditional coherence
and demanded extraordinary interpretive effort. One said that reading interactive fiction was like
62

watching someone else's favorite soap opera -- she felt cut off from a larger context that would
explain what was going on. Several students expressed anxiety about the lack of closure in the
fictions (the lack of a final "page") and worried that they would never "get anywhere" in the text.
Yet paradoxically, students showed an almost obsessive engagement with the fictions. They
spent far more time reading than was required: as much as 10 hours on a single fiction. Class
sessions were sometimes spontaneously extended and students regularly formed small groups to
exchange insights and reading strategies. Asked to explain why he spent so much time on a
frustrating experience, one student explained that fmishing an interactive fiction was a "completion
of self." His act of reading endowed the text with a form that was a powerful personal statement.
Students told the authors that they felt confused by interactive fiction but that they understood the
attraction of this new medium for writers. About half the class chose to produce electronic
narratives for their final projects.
The writers meanwhile tried to articulate their assumptions about interactive fiction and
respond to what they had heard from readers. They proposed a set of principles that emphasized
rather conservative literary qualities, such as the seamlessness of the fictional world and the
presence of a narrative voice, as guidelines for future projects. Where the readers were interested
in the expressive possibilities of interactive fiction, the writers seemed more concerned with saving
some aspect of a "readerly" text.
This crossing of purposes suggests a community of discourse where readers and writers
approach one another in the common space of an interactive text. Such a community might be an
ideal place to teach a dynamic, process-oriented approach to reading and writing, but it might also
be plagued with problems of subjectivism and intellectual discontinuity. These observations on the
Cornell experiment constitute a first survey of a fascinating and unknown interpretive region.
Kaufer, David;
Neuwirth, Christine;
and
Palmquist, Michael -- Carnegie Mellon University
PANEL -- NETWORK SUPPORT FOR COLLABORATIVE WRITING CURRICULA: THEORY
AND PRACTICE
Overview: The increased communications access and information processing capabilities afforded
by computer and network communications tools hold a number of implications for the collaborative
writing classroom. Hypertext tools (Conklin, 1987), increasingly flexible shared database
applications, and concurrent and nonconcurrent network communications tools are being adopted
in a growing number of writing curricula. Yet the theoretical and practical implications of using
such tools have not yet been fully examined. For instance, a study by Kiesler, et al. (1985) indicated
that using a computer network to communicate may result in a more negative evaluation of a
partner than comparable face-to-face communication, and consequently that network
communication tools may not be appropriate for collaborative classrooms. Subsequent work,
however, suggests that these effects may not be associated with the type of interactions typical of
63

students in a collaborative writing classroom (Neuwirth, Palmquist & Cochran, 1989). Clearly, much
work needs to be accomplished before we begin to approach a full understanding of the implications
of the use of network and computer tools to support coUaborative learning and writing. This panel
will address that need by examining the use and effects of such tools in a writing curriculum which
relies heavily upon computer-supported collaborative learning. Specifically, our presentations will
focus on: (I) theoretical issues associated with the computer-supported collaborative writing
classroom; (2) the effect of concurrent communications tools upon writing performance and
collaboration between students; and (3) the uses of nonconcurrent communications tools inside and
outside the writing classroom.
Designingand Implementation o/a Computer-Supported Collaborative Writing Curriculum: Theoryand
Practice
by Kaurer, David A. -- Carnegie Mellon University
This talk will trace the concurrent development and implementation of a writing curriculum
based upon a collaborative approach to learning and a set of information processing and
communications tools designed to support such a curriculum. The theoretical foundations of
coUaborative pedagogies will be discussed in the light of their implementation in the writing
classroom. Issues addressed will include: (1) adapting theory to practice; (2) implementing and
designing computer tools to support collaborative work; and (3) assessing the effects of computersupport
for collaborative learning.
Creating the Dialogue: Using the Network to Initiate Collaborative Learning and Wn'ting
by Neuwirth, Christine -- Carnegie Mellon University
In this talk, the theoretical and practical implications of using network communications tools
in the classroom will be addressed. Specifically, the talk will focus upon the goals. implementation
and effectiveness of coUaborative learning exercises used over CECETalk, a concurrent network
communication application. Examples drawn from classroom will be used as illustration.
Extending the Dialgoue: Using the Network to Evaluate and Support Student Writing
by Palmquist, Michael -- Carnegie Mellon University
This talk will examine the nature and outcome of nonconcurrent network-supported
dialogues between students and between teachers and students concerning writing-in-progress. A
theoretical framework supporting such exchanges will be presented, the program developed to
support this dialogue wiU be described. and exchanges drawn from the classroom will be used as
illustration. A discussion of the effectiveness of typical patterns of dialogue will be discussed in
light of the outcomes typicaUy associated with them.
64

O'Connor, John -- George Mason University
TEACHING COLI,.ABORATIVE WRITING ON A COMPUTER
First some caveats and definitions:
1. The collaborative writing I am speaking about is one paper written by multiple authors
as opposed to one student working with the advice and suggestions of a peer or a writing group to
produce his or her paper.
2. When I teach writing with a computer my goal is not the results of a particular
assignment, but an awareness by the students of the process of and alternatives for solving writing
problems. My ideal method is to teach something about writing and something about word
processing in the same assignment.
3. We don't use an outline program for it often limits creativity and creates too much order
too early in the process.
My method:
My underlying assumption is that inexperienced writers need to be taught truly collaborative
writing. When assigned a collaborative piece of writing, my students will each write a part of the
paper, then staple the parts together into a whole. There has been collaboration, and at times this
will be appropriate in their college courses and job assignments. However, I push my students to
take a more integrated approach. I hope to break down their sense of their discrete part or
contribution. I want them to feel a stronger commitment to the whole paper, to learn how to work
together when the proprietary boundaries are less clear, and to have a better sense of coherence
in a piece of writing (a lesson that can carry over to any piece of writing). All of this is made
easier -- possible, in fact -- because of the computer. But, the students need to be shown how a
computer can make possible more meaningful collaboration.
After choosing their topic and spending considerable time brainstorming, my students
together create a rough outline (one person at the keyboard. for now). From the outline each
writes a draft version of the paper. At this point they think of it as their paper, modifying the
outline and topics as they see fit. Obviously this is still part of the process of generating ideas.
With the individual drafts completed, they compare similarities and key differences. They analyze
what seem to be digressions and what seem to be new ideas that need to be incorporated. They
do this in class in group discussion and on their own when they have more time to think about small
details as well as overall effect. They then revise each of their partners' drafts: fill in each paper
with more details, quotes, examples; move parts around; cut what seems extra. The important point
here is that Jill is not working on John's paper, but instead is revising another version of their
group paper. Also, [ am not looking for efficiency (this process is surely not efficient) and this
needs to be stressed to th e students.
The next stage is the difficult one for students to envision. In theory they now have twelve
-- in my class -- versions or one paper. none of which is any longer clearly Jane's or Jim's. In
practice the variations/versions are not so distinct and dramatic. Still, they must bring together
different versions of the same paper. A simple (and hard won) lesson most student learn at this
point is that there is not a natural or even "right" paper. They also begin to recognize not only that
they write differently but that they also read differently. They learn clarity and coherence are not
absolutes.
65

After considerable discussion about what to include and in what order, they select one
author to process another draft that may still retain variations. They then delete redundancies,
create transitions, smooth out sentences structures and prose rhythms -- first by themselves then
collectively. The paper is familiar enough to them -- it is theirs -- that they can care about revision
yet it is strange enough -- Jane still recognizes parts she didn't write -- that they have some distance
that is often necessary for fuller revision. A presentation copy is finally printed out. The results
are often what we might expect from layered, committee prose, but the students can recognize this
problem (a valuable lesson itself) and process, not the final paper, is what] am most concerned
with.
Conclusions and implications:
While much of what I have described does not seem that new or remarkable especially for
those of us who taught collaborative writing before computers, it turns out to be a new and
remarkable experience for the students who have not written collaboratively before, AND the
computer does seem to make a qualitative as well as quantitative difference in collaboration. For
example. in the e.1.rly stages of drafting. what appears on the screen is generalJy less proprietary
than the same text on a piece of paper, thus generating more suggestions and discussion. Part of
the reason is simply that it is easier for four people to see, but it also partly because the image on
the screen is less personal than the handwriting of one individual on paper. Another example:
later, when students trade disk versions of the paper rather than hard copy, they are more also
likely to make revision rather than suggest them. Again it appears to reflect a different attitude
about proprietary boundaries as well as simple ease of entry (with a computer it is as easy to
change text as it is to comment very specifically about it). Finally, collaborative papers written on
a computer are longer than ones handwritten or typed (8 pages becomes 10). Students are much
more willing in the middle stages of the process to add a quote or an example or even work to
incorporate what might be a minor or seemly digressive point.
The primary value of this assignment is the students' awareness of making a text. While
struggling to put together a group paper, they face issues of unity and coherence, authorship, and
rhetoric that have profound theoretical implications. They can more fuUy examine these issues,
since the computer makes it considerably easier to test alternatives. The assignment also forces and
reinforces more revision than generally occurs in a single author's paper, even when he or she has
group responses to drafts. Secondary values are the experience of working in a group and in using
word processing skills that inexperienced writers generally don't attempt -- both are experiences that
will prove useful long after my composition class is over.
Parlett. James -- Human Resources Laboratory, Brooks Air Force Base
CONFER: A I'ROTOTVPE SYSTEM FOR KNOWLEDGE-BASEIJ PREWRITING
A number of programs currently available for computer-assisted invention are dialogic
programs which enact specific heuristics to aid the writer in learning what he or she has to say
about Cl topic. In these programs, the computer asks a series of questions of th e student; the
66

student's responses typically build on one another incrementally. When the student is finished with
the heuristic offered by the program, he or she has built a file of responses which then serves,
presumably, as a source for drafting the essay. Examples of these heuristic invention programs
include the well·known INVENT series by Hugh Burns, IDEALOG, by Fred Kemp, parts of Selfe
and Wahlstrom's WORDSWORK, and parts of Schwartz's SEEN among others.
AJJ of these systems for structured heuristic inquiry are powerful within their own rights.
Likewise, they all suffer from the same limitations. Unlike human teachers who might carry out
a heuristic inquiry sequence with a student, computer programs for heuristic invention don't know
anything. That is, with few exceptions, these systems must enact their heuristics without regard for
the student's topic, the level of the student's expertise, and the quality of the student's responses
at any given point in the inquiry. Clearly, what is needed is a program which is somehow
knowledge·based, which is "intelligent" enough to make decisions about the questions it will ask, the
source text from which it draws, and the student with whom it's working. Confer is such a program.
Confer is an intelligent interface for reflective inquiry as an aid to critical thinking. The central
feature of the Confer interface is a window for Socratic dialogue as a method of stimulating critical
thinking and inquiry as part of the prewriting activities often performed by students in
writing/prewriting conferences with teachers. Confer simulates the conditions of such conferences
by managing a dialogue between an embedded expert, which takes the Socratic tutorial role, and
the student. Thus the prototype Confer system supports prewriting and text interpretation, two
tasks which are taught formally in colJege-level composition courses, but the interface and design
methodology of the system has general value in many kinds of higher-order knowledge.intensive
learning.
Confer was designed with three goals in mind: to provide an interface for writing, reading
and discussion that was extremely easy to operate, to provide the student user with an "intelligent
desktop" that includes aU the tools and information necessary to support critical thinking in the
target domain, and to demonstrate that a knowledge·based tutoring system for prewriting could
indeed ask a student the "right" questions at the "right" time.
The prototype Confer interface includes six functionally integrated windows: the Interaction,
Notepad, Dictionary, Essay, Assignment, and Editor windows. Thus, asking Confer to discuss a
particular section of a text through the Interaction window causes the system to "post" that section
of the text in the Essay window. Pointing with a mouse at a particular word or phrase in the
Dictionary window will cause the functional definition of that word or phrase to appear in the
Notepad window. Other "intelligent" operations are also available, as are standard editing
operations. including cut·and·paste from one window to another.
The centerpiece of Confer, however. is the interaction window. Here the student may "talk"
with Confer about the current assignment or text. Because Confer can be programmed to "know"
things about the text or assignment, the system can use its sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms
to infer what assertions the student makes about the text or assignment in the Interact ion window
and to respond with a question that is contextuaUy-sensitive and appropriately-timed much as a
human teacher would do in the same situation. Because Confer uses multiple "scripts~ for its
pattern-matching and question·asking, and "remembers" a student from session to session, it rarely
repe:lts itself. The resulting convers~ltion is, as a pilot study has shown, a significant stimulus to the
critical thinking activities which inform st udents' prewriting.
67

In this presentation I'll also report on current research being conducted at the University
of Pittsburgh to assess Conrer's effectiveness with a large student population. I'll also discuss a
companion authoring system, CRITIAS, which will allow teachers to rapidly develop their own
Confer-like instructional systems.
Peek, George S. -- Western /lJinois University
DEVELOPING AN OVERALL COMPOSITION ENVIRQNMENT UNDER MS-DOS: PUTIING
PIECES TOGETHER
Business Students, and perhaps most especially accounting students, must learn to
communicate effectively and efficiently in both oral and written form. Moreover, written
communication is becoming more complex due to the integration of graphics and text, and more
immediate due to electronic mail and facsimile transmission of documents. The traditional pen and
paper approach to teaching writing is insufficient to prepare students to compose in an electronic
environment. New approaches must be developed to prepare students to work in the new business
environment and to flourish there.
Business students generally do expect to use microcomputers as part of their daily activities,
and they generally accept the fact that they must communicate well to be competitive. However,
they are often not prepared for the intensity or the complexity of the communication environment
in the workplace, and they are often not introduced fuUy to the business tools available to them.
Word processors, spread-sheets, graphics software, and communications software are widely used
in even small and medium sized businesses, yet students practice only minimally with the available
range of software. In addition. for each major type of software, there are additional products which
"add-ir.." or supplement the main product, for which almost no introduction is made in school.
Students thus exit academe with only a meager awareness of what products are available and how
they may be used effectively.
One area in which students may become sensitized to the complexity and opportunity is
through the integration of separate writing tools into an integrated "composition environment."
Ideally one product would supply aU the needed tools and provide easy movement among them.
However, such a product does not yet exist, though several products, such as Framework or
WordPerfect have multiple components which facilitate the writing process. If students could be
habituated to a writing environment and to use a variety of tools for prewriting, writing, and editing
activities, the quality of written output would certainly improve.
This paper describes a prototype project to develop a "composition environment" using
computer tools readily available for MS-DOS machines. The objective of the project is to facilitate
writing and editing by providing the user with a variety of computerized writing aids which can be
accessed :.md used easiJy through a menu system, and which may provide sufficient opportunity
for the writer to evaluate, alter, and reflect upon the written document before it is sent out to
readers. Not only would this "composition environment" he useful for students ilS part of an
educational program, but would he valuable for persons in the business community ;:I S well.
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The specific packages used in the prototype composition environment include:
Automenu, version 4.0
WordPerfect 5.0
PC Outline, version 1.0
Rightwriter, version 3.0
The Electronic Handbook
These packages were chosen because they are currently available and relatively inexpensive.
Each program has advantages and disadvantages for the writing environment, but even with the
problems associated with bringing disparate products into a workable system, the advantages of the
"composition environment" approach outweigh the problems.
Future work with the "composition environment" concept will include the evaluation of
alternative packages, e.g., Grammatik Ill, or new packages as they become available. Current plans
are to provide a network which makes the tools available, so that stand-alone or dedicated
workstations are not necessary. At present, the "composition environment" is available only on
hard-disk machines; a network would solve this problem, and it would even permit a greater variety
of tools to be available! for use.
The business writing environment is further complicated by the need for spreadsheet and
graphics skills in the development of effective business communication. A fuUy developed business
writing environment should include additional tools as well, including those which would allow
screen capture of graphics for inclusion in documents and for the transfer of data or formats
among several applications. To some extent, these capabilities are available in integrated software
such as Framework, Ability, Works, or Symphony, but none of these programs are used on a wide
scale. An integrated "writing environment" might provide impetus for firms to develop packages
which facilitated a broadly defined composition approach for business writers. Users of operating
systems other than MS-DOS, e.g., Unix or Macintosh, have many powerful tools and techniques
already available, including Writer'S Workbench and Hypertext. MS-DOS users are not yet so
bJe.:;sed, and must piece together tools from separate sources.
Peyton, Joy Kreeft -- Ga/laude/ University
T~CHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION MEETS INSTITUTION:
MURDER OF A GREAT mEA
BIRTH OF CREATIVITY OR
Many new uses of technology in education have been implemented to serve already existing
institutional goals and practices f

new pedagogical dynamics" -- shifting the role of the teacher from authority figure and judge to
participant-leader and collaborator; moving students from solitary composers to a writing
community in which written text is created collaboratively and commented on immediately in
writing; and changing writing from simply an exercise performed to satisfy teacher requirements to
a mode for authentic communication and the collaborative working out of ideas (Batson, 1988).
What happens when a technological innovation like the ENFI Project, with its accompanying
innovative theories and approaches to learning, is introduced into the educational institution, with
its well-established goals, preferred teacher approaches, student expectations, and assessment
requirements Do the hoped-for changes bud and blossom, changing student, teacher, and
institutional approaches to learning, or are they eventually swallowed up and overcome by fIrmly
ingrained beliefs and habits until the -innovation" disappears or is barely distinguishable from
approaches of the past
This paper presents case studies of the introduction of local area networks into writing
classes, as part of the ENFI Project. It examines the evolution of teachers and students as they
attempt and sometimes struggle to implement and make sense of a revolutionary approach in the
context of traditional educational beliefs and practices.
Reference
Batson, T. (1988, February). "The ENFI Project: A networked classroom approach to writing
instruction. Academic Computing, pp. 32-33, 55-56.
Raleigh, Donna -- University of WISconsin, Eau Claire
A STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF WORD PROCESSING EXPERIENCE ON THE REVISING
STRATEGIES OF INEXPERIENCED WRITERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN. EAU
CLAIRE
Published studies showing the effects of word processing on student writing generally
conclude that students using a word processor only increase the amount of editing they do, i.e., they
make cosmetic changes such as spelling, punctuation, and word substitutions; but they do not
significantly increase the amount of revising they do, i.e .. meaningful rearranging, substituting, and
consolidating (Collier 1983, Daiute 1986, Harris, 1985, Hawisher 1987). The methods used in these
studies were similar: each began with students learning how to use a word processing package
followed by the students entering and revising text. Often, in these studies, text revised on a word
processor was compared to that revised using pencil and paper or a typewriter. AU revised text was
examined for the types of revisions it contained. Finally, the kinds and numbers of revisions made
in the different modes of writing were analyzed statistically. Researchers expressed concern that
novice users of word processing may be forced to concentrate on the word processing functions to
the detriment of their writing; however, they had no way of testing this in their studies. Therefore,
the purpose of the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire study was to discover whether or not the
length of time students had used word processing affected their revision strategies. It tested the
hypothesis that students with extensive word processing experience would make more semantic
revisioll'i than did students with limited word processing experience.
70

The subjects of this study were forty students at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.
They were divided into two groups based on their reported experience with word processing. The
twenty students with less than 1.5 years of word processing experience were placed in Group 1; the
twenty students with more than 1.5 years of word processing experience comprised Group 2.
AU students were given a copy of the same writing sample. They were asked to revise it
using the word processing program, PC· Write. Each completed three succeeding drafts: Draft 1,
based on the original sample; Draft 2, based on Draft 1; and Draft 3, their final revisions, based
on Draft 2. Each revising session lasted 45 minutes.
The 120 writing samples were printed and the draft-to-draft revisions coded according to
Faigley and Witte's revision taxonomy (1981, 1984). The code consisted of two separate parts: a
text span code (graphic, lexical, phrasal, clausal, sentence, and multisentence) and a category code.
The category code included the type of revision (additions, deletions, substitutions, permutations,
distributions, and consolidations) and the level of the revision (formal, meaning-preserving, and
meaning·altering).
The hypothesis that length of word processing experience would significantly affect the
frequency of meaning-altering revisions was tested using the Students' T-test to compare the two
groups. The results indicated that there was no significant difference between the two groups in
any of the revision categories.
This presentation will focus on the highlights of this study and its significance to writing
instructors. lfwriting teachers cannot rely on the word processing software itself to help students
move to a higher level of revising, what strategies should they use Suggestions will be offered that
include software add-ons, coUaborative learning, and creative use of the word processing software
itself.
Selected Rererenccs
Collier. Richard M. (1983). "'The Word Processor and Revision Strategies." College Composition
and Communication, 34: 149-155.
Daiute, CoUette (1986). "Physical and Cognitive Factors in Revising." ResearclJ in the Teaching
of Ellg/ish, 20.2: 141-159.
Faigley, Lester, and Stephen Witte (1981). "Analyzing Revision." College Composition and
Communication,32: 400-414.
_--=,-" (1984). "Measuring the Effects of Revisions on Text Structure." New Directions in
Compositioll Research. In R. Beach and L Bridwell (Eds.). New York: Guilford. 95-108.
Harris, Jeannette (1985). "Student Writers and Word Processing." College Composition and
Communication, 36: 323-330.
Hawisher, Gail E. (1987). "The Effects of Word Processing on the Revision Strategies of College
Students." Research in the Teaching of English, 21: 145-159.
Randall, Neil -- University of Waterloo, Ontan'o, Canada
THE INFLUENCE ON WRITERS OFTHE USER INTERFACES OF COMPOSITION SOFTWARE
Text editors, word processors, outline editors, and desktop publishing packages are
accessible to the writer only through their user interfaces. Much has been made in human factors
71

literature and in the popular computer press about the importance of a well~designed interface, but
little has been done to determine how the interface actually affects composition itself. When we
consider the importance to the composition process of such small items as the delete and insert
keys, we begin to understand the ramifications of the entire interface.
Compounding the complexity is the enormous variety of available composition products,
each with its own interface. Purely aside from the differences in the operating system interfaces
for each machine (VMS vs. MS~DOS vs. Macintosh vs ... ), the programs all sport highly differing
interfaces. Writers are often forced to learn more than one machine and more than one interface,
so the learning process becomes intimately connected to the writing process. Then, too, working
with the software interface directly affects the composing process, since the computer must be
manipulated, during the process of composing, in a way that writers never had to manipulate a pen.
The paper examines, from the writer's point of view, the user interfaces of several software
packages for several different computers. The purpose of the paper is to link the features of each
package to the stages in the composing process, and to suggest ways in which composition is both
aided and hindered by the machine.
Reynolds, Tom;
and
Sire, Geoffrey·· University of Minnesota
IS ON-LINE ON-TASK
For our presentation, we would like to discuss the issues •. political, social, and
epistemological .- involved for the students and teacher in a collaborative networked computer
writing classroom. Use of a computer network, especially one such as ours (what has become
known as an ENFI classroom) which includes the ability to save transcripts of students using an
interactive dialogue utility, provides the classroom teacher/researcher with an important artifact
to study the way students interact and negotiate meaning within a college writing classroom.
We recently held three sections' worth of our two-quarter basic freshman writing course
sequence in such a networked writing lab. The transcripts from sessions in which the students
collaborated over the network, using the dialogue program, for peer~group response on written
drafts have been analyzed using a coding scheme of our own device adapted from existing
ethnography communication models. We have analyzed the student interchange for incidence of
such variables as presentation of self in a collaborative behavior, on- and off~task behavior, the uses
of humor and insult, and others which hope to provide a more refined picture of computer~assisted
collaboration in the writing class. Who initiates tasks, who stays on task, who gets the most time
to talk, whose papers get attended to most (or ignored most) Do black and white students behave
differently on the network Do men and women Does peer-group response held on-line
automatically constitute coUaboration'! We plan to discuss these crucial issues, to determine
whether the medium of a local·area network actually affords true collaboration (and if it does,
72

whether it's beneficial). as well as whether the LAN is a significant tool to empower the
marginalized student (in terms of race and gender). If, as is fashionable to claim, a networked
computer environment is a way of actualizing or making explicit the social construction of
knowledge, exactly how is that knowledge constructed
Our research affords valuable insights into both the use of a networked computer medium
as a research tool, as weU as more specific fmdings about the way students grow (or don't/can't)
into both the practice of writing and the community in which that practice occurs.
Ross, Donald -- University of Minnesota
BEYOND NeXT
In this paper I will first describe the basic hardware and software for Steven Jobs' "NeXT'
computer, announced in the FaU of 1988. NeXT will give writers the best of what they now can
duge together only through a heterogeneous jumble of software and text resources.
For the writer this computer includes full desk-top publishing software. the "WriteNow" word
processor, a huge optical disk with an indexed dictionary and thesaurus, windows for screen
management, digital voice recording, a compact-disk quality sound system, and so on. The
monochrome screen has million-pixel high resolution. The computer comes with a laser printer.
The whole lot will cost $7,500. Whether or not this particular machine becomes the "workstation
of the 90s," its combination of features will surely set the standard against which everything else will
be judged; it's what wiIJ replace the aging machines on our desks.
Commercial software and most of the academically-developed CAl programs developed for
pes or Macintoshes are at a rather primitive stage, and none really changes the writer's conceptual
environment. Elegant work processors like WordPerfect allow for dictionary and thesaurus linkup
in mid-text. However these quickly take up a significant proportion of the hard disk, and they
elbow the text for space on the screen.
Problems with style and usage analyzers are well documented, and speeding them up and
having a slightly more accurate parser won't make much of a difference. Nothing built into NeXT
will do these things any better, but the windowed screen should make the text analysis easier to
understand.
Even the best CAl invention programs only take the beginning writer through time-honored
questions, or they have the student build a topic through rather predictable steps. Typical of such
programs are questions like "What facts are you unlikely to know about TOPIC or "What has been
considered a result of TOPIC" While raising these issues has inspirational value for some students,
the uninformed writer is at a disadvantage, since the necessary information is in the library across
campus. or it has been pre-digested in th e copy of Newsweek the student brought to the lab. Except
for having the teacher's questions on tnt' same screen with the work processor. the content of these
approaches is traditional, and strictly text-based.
For our purposes, as CAl designers, NeXT's key elements are the "application kit" and
"interface huilder," part of the "NextStep" operating environment. These two elements create an
"object-oriented" programming environment, where complex input/output.

processing steps are available as icons which are fairly easily spliced together. The Application
Kit should work like an elaborate version of Macintosh's HyperCard" program, which has already
led to a couple of provocative applications in composition.
NextStep should radically change the nature of computer.based instruction in writing. We
will be able to include visual and sound images and music into our assignments, and expect them
to be part of the students' writing. These will not just be "figures" or illustrations, but an integral
part of the presentation. In effect, then, the student would be producing a multi·media narrative
and commentary. The electronic "audit trail- of the composing sessions would become the -list of
works consulted."
Consider a task like "Discuss 'folk art' and 'folk culture.'" The NeXT optical disk can easily
handle an archive of visual images from various galleries, books, and private collections. It can
also carry musical examples from cultures throughout the world. The assignment itself can be
conveyed as a series of activities which would let the student explore the topic in ways that are
simply not possible now, either on a computer or on the desk. The fruits of the exploration would
not be a "paper," since the student would be able to incorporate images and texts selected from the
archive. In effect, we should start to prepare our students to develop high quality audio and video
materials which interact with their written commentary.
Object·oriented software should make it possible for the student to browse through large
libraries of images and texts in various ways. To guide the student we need to decide on what is
most likely to be relevant, but only after we link criteria for relevance with new ways to classify
images in different media. The experimental hypertext/hypermedia projects, such as the one at
Brown University, have been developed on expensive, closed-shop computing systems. NeXT will
put many more scholars and teachers in such a setting. We wlll need to combine experts'
judgement and knowing something about previous students' successes. Finally, we should not just
give the student a single choice, but a group of roughly comparable examples.
Given this computer's possibilities to integrate text, words and sounds, and pictures, the
entire nature of writing and communication will change within a decade. My guess is that we all
will have a Jot to learn if we expect to serve our future students well.
Sayers, Dennis -- Yale University Center for Language Education and Research
LANGUAGE AUITUDE CHANGE OF STUDENTS IN U.S. UPPER ELEMENTARY BILINGUAL
PROGRAM CLASSROOMS PARTICIPATING IN COMPUTER·BASED EXCHANGES WITH
PUERTO RICAN SISTER CLASSES
This presentation summarizes three research studies conducted between 1987 and 1989
which have examined the change in language attitudes of students in six upper elementary classes
in a Spanish-English bilingual program in New England. Each class had approximately 25 students,
all of Puerto Rican heritage and all of whom speak Spanish at home. Approximately one-quarter
of the students were "new arrivals" dominant in Spanish, and three·quarters of the students were
more proficient in English, mostly born in New Haven, Connecticut. The students regularly
exchanged written texts via computer with different "sister classes" in Puerto Rico. The classes are
74

d
part of an international computer writing network named De Orilla a Orilla (From Shore to Shore)
which since 1985 has used telecommunications to link bilingual student writers in Argentina,
French·speaking Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico and the United States. The studies reviewed all
investigated the functioning of student·directed Editorial Boards in the production of bilingual
newsletters produced jointly by sister class partnerships.
10int Editorial Boards involving minority language students in sister class partnerships were
first studied (Sayers, 1987 & 1988) as a vehicle to promote the simultaneous development of
litera(.'Y in both the home and second languages. In the initial research, the Editorial Board
exchanges were between a 5th grade bilingual program class in New Haven and another bilingual
class of the same grade level in San Diego. All the students in the New Haven class were from
Puerto Rican families who spoke Spanish at home, and for most of these students the dominant
language for school activities was English. The San Diego students were in a "two·way" bilingual
program: half the students were Anglos whose parents had placed them in the bilingual program
to learn a second language, and the rest of the students were from Mexican-American families who
spoke Spanish at home, as did their Hew Haven counterparts, and the majority of these students
also felt more comfortable interacting in English during school hours.
Students in both classes were nominated for the Joint Boards by their teachers, with no
regard for their relative proficiency in English and Spanish. Not surprisingly, the amount of written
communication in Spanish which resulted from the exchanges between these particular sister classes
was minimal; there was little reason to tcIp the relatively weak, emerging Spanish skills ofthe Anglo
students in San Diego or the decaying first language skills of the English-dominant minority
language students in both sister classes if English was the more easily employed "coin of the realm."
For the second study, the decision was made to investigate a sister class exchange with the
same New Haven teacher, but this tim e teamed with a teacher from Puerto Rico. Moreover, in the
New Haven classroom, all Spanish-dominant students were assigned to the Joint Editorial Board
and matched in number by students nominated by the teacher. The initial negative attitudes of the
ElIgiish-dominant "majority" of these minority language students toward their Spanish-dominant
classmates was revealed in direct commands ("Talk English!"), deprecatory comments ("I can't
understand you when you talk that Spanish") and critical remarks made to this researcher ("I wish
they wouldn't talk so fast"). Negative cultural attitudes were voiced by one New Haven-born
English-dominant student when the topic of "personas ilustres puertorriquenos" (famous Puerto
Rican historical figures) was raised: "What' she talkin' about We don' got none of those 'round
here." One of the major findings of the second study was that in the context of editorial board
exchanges with a Puerto Ric'ln sister class conducted entirely in Spanish, th e "prestige" of the
Spanish.dominant Editorial Board members increased. both in their own estimation and in that of
their English-dominant peers. The Spanish·dominant students became "language experts" whose
skills were much sought after by their English-dominant classmates.
In the most recent study of sister class partnerships begun in September 1988, four teachers
in Connecticut and their colleilgues in Puerto Rico planned and coordinated activities which
invol ved HIJ the students in both sister classes. In two of the New Haven classes, teachers and
students planned joint activities with th eir Puerto Rican colleagues around several cultural events.
In the remaining two c1asse .-:. th e students participated in II .specific project with their Puerto Rican
sister cia.,.:; which required interdepend ent activity between Spani

The joint production of a fully bilingual newspaper, under the direction of Joint Editorial Boards
comprised of a sub-group of students in both classes. Members of the Joint Editorial Boards in the
New Haven "experimental" classes include (a) all Spanish-dominant students, and (b) an equal
number of English-dominant children.
Change in students' language attitudes is predicted in the form of increased favorable
evaluations toward Spanish speakers in aU classrooms, with more positive change for those classes
employing cooperative learning techniques due to increased opportunities provided for interaction
with Spanish-dominant classmates around specific cultural and linguistic issues. The research
literature on students' language attitudes argues that minority language children begin schooling
with a neutral attitude towards their speech variety in comparison to that of the majority culture,
and gradually come to value the dominant language variety more highly (Day, 1980, 1983). The
potential of the proposed intervention to counteract these language attitudes is supported by a large
number of social psychology investigations which have studied cooperative, interdepe ndent learning
groups as a means of producing significant favorable change in "cross-group" attitudes (Slavin,
1977a, 1977b).
Rcrerences
Day, R. (1980). The development of linguistic attitudes and preferences. TESOL Quarterly, 14,
27-37.
Day, R. (1982). Children's attitudes toward language. In E. Ryan and H. Giles (Eds.), Attitudes
towards Language Variation: Social and applied contexts. London: Edward Arnold.
Sayers, D. (1987). Bilingual sister classes in computer writing networks. In D. Johnson & D. Roen
(Eds.), Richness in Writing. New York: Longman's.
Sayers, D. (1988). Editorial Boards between Sister Classes. Unpublished typescript for Qualitative
Research Methods, Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Slavin, R. (1977a). How student learning teams can integrate the desegregated classroom.
Integrated Education, 15, 56-58.
Slavin. R. (1977b). Using student learning teams to desegregate the classroom. Baltimore: Center
for Social Organization of Schools, Johns Hopkins University.
Schwartz. Helen J., Chairperson -- Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis
Balestri, Diane -- Pn'nceton University
Gallagher, Brian -- LaGuardia Community College, CUNY
Kaplan, Nam.:y -- Cornell University
Neuwirth. Christine -- Camegie Melfon University
and
Haring-Sm ith. Tori -- Brown University
NATIONAL PANEL ON WRITING INSTRUCIION
American institutions of higher education embrace many different missions and set many
different goa ls fm the learning of their diverse student populations. But students everywhere
write, and faculty everywhere assess their students' knowledge at least in part on thc hasis of what
76

they write. Writing is thus at the heart of every curriculum, and institutional planning for
improvement in learning falls short whenever it fails to take into account the need to include the
teaching of writing explicitly as a key element in the curriculum,
Now institutions find themselves being asked to invest in the tools of writing. The costs are
high, but institutions see a way to realize several important non·writing goals if computers are
used in writing classes. The impact of computer use is so significant and growing in our intellectual,
economic and political life, that Americans increasingly need to understand computer use, its
potential and limitations; the writing classroom is a tempting location for achieving equitable
computer literacy. On campus and off, word processing, which represents the most pervasive US\!
of computers, is fast becoming the preferred mode of writing in the workplace. Using computers
in writing classes has the potential to reach almost all students, usually at the start of their academic
program. And the National Taskforce on Educational Technology has advocated that computer
literaL), arise out of academic classes rather that separate classes (1986). If funding inequities could
be addressed. most students could therefore be introduced to computer use, regardless of gender,
race, social-economic class or field of interest. However, introduction to word processing does not
guarantee improved writing. without a faculty prepared to integrate computer use meaningfully into
the curriculum, comput\!rs interfere with writing instruction, deskiUing the teacher's role and taking
up class time. Computer literacy ca n he reached outside the writing program (for example, with
short courses by the Academic Computing Staff). So the educational question must remain
primary: is it educationally valuable to use computers in writing instruction
In this report, we survey the value of computers in writing instruction and conclude that aU
students can benefit. However, we are not technological determinists. Computers do not improve
writing, but they can aid students working with teachers to create meaning and gain mastery.
Access to computers is only a strategy; writing improvement is the goal. And the key to educational
gain is not the number or sophistication of the computers, but the level of integration faculty
achieve of computer aids into th eir overall writing program. Educational gain can be expected
whether faculty use word processing programs, additional softw:lre or networking. We recommend
that all institutions should begin. if only as a pilot project. a carefully planned and supported,
faculty-hased program tailored to meet the needs of the students.
As computer facilities become mort:: extensive and more sophisticated. new planning and
partnerships are needed to keep educational gain as the central focus and to support the student
and teilcher in their task. How does an institution decide the level and pace of commitment
suitahle for their academic mission '! What partnerships must be forged to achieve these goals
effectively for the foreseeable future'! These are the questions we set out to answer for potential
partners: instructors, academic administrators, computer support personnel, hardware and software
d\!velnpel s and funding agencies in government and the private sector.
The report will cover th e following topics:
1. What is the value of using computers in writing programs
--Support for writing theory: process writing, collaborative writing, writing across the
cu rriculum
.. Improvement of student im'olvement in le:lfning and attitudes tow:ud writing
--Exploration of the most effective ways to use or improve computer aids to writing
--Exploitation nf new computer capabilities with shlrage and mixed med ia (CD-ROM.
77

hypertext, videodiscs); expanded audiences (through networking and electronic mail);
artificial intelligence (with true grammatical analyzers)
2. What is the faculty role
--How do faculty champions grow and what are their duties
--What kinds of faculty development and support are necessary for expandinB the
program in the number of sections or technological complexity
3. What changes in hardware and software are in store and how do these affect planning
4. How can administrators support an evolutionary program based on the institution's
mission, student needs and faculty expertise What are the on-campus partnerships and planning
issues What are the inter-institutional connections needed to share information and foster equity
of access
Schipke, Rae C. -- University of Southern Mississippi
UNDERSTANDING STUDENT SUCCESS IN THE ELECTRONIC COLLABORATIVE WRITING
CLASSROOM: A STUDY OF LEARNING STYLES AND TEMPERAMENT TYPES
Introduction
Research on computers and writing tells us that as a tool, word processing tec1mo!ogy offers
a more flex ible writing medium than traditional means (Daiute, 1985a; Levin, et ai., 1985). It also
eases the physical and psychological constraints that burden young writers (Daiute, 1983). For the
most part. it supports the composing process of writing -- writers use computers in ways that are
functional for th em (Bridwell et aJ., 1987; Schipke, 1986). Although word processing technology
offers distinct advnntages for student writers, not aU students use technology with the same level
of success. It is necessary, therefore. to understand not only the diffe rent levels of skill possessed
by successful students, but also their lenrning style preferences, temperament types, alld degree of
intemctional comfort with the computer.
Background
Under a 1988 grant awa rded by th e CoUege of Liberal arts at the University of Southern
Mississippi. this researcher developed profiles of 100 freshman English students receiving
coUaborative instruction. F ifty of the subjects used work processing technology and fifty subjects
did not. The profiles wert! developed from the results of a statistical analysis of eight variables
including personality type,learning sty1e, pre- test and post-test writing apprehension scores, and pretest
and post-test essay samples (t he latter two were used to measure writing success).
Description of the Paper
This paper describes th e types of (USM) students for which the computer writing classroom
was an optimal instructional environment. It fir~t presents the student characteristi("s associated
with writing success in the computer classroom:
I. What were the learni ng styl e. .. of the successful student",!
2. Whit t were the tempenHne nt types of the successful stude nt
3. What specific (temperament) preference variables correhHed most high ly
10 writing success fn r these students
78

4. What learning styles and temperament types (together) correlated most
highly to writing success
It then presents and discusses the student types who were most suited to computer-based
collaborative instruction. FinaUy, it suggests possible applications for this work and directions for
further research.
Selfe, Cynthia L. -- Michigan Technological University
CREATING COMPUTER· BASED FORUMS FOR ACADEMIC DISCOURSE:
SPACES FOR COMMUNITY. DISSENT, AND LEARNING
ELECfRONIC
Our profession's interest in the social construction of knowledge and discourse has sparked
much of the recent work on computer-based systems for English classes, especially that work
focusing on the computer's value in facilitating collaborative, cooperative group activities among
student writers (Daiute, 1985; Rodrigues, 1985; Eldred, 1987). Less explored, but perhaps even
more important, is the computer's potential for addressing another need identified by the social
constructivist movement -- providing a forum for diversity, dissent, resistance, and the learning that
grows from thinking across the grain of convention.
This paper discusses how three different forums for computer-based discourse -- computerbased
conferences, hypertext knowledge bases, computer-based universities -- promote divergence
and learning in written communication contexts. These forums provide powerful language
opportunities for students not simply because they alJow more chances for written collaboration and
dialogue, but also because they create spaces in which students CAin construct their own versions of
texts and, thus resist, dissent, explore the role that controversy and intellectual divergence play in
learning and thinking through language.
To understand the importance of such resistance, teachers must understand the academic
discourse communities that our English classrooms comprise and acknowledge the process of
inteUectual and ideological accommodation that we ask students to undergo in becoming part of
these communities. Scholars like Bartholomae (1985, BizzelJ (1982), Cooper (1988), and
Berkenkoner, et aI., (1988) note that a great deal of our classroom effort in English composition
courses consists of teaching students how to master the specific conventions associated with
academic discourse in our particular field. They suggest, moreover, that our efforts in this direction
may welJ be designed to legitimate our own work and our place in the larger professional
community.
We carry out this work of assimilating students into our academic discourse community in
several carefuUy controlJed, traditional forums within our courses
-- class discussions, writing assignments, and teacher-student conferences. In these foruros, the
traditional hegemony of the teacher-student relationship, supported by the evaluative power of
grades and the traditional authority of teachers, assures that our students respond as we want. If
students don't respond according to the conventional boundaries that we set up for each of these
forums, then we fail students or they drop our classes, and we are left with students who have
succeeded in accommodating to the conventions of our academic discourse community (Bernstein,
79

1977; Bourdieu and Passerson, 1977; Bizzell, 1982; Batsleer et al 1985).
To change this situation in English composition classrooms -- as Faigley and Hansen (1985),
Bizzell, (1982), Cooper (1988), Chase (1988, and George (1988) suggest -- we must recognize that
teaching our students to value convention alone may not lead to the kind of writing or learning we
want them to exhibit. Rather, as language teachers, we may need to provide students the
opportunity to develop a Rcritical consciousness" (Freire. 1970) about discourse and its societal
functions, to use writing as a means of thinking against the grain of convention as well with it, to
resist the normative function of classroom discourse as a way of learning from a different
perspective (Bizzell, 1986). In this way, Bizzell (1986) notes, by acknowledging and supporting
revolutionary as well as the normative functions within academic discourse communities, by
"increasing the scope of academic discourse" (p. 52), we provide students a truly useful
understanding of how language works as a social force.
Computer technology may provide teachers a critical forum for this important lesson. While
it is difficult to value diversity and dissent within the traditional academic forums we currently
have available to us because they are so constrained by traditional political and educational values
which privilege accommodation to convention over resistance, we can do so within non-traditional,
computer·based academic forums which difTer in important political ways.
Computer-based conferences, hypertext knowledge bases, and computer-based universities
for example, do not have their roots in traditional academic discourse communities, on a new
medium that is as wild and unsettled as any frontier. Within this medium--because change,
exploration, and divergence are central values already (Fjermedal, 1986; Levy, 1984); social,
intellectual, and philosophical codes, and political structures often run directly counter to those
found in traditional classrooms. For these reasons, electronic forums are not bound by the same
set of conventions that constrain traditional academic discourse and privilege the normative
functions of academic discourse. If we use electronic forums to supplement the traditional
classroom forums, if we construct these spaces carefully. if we encourage within them a diversity
of discourse, if we ensure a reduced-risk environment for students who use them, then conferences
can, in turn, provide "room" for resistant discourse of the most positive intellectual kind, discourse
that provides alternative ways of thinking and learning.
A most interesting parallel occurs to me here. I might add (if time and momentum permits)
a footnote about how the study of computers in writing also provides a vigorous alternative forum
for English teachers within our profession--one which values divergence and dissent in thinking
about composition theory, research, and teaching. Computers are a catalyst for educational reform:
both for our students, as writers, and for us, as professionals. Neat.
Shirk, Henrietta Nickels -- Northeastem University
HYPERRHETORIC: TEACHING STUDENTS TO DEVELOI' HYPERTEXT DISCOURSE
MODELS
This presentation covers some of the philosophical assumptions underlying hyper text or
hyper media applications as they relate to using these new technologies for the creation and
80

management of information. ]t focuses on the needs of writers to develop new approaches to the
writing process and new mental models for organizing information. One of these requirements is
an understanding of the cognitive aspects of screen design and the chunking of information.
Another requirement is an understanding of the effectiveness of metaphors in presenting hyper
information and a knowledge of practical skiUs for developing meaningful metaphors within the
context of hyper systems. A course in which students were taught how to use HyperCard to
produce computer-based training is described and the basis for a theory of "Hyper Rhetoric" is
suggested.
Introduction:
In their forecast for 1989, the National Institute of Business Management predict that there
will be "a proljferation of 'hyper' software" (January 15, 1989). Hyper text or hyper media is an
electronic attempt to cope with the explosion of information and paper documents by offering the
ability to rapidly leap back and forth between large databases of information. The implications of
this computer technology for writers are enormous and chaUenging, and they· are changing the
rhetorical foundations of the profession.
When using the new hyper text (media) technologies, writers must abandon most of their
previously held assumptions about the qualities of effective communication. The medium of the
computer requires an understanding of effective screen design, including knowledge from cognitive
psychology about methods for chunking information. It also requires a working understanding of
the use of metaphor as a knowledge process in cognition and the assimilation of knowledge via the
computer.
This presentation describes the skills which writers of hyper text must learn. It uses the
example of a graduate-level course in technical and professional writing in which students learned
Apple Computer's hyper text product, "HyperCard," as a tool for creating computer-based training.
FinaUy, as the result of these experiences, it suggests the foundations for a theory of HyperRhetoric,
which wiD be useful for others learning or teaching this new technology.
1. The New Requirements ror Writers:
a. The Basics of Screen Design: The differences between the printed page and the computer
screen are described from the perspective of cognitive psychology and through a summary of the
impact of online writing on composing techniques and visual layout and design.
b. The Chunking of Infomzation: The stylistic implications of the need to present
information in "chunks" are described in terms of requirements suggested by studies in cognitive
psychology and illustrations of successful and unsuccessful chunking are presented.
2. Building New Mental Models:
a. The Meaning of Metaphor: The significance of metaphor as a mental model and
evolutionary knowledge process is explored in terms of its influence on the creation of metaphors
within hyper text environments. Several new implications for writers are described.
b. The Creation of New Metaphors: Practical advice is outllned for writers of hyper text to
develop their own metaphors. Requirements include an understandingof information management
and potential metaphorical intelligence, as well as the use of real world scenarios to reflect the
features and functions of hyper text products.
3. Example or a Course in "Online Documentation":
A graduate-level course at Northeastern University in which writing students learned
81

HyperCard to produce CBT is described. The issues, problems, and questions which were raised
by these students further emphasize the need to revise current approaches to teaching writing within
the medium of hyper text technologies. Examples of some of the students' projects are described
to illustrate the points covered above.
4. The Foundations for a Theory of HyperRhetorlc:
The medium of hyper text requires a new approach to rhetoric. Several suggestions are
made for a set of fundamental assumptions that underlie the structure and rationale for a new
HyperRhetoric. This theoretical model builds on the applicable (and practical) techniques of
cognitive psychology mentioned above and on a reinterpretation of metaphorical theory within the
context of creating effective hyper text products.
Smith, Catherine F. -- Syracuse University
RECONSIDERING HYPERTEXT
This is an inquiry into the conceptual basis of hypertext.
Hypertext is now under-conceptualized -- usually, as machine action rather than human
action, and narrowly defined -- usually, as system operation (retrieval and analysis) or as artifact
(non-linear test). I propose an essay that, after reviewing present approaches, will freely explore
additional dimensions and alternative viewpoints. My aim is to draw from varied disciplines and
perspectives to enlarge the conception of hypertext, primarily for two audiences: practitioners
approximately like myself, a teacher (of composition, or of information studies, computer science,
philosophy, history, sociology, or other fields) experienced in teaching with word processing now
beginning to conceive how I might teach with hypertext, and theorists (of composition, of cognition,
of computer system design) actively contemplating the meaning of hypertext for literacy. Readers
less familiar with hypertext can gain from the proposed essay an overview of ideas about the tool.
Hypertext systems promise to become in the 1990s a redefining technology
-- tools that reshape not only our practices but also our abstract understanding of writing and
reading. In the cusp of that potential reformation, I want to examine assumptions and metaphors
that seem to be driving development of hypertext tools as we enter the 1990s, and to go on to revise
assumptions, perhaps propose other metaphors, that might broaden the practical and theoretical
development of hypertext.
In current thinking about hypertext, five assumptions seem key:
1) virtuality, or an understanding of thinking as effecting virtual spaces, creating malleable
mental worlds, gestalts
2) dynamism, or a dynamic view of intellectual action as reworking the spaces, altering the
gestalts -- e.g., through association, combination, substitution, intersection, or other relational action
3) engagement, or projections of a creator persona, an active thinker
4) machine situatedness, or the computer as an environment in which ideas are built
5) connectiVity, or perception of interconnected electronic experience and ordinary physical
and social experience.
Together, these five assumptions loosely constitute a paradigm informing early hypertext
82

thinking and development. With varying emphases, Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, Douglas Englehart
in the 19505, Ted Nelson in the 1960s, and, more recently, university or industry hypertext research
and development groups, as well as hypertext/hypermedia vendors (e.g., Apple, HyperCard) can
all be located in reference to this set of assumptions. The paradigm has least emphasized the fifth
assumption, the relation of electronic experience to other kinds of experience, possible excepting
Engelhart's interest in cooperative work and Nelson's association of electronic and print media.
I want to reconsider the paradigm, perhaps to alter it, perhaps to reconfirm it and broaden
its resonance. Both older and newer versions of its assumptions, eclectically gathered from nonM
technological and technological fields, can be brought together to form a fresh look.
Examples illustrate the range of perspectives I intend to explore in the proposed essay.
Psychologist William James' pioneering (1890s) modern view of consciousness, which he named
"stream of consciousness," connotes virtuality, dynamism, and connectivity, and illuminates their
more recent manifestation in hypertext use. Novelist Virginia Woolf and feminist theologian Mary
Daly suggestively characterize those qualities in ordinary thinking through metaphors of waves
(Woolf) and spinning (Daly). (Disregarding the antiMtechnoiogy bias of much feminist theory
including Daly's, I believe that Daly'S metaphor of spinning suggest provocative associations between
radical feminist phenomenology and types of cognition that may be augmented by hypertext
systems.)
Woolf and Daly also provide perspective on gendered thinking and they outline useful views
of active thinkers as female. Philosopher of science Michael Polanyi applies gestalt psychology to
understanding the composition of personal knowledge. Linguist George Lakoff theorizes the
experiential (physical and social) basis of thinking, following in paths toward understanding social
cognition laid out by cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas. Computer system designer Terry
Winograd and management analyst Fernando Flores reconsider the machineMsituatedness of
electronic thinking, noting that computers are embedded in a context of human action and arguing
for re-founding the design of devices on the human, not the mechanical, environment.
Sources Consulted
Belenky, Mary Field, et al. Women s Ways of Knowing: Developing Self, Voice, Mind. (Basic Books,
1986).
Boiter, J. David. Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. (University of North
Carolina Press, 1984).
Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think," Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, pp. 101-1OB.
Conklin, Jeff. "Hypertext: An Introduction and Survey," Computer, September 1987, pp. 17M41.
Daly, Mary. GynEcology: The Metaethies of Radical Feminism, (Beacon Press, 1978).
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, (Pantheon, 1970).
Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge. (Penguin, 1973).
James, William. Talks to Teachers: On Psychology; and to students on some of Life's Ideals, (Norton,
1958).
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By, (University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Nelson, Ted. Literary Machines, (San Antonio, 1986, sixth ed.).
Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, (Basic Books, 1980).
Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, (University of Chicago
Press, 1958).
83

Smith, John B., et a1. Hypertext '87, (University of North Carolina Department of Computer Science
Technical Report #88-103, 1988).
Smith, John B., and Catherine F. Smith. "Writing, Thinking. Computing, II forthcoming in Poetics:
Journal for Empirical Research on literature, Media, and the Arts.
Winograd, Terry and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation
for Design, (Ablex, 1986).
Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, Jeanne Schulkind
(Ed.), (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
Snyder, liana -- Monash University, Australia
A GENRE APPROACH TO THE EVALUATION OF COMPUTER WRITING
Recent developments in writing research and pedagogy focus on the linguistic concept of
"genre" (Cristie, 1984a & 1984b; Rothery, 1984; Martin, 1985; Kress, 1986). In the genre view,
learning to write is a matter of learning to recognize and produce a number of different forms of
written language, that is genres, each of them culturally determined. A genre is defined as " ... any
purposeful, staged, cultural activity in which human beings engage: (Cristie, 1984a, p.20). A genre
is characterized by having a schematic structure -- a distinctive beginning, middle and end.
According to Christie (1984a) genres are shaped and organized in different ways and the differences
in organization and structure are expressions of differences in purposes and meanings. Hence,
the process of writing is one of constructing a written language text for particular purposes and with
particular audiences in mind.
The genre exponents believe that it is possible to identify the principal genres which are
critical in the development of writing abilities. It is also possible, they claim, to characterize the
principal identifying features of these genres. Also of importance is the view that learning to write
most productively is both dependent and contingent on informed, timely intervention: in other
words, on teaching. This paper reports on the application of genre theory to the evaluation of
computer writing. It focuses on the development and structure of three genre-based analytic scales,
their application to writing data and the results of the analyses of the data.
The central purpose of an empirical study of computer writing was to compare the quality
of genre-specific writing samples produced with pen to genre-specific writing produced with word
processors. In the quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design, 384 writing samples representing
three genres -- narrative, argumentative and expository report writing -- were collected over a
period of seven months. The subjects (N=51) were Year Eight students (Junior High) at a
Melbourne metropolitan private girls' school. To facilitate comparisons of the quality of the genrespecific
writing samples produced with different tools, it was necessary to develop effective
evaluation procedures which could provide inter and intra-genre information.
There are a number of qualitative evaJuation procedures supported in the literature which
when used appropriately and in conjunction with quantitative techniques, offer a comprehensive
picture of the quality of writing sample. These are global evaluation procedures (Britton, Martin
and Rosen, 1966; Cooper, 1977) and analytic scales (Lloyd-lones, 1977; Rabianski, 1977; Graham,
84

1982). GlobaJ assessment provides an evaluation of overall quality, whereas scales can produce
analytic measures of selected parts of the writing samples. An analytic scale aims to determine
whether a writing sample has certain characteristics that are crucial to success with a given generic
writing task. The steps in the development of an analytic scale are to define the generic boundaries,
to devise writing tasks which sample that genre, to devise workable scoring techniques and to train
independent markers in the use of the scoring techniques.
An advantage of an analytic scale is that it can be tailored to fit the unique requirements
of a study. Scales which have been developed for specific purposes in the analysis of writing can
be used productively to further understanding of the qualitative aspects of the text. An analytic
scale can facilitate an investigation of differences, if indeed there are any, in the relative quality of
the specific elements of the focal genres when different writing tools are used.
Despite the insight into the qualitative aspects of texts which analytic scales provide, in the
computer writing studies, the assessment of quality has been achieved almost exclusively by the
global marking of the writing samples. Quantitative measures such as word and error counts have
also been employed, but not widely. Analytic scales which have been used effectively in many non·
computer writing studies have not been applied to word processing studies. (Sommers, 1985, is a
notable exception.)
Thus three genre·based analytic scales were developed for the purposes of the study. Each
scale has II elements. A number of elements are common to all three scales. These are: sense
of purpose; sense of audience; point of view; organization. However, even though there are
parallels among the elements of the individual scales, attempts at total matching were avoided for
it would have been at the expense of the inherent differences among the genres.
The scales offer the possibility of an empirical investigation of some of the assertions about
the effects of word processors on writing which appear in the anecdotal computer writing literature.
Examples of such questions which can be explored through the assessment of the writing samples
according to the elements of each of the scales are:
* Is there a difference in the development of a sense of audience between genre-specific
writing produced with a word processor and genre-specific writing produced with pen
* Is there a difference in the development of a sense of purpose
* Is there a difference in the attention to organization
The data are currently being analyzed and the results will be ready for presentation at the
"Computers and Writing" conference.
Bibliography
Britton, J. N., Martin, N. G, Rosen, H. (1966). Multiple marking of English compositions: An
account of an experiment. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
Christie, F. (1984a). The functions of language, preschool language learning and the transition to
print. In ECf418 Language studies: Children writing: Study guide. GeeJong: Deakin
University Press.
Christie, F. (1984b). Varieties of written discourse. In ECf4 18 Language studies: Children writing:
Study guide. Geelong: Deakin University Press.
Cooper, G R. (1977). Holistic evaluation of writing. In C. R. Cooper and L. Odell (Eds.),
Evaluating Writing: Describing, measuring, judging. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers
of English, 3-31.
85

Daiute, C. (1985). Writing and computers. Reading. MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.
Graham, S. (1982). Expressive modes in tandem: Drawing and writing at four grade levels.
Unpublished Doctor of Philosophy dissertation. Faculty of Education, Monash University.
Kress, G. (1986). Genre in a social theory of language: Reply to John Dixon. In I. Reid (Ed.),
The place of genre in leaming: Current debates. Geelong: Centre for Studies in Literary
Education, Deakin University.
Uoyd-Jone" R. (1977). Primary trait scoring. In C. R. Cooper and L. Odell (Ed,.), Evaluating
writing: Describing, measuring, judging. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
33-66.
Martin, J. R. (1985). Factual writing: exploring and challenging socinl reality. Geelong: Deakin
University Press.
Rabianski, N. E. M. (1977). Scoring writing with an informative aim. In Measures for research
and evaluation in the English language arts, VoL 2, The Research Instruments Project. Urbana, IL:
National Council of Teachers of English. ERlC Reproduction Service Number 236 638.
Rothery, J. (1984). The development of genres -- primary to junior secondary school. In ECf418
Language Studies: Children wn·ting: Study guide. Geelong: Deakin University Press.
Sommers, E. A. (1985). The effects of word processing and writing instruction on the writing processes
and products of college writers. ERlC Reproduction Service Number 269 762.
Snyder, nana -- Monash University, Amtralin
WRITING WITH WORD PROCESSORS: THE RELATIONSHIP I!ETWEEN WRITING GENRE
AND WRJTING OUAL/IT
[NOTE: THE TWO ABSTRACTS I!Y SNYDER WILL COMBINE INTO ONE TALK.J
This paper presents a rationale for comparing the quality of writing produced with word
processors and writing produced with pen. The paper then outlines a computer writing study which
investigates the effects of word processing on quality. The theoretical framework of the study is
based on a genre approach to the teaching and evaluation of writing.
A review of the computer writing research reveals that the findings of studies which have
investigated questions of quality when word processors are used are equivocal: some fmd an
improvement, others no difference, while there are those which have found a deterioration in
quality. What this paper argues is that it is more theoretically sound to compare the quality of
writing samples representing particular writing genres when different writing tools are used rather
than simply to compare the quality of "writing" when there are no distinctions made between genres.
In other words, the question becomes: "What happens to the quality of genre-specific writing when
word processors are used" rather that simply: "What happens to the quality of writing"
Questions about differences in writing quality must be investigated within the context of
different writing genres for a number of reasons. Firstly, contrasting discourse genres are likely to
produce examples of writing which differ stylistically and organizationally (Britton, et aI., 1975). If
86

comparisons between writing samples produced under different conditions are to be made, then
variation in regard to genre, which confound the measures, should be minimized. This is more
likely to be achieved by comparing samples written in the same genre.
Secondly, It has been demonstrated that skill in one genre does not necessarily imply skill
in another (Uoyd-Jones, 1977; Hillocks, 1986). Similarly, Bereiter and Scardamalia (1982) argue
that it would be unreasonable to expect performance across a number of genres to be equal. It
follows, then, that the effect on writing skill of different writing conditions can be investigated only
if the writing assignments are genre~specific.
The third point concerns syntactic complexity. Analyses of the syntactic features of writing
samples in a number of genres show that different genres and different intended audiences require
varying degrees of syntactic complexity (Martinez San Jose, 1972; Hird, 1977; Crowhurst and Piche,
1979). Even though the link between syntactic complexity and writing quality is a somewhat
tenuous one (Hillocks, 1986), it does seem retrogressive to examine the effects on quality of
different writing conditions without considering the writing genre.
It follows that questions of quality can be best examined when other sampling criteria
relating to the genre.specific writing assignments are met: that an intended audience is identified;
that the purpose of the task is determined; that the task is not decontextualized; that all students
write on the same topic.
A quasi.experimental pretest-posttest design was used involving two intact groups, one using
word processors for writing, the other pen. For the pretest, each student completed three writing
tasks which represented the three focal genres •. narrative, argumentative, and expository report
writing. All subjects completed the pretest writing tasks using pens. For the posttest, both groups
completed three writing tasks: the pen group used pens and the computer group used word
processors. The computer group also completed three writing tasks using pen as part of the
postlest.
The subjects (N=51) were Year Eight students (Junior High) at a Melbourne metropolitan
private girls' school. This age group was chosen as it has been largely neglected by research studies
on computers and writing (Daiute's 1986 study on Junior High students is a notable exception).
To date, most of the studies have been American in origin and coUege focused. In Australia, the
research on computers and writing has concentrated on Primary School writers (Porter, 1985) or
beginning writers (Porter, 1986).
All the participants in the study had some keyboarding skills and at least several hours' word
processing experience during the previous year. Both classes were taught the same writing
strategies and techniques by the same teacher over a period of seven months. The computer group
had access to the computers for writing for approximately two hours per week. They used Apple
lIe computers equipped with the Bank Street Writer Three word processing program.
The teacher and researcher worked closely on the development of teaching strategies that
would help students improve their writing from one draft to another regardless of whether they
worked with pen or word processor. A number of lessons were allocated to the presentation and
discussion of various approaches to each genre-specific writing task. The students were given the
opportunity to brainstorm, discuss and revise their writing with each other and/or with the teacher
and the researcher at aU stages. The researcher acted as a participant/observer attending all classes
for both groups.
87

Three hundred eighty-four writing samples were collected during the study. Each writing
sample was assessed by four independent raters, both globally and according to genre-specific
analytic scales devised for the purposes of the study. Other quantitative measures (word counts,
error counts and aT-unit analysis) which contributed to a comprehensive view of the quality of the
writing samples were also used. The data are currently being analyzed and the results will be ready
for presentation at "the Computers and Writing Conference."
Bibliography
Bereiter. c., Scardamalia. M. (1982). From conversation to composition: The role of instruction
in a developmental process. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in instructional psychology, VoL 2.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1-64.
Britton, J. N., Burgess, T., Martin, N. C., McLeod, A. t
Rosen, H. (1975). Thedevelopmen/ of writing
abilities (11-18). Schools Council Research Studies. London: Macmillan Education, Ltd.
Crowhurst, M., piche, G. L. (1979). Audience and mode of discourse effects on syntactic complexity
in writing at two grade levels. Research in the Teaching of English,ll. 2, 101-109.
Daiute, C. (1986). Physical and cognitive factors in revising: Insights from studies with computers.
Research in the Teaching of English, 2Q, 2, 141-159.
Hillocks, G., Jr. (1986). Research on written composition. Urbana, IL: National Conference on
Research in English.
Hird, B. 1. (1977). The relationship of different modes of writing and syntactical maturity in
children's writing. Western Australia: Mount Lawley College of Advanced Education,
Typescript.
Lloyd-Jones, R. (1977). Primary trait scoring. In C. R. Cooper and L Odell (Eds.), Evaluating
writing: Describing, measuring, judging. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
33-66.
Martinez San Jose, C. P. (1972). Grammatical structures in four modes of writing at fourth grade
level. Dissel1ation Abstracts Internationa/,:u. 10, 5411-A. Michigan: University Microftlms
International.
Porter, R. (1985). Children, storywriting and microcomputers. In J. Anderson (Ed.), Computers
in the language classroom. Australian Reading Association. Victoria: Impact Printing Pty.
Ltd. 39-49.
Porter, R. (1986). Writing and word processing in year one. Australian Educational Computing,
1. I, 18-23.
Sudol, Ronald A. -- OakJand University
GENERIC WORD PROCESSING: TEACHING WORD PROCESSED COMPOSING WITHOUT
A COMPUTER LAB
Although most universities have by now provided some kind of hardware and technical
support for the use of word processing and other computer applications to the teaching of writing,
1 doubt that university finances will aUow expansion of these facilities in proportion to need. At
the same time an increasing number of students have acquired independent access to computers
88

and do not need to use facilities dedicated to word processing for composition classes. At Oakland
University we have, for the last three semesters, offered composition courses with word processing
in both lab and non-lab formats. In the non-lab format, students use their own equipment, so the
focus of the class is on how to make the most of word processing in the writing process no matter
what kind of software and hardware is being used. This is generic word processing--applying the
underlying principles of digital writing to the way we teach thinking and writing.
I propose to do three things in my presentation: (1) describe how the alternative class
formats work in terms of the curriculum and the writing program; (2) discuss the results of a survey
of all incoming students about their access to computers for writing; and (3) review some of the
elements of generic word processing that work particularly well in the non-lab format.
In connection with the place of the alternative formats in the curriculum, I will discuss the
advantages and disadvantages to both students and faculty of the two formats, the problem of
explaining to students the difference between the two formats so they can register accordingly, and
the question of whether or not grouping students who have their own computers is "elitist.-
The results of the survey are not fully tabulated, but an initial impression is that more
students have independent access to computers than might have been imagined. And, although they
express a powerful willingness to enroll in special sections for word processing, registrations in those
sections is slow and unpredictable. In any case, I plan to provide a complete summary of the results
of the survey and open it to discussion briefly.
The third part of my presentation is the longest. I have spent as much as a full day in
workshops discussing the pedagogical and rhetorical dimensions of word processing and can adapt
this material to any time frame. During the current semester I am teaching one section of
composition in each of the two word processing formats. I hope to be able to show how generic
word processing works by comparing and contrasting the ethnographies of the two classes. In the
lab class students are learning the computer and the writing process simultaneously. In the nonlab
class students learn the writing process having already mastered the computer. These
differences influence the way I teach and the way the students learn.
My principal references on the subject of how digital writing affects the writing and thinking
processes are Michael Heim's Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing and my
own text book Textfiles: A Riletodc for Word Processing. As time permits I will discuss the spaceless
environment of digital writing and the Mprinciple of addition M in word processed revision. I will also
sound some cautionary notes about how word processing can reduce language to information
exchange, how it can destabilize meaning, and how its encouragement of ease and fluency signal a
need for renewed emphasis on the teaching of style and taste in writing.
Sugano, Miyoko -- University of Hawaii at Hilo
INTEGRATING WORD PROCESSING INTO COLLEGE WRITING COURSES
Teaching writing on computers is an exciting development for both students and teachers.
Yet a number of writing instructors are still apprehensive about such a prospect. And even many
of those who see the value of writing on computers are merely sending their students to a computer
89

lab to word process their assignments and use spelling and style checkers to "polish" them, instead
of teaching writing on the computers in the classroom. Indications are that students left to write
on computers on their own and told to style check their papers before turning them in are not
learning to improve their writing and they are receiving the wrong message. In fact both students
and instructors are lulled into thinking they have achieved something of value.
The writing instructor who offers courses that teach students to compose on the computer
can take advantage of the attraction the fluidity of electronic writing has for students, the
opportunity to teach in workshop situation where the instructor and other students can act as
coaches and collaborators, but most important of all, the instructor can teach the shop worn subject
of writing in a different way·· on the computer. After a year and a half teaching writing using
WordPerfect, I have found many of my students writing with confidence and pride. They speak of
a sense of achievement, of gaining control over their thoughts, and feeling better about themselves;
in fact on student who attempted English 100 five times at different colleges on the mainland U.S.
and in Hawaii finally completed the course because, he said, the computer made writing fun.
I have integrated word processing into my writing course··the basic expository writing
course, a business letter/report writing course, and the advanced composition course, each time
integrating the two more smoothly.
In this paper I discuss what llearned in planning such courses after a number of trails and
errors. For example, I realized that for some of the insecure, inexperienced writers there were
seductive traps lying in wait in the word processor, such as the ease of padding and being repetitive,
the allure of the polished surface that seems to imply completion. 1 had to design the courses in
such a way as to emphasize those features, such as block moves, that need to be focused on in
order to steer the students into more productive ways of writing.
Also I found I had to consider t) the apprehensions students bring with them·-about writing
and about writing on computers, and 2) the necessity for careful timing and sequencing of concepts
and features of the particular word processing program and relating them to writing assignments.
I minimize apprehensions by having the students work collaboratively during the early stages
of learning the program and writing on the computer--in small groups and as a class. For example,
their introduction to the computer and to WordPerfect is done by having them work in small groups
proofreading a letter I have written to them on the screen. As they help each other correct the
errors, they learn things like "wordwrap" and how to delete characters, and so forth; in the process
they become intrigued with the power of the computer and the program. I save the details about
booting up, etc., until the next time. I have them write their frrst essay/letter or two collaboratively.
I have also found that having them use templates already prepared to prompt their planning when
they need it helps to lessen their insecurities.
I have sequenced the course in such a way as to have students go through the process of
writing particular assignments as they learn basic concepts and reatures or word processin&.
Because students generally will be going through the same process in writing each essay,
letter, or report, they learn the program by repetitive use. As they become more confident and
more competent, I introduce new features like spelling check, windows, outlining, and alphabetizing
bibliographical entries at appropriate intervals, thus also helping to keep interest in writing on the
computer from lagging.
90

Taylor, Paul H. -- University of Texas at Austin
COMPUTER NEJWQRKS. DISCOURSE COMMUNITIES. AND CHAOS
What is knowledge Where is it located In the nineteenth century, phrenologists claimed
that knowledge is stored in specific locations in the brain. In the present century,
neurophysiologists have argued that the functions of the mind are not localized _. that knowledge
is distributed across a "neural net" of brain cells linked by dendrites and axons. Also in this century,
theorists of culture, language, and related fields have proposed that knowledge is socially
constructed within discourse communities .. a kind of "social net." These descriptions of human
thought have influenced the ways in which we design and use modern computers; specifically, they
shape our conceptions of how we can teach composition on computers.
Most individual computers take the phrenological approach: any specific piece of
information is stored in a precise location (a memory address). The computer examines the data
one small piece at a time, performing some kind of operation on the data and placing the result
in either the original storage area or a new address. In contrast to this linear procedure, some
newer computers attempt to imitate the brain's neural net through the use of parallel processing.
Instead of having a single processing center, these computers link together many processing centers
that work simultaneously on different parts of a problem. The goal of this parallel structure is to
create more intelligent computers ·-ones that work more like the human brain.
At the same time that work has progressed on parallel processing, an alternative approach
to synchronous computation has been evolving _. the use of computer networks (both local area and
wide area). Computer networks join together many processing centers (i.e., many computers) that
work in parallel, but the individual centers are not necessarily cooperating on a single task. Instead,
each center is under human control. Of course, networks tend to arise from shared goals .. a group
of people need access to a common body of information, and often to each other, in order to
pursue corporate objectives.
While a number of computer programs have been written to operate on networks, only a
few specifically utilize the capabilities of synchronous (real-time) communication. Among those
that do depend on the simultaneous participation of several individuals are the ENFI system
developed at Gallaudet University, the Colab tools developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center, and the program InterChange developed at the University of Texas. Each of these
programs, with different emphases, allows for a discussion or meeting that takes place through
electronic text rather than spoken dialogue.
These electronic conferences offer specific benefits in the composition classroom, according
to publications and presentations by the software developers and implementors; those testing the
systems report increased individual participation, improved awareness of audience and social
cooperation, and enthusiasm for the transcripts that preserve the dialogue. So where do we go
from here Back to the models of the brain. Despite the obvious interconnectivity of real-time
communication programs, electronic conferencing remains a largely linear, hierarchial
(phrenological) phenomenon. In both InterChange and the ENFI software, participants see all the
messages in chronological order. The computer forces the text into a form that has little to do with
the content .. the information is arranged according to the computer's need to store data in specific
locations rather than the user's need to make sense of the text.
91

As a result of this linearity, users complain that related items don't appear together; a
message and its reply may easily be separated by other remarks that are related only marginally or
not at all. A remedy is suggested by Xerox's PARC's program Cognoter and by the developing field
of hypertext. Rather than linking the texts sequentially (or in any other hierarchy, for that matter),
texts can be manipulated so that participants in an electronic conference can specify relationships
between different messages and read the messages in whatever order seems appropriate. To that
end, researchers at the University of Texas are currently modifying InterChange so that it can selVe
as a real·time hypertextual writing environment.
In the new InterChange, messages do not necessarily appear in chronological order and
scroll off the top of the screen to make room for more recent comments. Instead, a participant
specifies the connections she wishes to make between the message she is sending and any previous
messages she considers relevant. If the message broaches a new topic, the writer can allow it to
appear on the main level. But if the message is related to earlier ones, its presence is signaUed
visually without actually displaying the text. Those readers who wish to pursue the topic can call
up the message, while other participants can follow other threads.
Non·linear texts may seem to be overwhelming in the complexity since there is no logical
beginning or end, but they seem to reflect accurately both the mind's "neural net" of information
processing and the knowledge structuring of discourse communities. The complexity of these
processes is not the disorder of traditional chaos, but a "stable n chaos that scientists such as Benoit
Mandelbrot are studying through fractal geometry. Since computers are rapidly becoming the
primary means of transmitting textual knowledge, we must continue developing tools like
InterChange to provide students and our society as a whole with the means of managing and
comprehending such complex intertextual information.
Tobin, Lad .. Saint Anselm College
WRITING BElWEEN THE LINES: EMBEDDED TEXT IN COLLABORA TlYE ESSAYS
It is a common knowledge that computers can provide valuable support to collaborative
writing groups: word processing facilities complicated editing procedures (such as combining
sections of different drafts) and networked computers make it possible for writers to work together
with little or no face·to·face contact. But while these logistical advantages are important, they have
very little impact on the basic ways that students write or teachers read. I would like to present the
preliminary results of a federally· funded project (Dept. of ED; FIPSE #P116BB J 001) on computers
and collaborative writing that is designed to change the typical (and often unsatisfying) relationships
that a student develops with her text, her fellow students, and her instructor.
To accomplish these goals, I am training ten professors and 175 students to use word
processing to produce "Iayered~ collaborative essays. Each "layered" essay is produced
collaboratively by three writers working together from start to finish and consists of primary text
(the actual essay that the group is working on) and secondary text (subtext information which
individual group members or the instructor add during the writing process). These embedded
comments, which can be visible or invisible on the screen during any particular reading, are
92

questions, minority opinions, suggestions, annotations, personal observations on the pleasures and
pains of the writing process; they are, in other words, any information that the writers could not
(or chose not) to integrate into the primary text.
For example, here [ could use embedded text to point out that although [ will pay less
attention in my presentation to the technical problems of computer networking than to the
pedagogical implications of the project, I wiU explain the particular hardware and software
requirements needed to support this sort of program (we are using a local area network of
Macintosh computers, MacServe, Apple Talk, and Microsoft Word 3.01). I will also discuss some
of the problems we have encountered in training students and faculty to use this network.
There are, I think, sound theoretical and pedagogical reasons for asking students and
teachers to write in this way. In my presentation J will support and illustrate each of the following
points with specific examples from our project:
(1) This approach changes the way most students look at written texts. Too many beginning
students think of essays only as stable, finished products. By working with other writers to create
a layered, dynamic text, students realize that writing is an organic, dialogic process.
Another example: many students interrupt their primary ted to ask, "Does this make
sense" "Is this boring" or "Another way to look at this would be •••"
Because the secondary text can be embedded into a page. paragraph, or sentence and
appears on the screen exactly where it was inserted, students are given the chance to reconsider
their evolving essay as it is constructed and (literaUy) deconstructed. Students then realize that
there is not just one "correct" way to write a particular paragraph or essay. For some, this
realization leads to a sense of liberation, even playfulness, not only in their own writing but also in
their reading of other kinds of texts as well.
(2) Students in this project -- even those who complain that collaborative writing is difficult
because "everyone has his own way of writing" -- benefit by trying to integrate diverse styles and
approaches. Some students adopt new methods while others simply come to understand the
implications and consequences of choosing one rhetorical form or organizational strategy over
another. In almost all collaborative groups, students use the embedded text to explain, defend,
question, or speculate about the rhetorical strategies they are using in the primary text. By
examining the ongoing relationship between the collaborative and individual writing, the primary
and embedded text, the students are continuously examining the relationships between reading and
writing, process and product, form and content.
(3) Although most writing teachers pay considerable attention to questions of audience,
many students still sense (perhaps accurately) that they are writing only for one reader, the teacher.
even in peer review groups, many students remain detached from the text at hand. In our project,
we are trying to reinforce the concept that an essay must be directed at a real audience of readers
who wilJ question, support, or disagree with particular assertions. Since these comments are
embedded at the place of utterance and since the commentators are co·writers with a vested
interest in the project, the student's usual sense of isolation is greatly reduced or eliminated.
(4) Participating faculty are also brought into a community of writers; in fact, they are
brought into the essays themselves. We too often forget that the traditional methods of assigning,
teaching. and evaluating writing isolate teachers as well as students. No longer carrying student
essays around for a week in a briefcase, no longer commenting in red ink in the margins, faculty
93

are now writing in the (secondary) text itself. One participating instructor told me that she finds
commenting in the embedded text to be less impersonal than written response on a paper and less
tense or confrontational than a spoken remark in a conference. As a result, she finds that her
embedded comments are more informal, speculative, and supportive than her typical written
comments.
] am not suggesting that this program represents radically new technology (it is, of course,
much less sophisticated and powerful than hypertext programs such as Storyspace, HyperCard, or
GUide), nor am I proposing this program as a panacea for all writing problems. Rather it is meant
to be a realistic frrst step in solving deeply-rooted problems, particularly the lack of innovation
and motivation in college writing courses. By changing the dynamics of writing instruction, by
making the process less frustrating, and by creating interactive communities of writers and readers,
we are addressing the underlying problems facing student writers and inexperienced writing
teachers. And by building into our curriculum a series of writing assignments that make students
and teachers pay attention not only to the written product but also to the writing process, we are
trying to establish a logical and conscious relationship between writer and reader, cognition and
written communication.
Tuman, Myron _. University of Alabama
"CAVERNS MEASURELESS TO MAN":
LITERACY
THE PROSPECTS FOR POST-TYPOGRAPHICAL
It is ironic that one poem, Coleridge'S "Kubla Khan," should contain the dominant
metaphors of literacy both for typographic culture -- that of Coleridge as solitary artist probing the
depth of his consciousness seeking a truth beyond the realm of common understanding _. and for
the newly emerging post-typographic culture -- that of "measureless caverns," the sustaining image
of t~.e vast networks of texts and images that form the basis of hypertext and hypermedia
technologies (as well as ted Nelson's long-term Project Xanadu). We are in the process of coming
to see texts less as a fixed entity like a lyric poem (or the hardcopy output of a word processor) and
more as a single, unified, hut vast coUeetion of text and images that can be effortlessly and
randomly accessed in unique fashion by different readers, that is, as a run-time version of a free·
form database. The "writer" in this process will be less an expressive presence communicating to
us through the intimacy of the text and more the ingenious creator or assembler of a game-like
structure in one easy-to-use package. Indeed, as the text itself becomes more game-like--that is,
composed less of continuous discourse and more of graphical and design-oriented constituent parts,
less like the transcription of speech and more like the extension of the lists and charts that in some
ways have always been the key element in literacy -- then we may become increasingly reluctant to
use the traditional term writer, preferring instead to refer to the author, the creator, or perhaps
even the compiler of what it is we are "reading." And while we may still refer to our activity as
reading. its very nature is also Likely to change from what it has been, at least for most of this
century -- the comprehension of meaning (usually prescribed to the author) as embodied in the text
_. to something more open-ended and reader-based, in some ways akin to the playful imaginings
of decontructionist critics and in other ways akin to getting as far as one needs to go in the new
94

genre of open-ended laser-disk-based video games where one moves gropingly through the rooms
of a castle.
Opposed to this high-tech compilation of multiple screens containing multiple stacks of
information is the more common metaphor of word processors today -- composing in linear fashion
on a blank sheet of paper. Behind this metaphor is the traditional image of the solitary writer
rolling the single sheet of paper into the typewriter and beginning some monumental literary work
(the great American novel) that has already been worked out in the writer's imagination. The task
for this writer is not linking in some insightful way what has already been written but forming some
new, largely personal vision of reality. My own book, A Preface to Literacy, for example, not only
affirms the value of an older, typographic form of writing but is itself the result of the very process
of this older tradition in its concern less with linking information than with the links themselves or
rather with uncovering the logk that between those links, with only an occasional details brought
directly in from some pre-existing source. Yet I also know that this new model of post-typographic
literacy does not suggest that we will al write more profound analyses in the mode I attempted in
my book and am attempting again here (what we might at one time have been tempted to call
"better, more original" writing) but that instead aU of us (students and teachers alike) will all
become increasingly concerned with creating a different kind of text entirely -- one that we write,
not as traditional writers, but as electronic readers, threading our own course through a unique
series of screens.
For anyone trained in the close reading of literature and in the writing of detailed literary
analysis, this new notion of literacy may seem not just strange but threatening. What advantages,
skeptics wiU ask, might these new texts have to make up for their lack of gravity and insight To
use an analogy from music, what is to be gained by giving alJ of us the power to create a unique
musical text as listeners by linking pieces of one great composition to another, when what we want
most of alJ is the power to respond to the unified experience of a Beethoven symphony As
classicist J. David Bolter notes in Turing's Man: Western Culture ill the Computer Age, those who
read and write computer texts will seem, at least initially, less "natural," that is, less concerned with
those peculiarly Romantic notions of sensibility, spontaneity, intimacy, and creativity that we have
come to accept as the "natural" human condition. New literates wiU not be searching for what
Bolter called "something remote, hidden, deep" (223), nor even for "self-knowledge." Instead their
efforts will have more of the game-like nature of programming -- ingeniously reworking the limited
possibilities defined by the very rules or, in the case of programmers, conditions, of their game.
Ultimately then the new literacy offers at the micro-level an alternative to a macro-problem
-- what Bolter caUs the "mechanical-dynamic technology [that] led mankind to pursue the politics
and economics of infinity: (227). The Struggle is no longer with intractable nature, hence no longer
a struggle that requires the ability to generate immense physical power as was the case during the
steam age and is still too often the case the nuclear age; instead it is with the time, space, and
memory limits of electronic computation and storage. The new literacy is based on the careful,
ingenuous manipulation of finite resources; not the constant, wholesale generation and finally
exploitation of what until recently seemed like infinite material resources. It is, in a phrase, a newage,
post-capitalist alternative to the world of Adam Smith.
95

Wayman, Wendy;
Hull, Glynda;
and
Greenleaf, Cyndy -- University of California, Berkeley
STUDENT-CENTERED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
For a long time, people have talked about the potential of information technologies as aids
to the process of writing and the teaching of writing. The most common expectation has been that
tools like word processors would transform students; writing processes, making the production of
texts easier in a mechanical sense, and facilitating the thinking that accompanies composing by
freeing up energy normally siphoned away by low level concerns like recopying. We too have great
expectations for the potential of information technologies in education and writing instruction, but
we also have concerns about how such technologies are being deployed in educational settings. We
are troubled, for example, that tools are developed with too little attention to the users of the tools.
In this proposal, we describe a research and development project that is "student-centered."
With support form Apple Computer, Inc., we are building two levels of writing tools for atrisk
students in high school and college. The first tool will allow students to access a data base of
images, film, animation, and sound in order to create multi-media documents. The second tool, also
a multi-media data base, will model the process of creating such documents. Thus, we hope not
only to make it possible for students to access rich data sources in order to create non-linear
writing, we want also to provide the scaffolding that will show them how by modelling expert
processes. But most importantly, our development effort is informed by classroom research in
which we attempt to identify particularly thorny aspects of learning to write.
We have spent a semester in two UC Berkeley "remedial" writing classes to collect baseline
data. Relying on naturalistic observation techniques, we recorded teacher instruction about writing
as well as student response to it: questions, comments, classroom discussion. Relying on cognitive
process-tracing techniques, we also monitored the way that writing instruction was represented as
students composed and the way it interacted with the knowledge that students brought with them
from their previous education and literacy experience. In addition to weekly classroom
observations, we carried out detailed case studies with ten students as they completed writing and
reading assignment for the course.
For example, one unit on persuasion in both courses focussed on the writing of Martin
Luther King, Jr., particularly "'l1le Letter from Birmingham Jail". By conducting reading and writing
protocols with students completing assignments in this unit, we discovered the degree and nature
of the background knowledge necessary for basic comprehension. It was not surprising that students
born in 1970, were sometimes lacking in detailed hisrorical knowledge of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
the Civil Rights Movement, or passive resistance, knowledge necessary to understand King's
references. Nor was it surprising to find students, such as one young Vietnamese refugee with a
Buddhist background. unable to understand King's many Biblical allusions. But what was surprising
were the ways a student's knowledge or preconceptions can contribute to her confusion.
One devout Catholic for example, was considerably frustrated by King's comparison of
himself to Socrates, who, the student believed, had committed the mortal sin of suicide. Another
student, a Christian with an image of Christ as a complacent and compliant leader, objected to King
96

likening his protest to that of a revolutionary Christ. Both students were frustrated because they
judged these comparisons as rhetorical mistakes, and they were learning to read with the eyes of
an author. It is precisely at these points of frustration, that more information, both fact and
controversy, will help them understand the text as weU as deepen and articulate their own positions.
Providing access to linguistic knowledge is also necessary of course. Those of us beyond
puberty in the sixties take for granted words such as "moratorium", "power structure", and "outside
agitator", the fuU understanding of which go beyond reading their entries in the standard dictionary.
One student who in class was learning to read closely and with sensitivity to connotation, was
bothered by King's use of the pejorative "negroes" instead of "blacks" to refer to his own race. Once
she understood the historical evolution of the terms, however, she forgave King, and felt much
better to know her growing sensitivity to word choice did not have to result in frustration but could
instead foster curiosity that would lead to answers.
Idioms and metaphors that have long since died to us, losing their original imagery, can be
rehabilitated by the student who is confused by an apparent conflict between authorial intention and
literal denotation. Two students were confused by King's referral to Birmingham's "city father" as
his opponents, as the word "father" connoted warm and loving feelings. "Doesn't King's use of
'father' undercut his intentions" they asked. Such confusion can have its source in a lack of
linguistic knowledge, a propensity for literalness, or perhaps simply overly zealous close reading.
Only the classroom researcher can learn the source of the confusion, knowledge necessary for its
resolution. The software developer sitting at her workstation does not have his privilege, and
therefore cannot predict where students will become confused nor know how best to help them.
Additionally, in many cases students have the background that would greatly help many of
the others. For example, some of the minority students were quick to relate their own experiences
with discrimination to their reading of King's "Letter," and were empathetic readers. On the other
hand, one white student, whose family Oed the inner city for the suburbs, felt King's passion
inappropriate in 1963 and irrelevant in 1989. Another student, unfamiliar with the oral tradition
of Southern preachers, found King's repetitive style strange and artificial. To others it was long a
familiar style. Here students are the best teachers and have knowledge and experience to share
with each other in the form of exposition, narrative, dialogue, sound, and imagery.
Writing about literature is the mainstay of the composition class. These examples illustrate
that students face a variety of problems when they sit down to read and then to write about what
they read. In some cases they need more background information, in others, guidance for applying
rules and techniques they are learning, and in still others, a chance to learn from their feUow
classmates. What we hope to do is create some multimedia computer tools that will provide this
help, helping students to understand what they read while at the same time showing students how
best to read for understanding.
Our plans are to build a rich, multi-media data base of the speaking and wring of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., and enrich this data base with media news-clippings, photographs, film
documentaries, and sound recordings capturing the flavor of the Civil Rights Movement. We plan
to build in the facility to add to this data base, encouraging students to use their knowledge and
experience and to share them with others. Finally, we plan to base our process-modeUer on the
struggles we have watched these students engage in as they undertook their writing assignments.
97

By more fully contextualizing what students read, and by providing on-line help to them as they
compose, we hope to help student over the thorny aspects of learning to write about what they read.
Werier, Clifford -- Mount Royal Col/ege, Calgary, Canada
COMPUTER LAB AS CLASSROOM
The paper will be based on discussions with instructors in the Department of English at
Mount Royal College (MRC), where we have been using computers in some of our composition
classes for the past three semesters. It will examine issues relating to the use of the computer lab
as a classroom space.
Institutions allocate their computer facilities differently: for example, some English
Departments use computer-assisted programs to drill the student in the "surface~ features of
punctuation and grammar. Others set up writing labs where students can work on their current
projects independently, with the assistance of word processors and spelling checkers. In some
cases, students may be required to hand in their documents in a particular format which proves that
they have utilized the lab, such as a style-checking report. Or the lab may be a supervised space
where instructors work with students on an individual basis during formal class time.
The composition courses at MRC are offered in two, two-hour classes per week. The
instructor has the choice of offering all or part of the class in the computer lab. There are twentyfive
IBM XT compatible machines in the lab, with approximately five computers to each dot-matrix
printer. We have a site license for WordPerfect, although instructors are free to choose other
programs (such as Norton Textra) if they are available as individuaUy purchased units from the
bookstore.
We are presently experimenting with our balance of computer-lab time and classroom time.
Some instructors spend two hours per week in the lab and two hours per week in the classroom,
while others prefer to use the lab exclusively for all of their instruction. In a busy college, computer
lab time becomes a sought after and expensive commodity. Tnstructors have to justify their use of
the lab to accomplish tasks that may be better performed in the classroom. These may include the
more traditional elements of composition instruction: the examination of assigned readings,
students reading their work out loud, grammar lessons, and small group peer editing. The
instructor must determine whether any of these processes can be assisted by computers or whether
the most effective pedagogical strategy consists of a mixture of "old" and "new" styles.
Much has been written about the quality of student writing that comes out of their
interaction with computers, but less has been said about the way teachers make use of their time
in the computer lab when the lab time is part of the formal classroom experience. Tt is obvious that
the most effective teaching occurs when the instructor is able to work with students one on one in
the lab. The computers provide us with the opportunity to demonstrate revision by showing our
students directly how their writing can be made more effective. This is done through a collaborative
process in which the instructor and student edit the work together and watch the changes appear
on the screen. But how many students can an instructor see individuaUy in the course of a one- or
two-hour lab session per week
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One way of making good use of lab time is to encourage group work during the writing
process. Students are encouraged to consult with each other at every stage. Early in the semester,
most instructors form small groups of three or five students to encourage a sense of audience. If
the instructor is unavailable to work with a student at their computer, then the student may work
with their neighbor or someone in their small group. At the end of every session, students print
up work in progress. In the next class, the hard copy can be taken up formally in the small group
for peer-editing. This way, students consult with each other in the drafting and revision of writing.
both on the computer screen and on the printed page. later, the student will go back to the
computer and revise accordingly.
The most revolutionary change that occurs in this kind of classroom is the disappearance
of traditional instruction. Once the computers are switched on, the classroom becomes a workshop
-- a place where the students interact with text on the screen. If the instructor goes over the
readings, examines rhetorical techniques, reviews grammar and other elements of style, then this
kind of teaching might as well take place in the classroom, where the students are less distracted
by the hardware on their desks. It is certainly possible to use the computers to teach these other
elements by making use of grammar programs and style checkers to demonstrate rules and flag
errors. The instructor could even place the readings on disk and produce tutorials which point out
various stylistic elements. But are these functions always enhanced by the computer Is there a
point where the computer becomes an end in itself, instead of a tool to enhance a complex creative
process Thus instructors must resist the impulse to worship the technology for its own sake, and
honestly ask whether the computer lab is always the optimum environment for every task associated
with the teaching of writing.
Wresch, William -- University of WISconsin
COMPUTER ANALYSIS OF WRITING; HOW DID WE GET HERE OF ALL PLACES
You wouldn't think computer use in writing would be very newsworthy any more, yet articles
regularly appear on at least one aspect of the computer-assisted writing -- computer analysis of
text. From the Atlantic Monthly to Sunday supplements, everyone has something to say about
analysis. This is apparently a subject that starts adrenaline pumping. or at least sells newspapers.
The problem for us who actually do analysis, is that this is a subject vaguely defmed. People
tend to lump diverse programs together. Available analysis programs may indeed have some
similarities or even some overlap, but each came at analysis from a very different direction and with
a very different purpose. Jf you look closely enough, and know some of the history, you will see
that there are essentially three different groups at work here.
Computational Lineuists:
This group has a history going back to automatic language translation. Much of their early
efforts were in the area of syntax, and a primary effort involved the automatic parsing of sentences.
Computer parsing floundered for several reasons, but a major one was "ill-formed" sentences.
People use bad grammar. For programs that had a real struggle with correct text, incorrect text was
impossible.
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While three decades of effort have been unable to produce a program that can "understand"
text in even the most limited ways, there has been some progress. For instance, IBM's Critique is
supposedly able to parse sentences correctly 95% of the time. Programs like Grammatik, and
RightWriter are much less accurate, but are still able to process text with some facility.
What to do with such programs Back to "ill-formed" sentences. Rather than try to work
around them, the program now makes finding errors its primary objective. It finds errors, marks
them, and suggests corrections.
As teachers of writing we should be aware that as these programs become more accurate,
they may in fact be able to identify much surface error and help students correct it. As teachers
of writing we should also be aware that these programs are only looking at surface error. A paper
can be "correct" and still silly, boring, or even incoherent. We should also be aware that current
programs are still inaccurate. Even if 95% correct, they are 5% wrong. The problem isn't that
students won't be told about 5% of their problems, the problem is that 5% of the time students
will be told what is right, is wrong. For students still struggling to learn the conventions of grammar
and usage, 5% bad advice is a lot of bad advice.
Style MeaSurers:
What accounts for the style of writers We fmd some people bombastic, others lyrical.
Efforts to identify specific tricks of language have been made by everyone from literary historians
to apprentice novelists. And tricks have been found. Edward Corbett, Richard Lanham, and
Walker Gibson are some of the better known researchers who have found particular phrases, high
or low instances of certain verb forms, or clause lengths to account for much of the effect we
experience when reading famous passages.
Since these measures often are fairly simple and amount to counting the instances of words
or phrases, they can and have been computerized. Richard Hanham's Homer program is the first
example of such a program. Writer's Helper Stage II incorporates many of the measures of Walker
Gibson and others. In each case the program tells the writer about particular traits, leaving it to
the writer to decide if the text needs to be changed or is achieving the desired effect with a given
audience.
The intention of such programs is less to demand an "approved" style than to remind student
writers that there is such a thing as style, which is to say, an effect of words on readers. As such
these programs add to the curriculum, allowing teachers to introduce concepts that are not easily
grasped by undergraduates. With them we can teach voice, diction, phrasing -- style -- welcome
additions to a curriculum that is too often focused on error and ignores the needs of readers.
Visual Revisers:
I apologize for making up a name for a group of people who probably don't think of
themselves as sharing an identity, but there are a group of people who do in fact have some very
interesting strategies for revising. In brief, they advocate repositioning text during revision so that
writers can more easily identify needed changes. A typical task such people might recommend is
cutting a text into separate sentences, spreading them out on a desktop, and reordering or
recombining them.
The computer of course does a much neater job of cutting and pasting, and it wasn't long
before some of this strategy was reflected in writing programs. Quill, for example, takes text and
presents one sentence at a time on the screen so writers can focus on each sentence when revising.
JOO

Writer's workbench presents the first and last sentence of each paragraph so that writers can
quickly see if paragraphs end with any relation to the way they begin. Writer's Helper Stage II uses
both strategies and also creates an outline of a text, highlights transitional phrases, underscores
passive verbs, and reformats the text in other ways.
The advantages of such programs for student writing are clear. Students are not directed
to look at particular errant words or phrases, but to examine larger units of text for coherence and
cohesion. In short, the programs support revising as opposed to editing.
Clearly, these three approaches to computer analysis of text come from very different
backgrounds and have very different purposes. Distinguishing between them will be useful as we
evaluate the role of the computer in revising.
Zarabozo, Gloria
and
Coddington, Lynn -- University of Califomia at Berkeley
ExpLORING THE CREATION OF HYPERTEXTS; THREE CASE STUDIES OF COLLEGE
WRITERS
In recent years word-processing has become a common and accepted technology in writing
classrooms. Most recently, however, we hear promises of newer technologies that may affect writing
and writing instruction -- hypertext and hypermedia systems and video-disc technologies. The
promises surrounding these technologies are great. For example, they are expected to give more
students access to more information, and different kinds of information than ever before, as well
as open up new modes of learning through multi-media. We, too, are intrigued by such visions, but
we are also concerned that the development of this technology and its introduction to students be
accompanied by research that is sensitive to the social/academic context in which it will be
potentially embedded. In our paper, we wiU present the results of a study in which we introduced
a hypertext system to students in a college freshman writing course. Our results suggest that the
successful and equitable implementation of hypertext in educational settings requires a critical
examination of the underlying assumptions and structures of traditional classrooms.
Notions of hypertext are rapidly evolving with many people offering different views of its
functions and features. Two main features of hypertext. however, that are generally emphasized,
however, are its non-linear representation of text and the relative ease with which one can create
a hypertext. For the purpose of our study we chose to introduce the students to XREFfEXT, a
system that works in Hypercard and offers two features of its own for creating cross-references
between cards. These work very simply: to make a cross-reference between a word in the main
text and a new card, the cursor is placed on the desired word in the main text, then while pressing
the option key, the user clicks the mouse. The application places an asterisk at the end of the word
selected and a new card appears on the screen with the chosen word in the key word box at the
upper left of the new card. (EDITORS' NOTE: The figure is not given here.)
We conducted case studies of three incoming freshmen at the University of California at
Berkeley. They included two black females and one male of hispanic background; aU three were
101

monolingual English speakers. Their computer experience ranged from one student who owned a
Macintosh Plus to the other female student who expressed anxiety concerning computer use. The
male fell in between the two since he had done some word processing with WordStar on mM
clones. None had any experience with hypertext prior to this study.
We met with the students on four separate occasions, each session lasting approximately two
hours. During the first session the students were introduced to the Macintosh and shown basic
word processing skills, which they practiced during the last hour of the session; all subsequent
sessions began with a review of the previous sessions's content. Session two included an
introduction to a nonsense text in XREFTEXT. The students were shown how to create crossreferences
through XREFTEXT and Hypercard buttons, they then practiced these procedures
together on the nonsense text, after which they created their own minitext. For the third session
the students were presented with a segment taken from their class text, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
on XREFfEXT. The students cross-referenced this passage as a group using both the XREFfEXT
method and Hypercard buttons. For the final session the students cross-referenced a passage that
they selected from their own class assignment based on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Afterwards
we interviewed the students as a group to discover how they viewed the idea of incorporating
hypertext into existing classrooms.
The data consist of the hypertexts produced by the students and transcriptions of audiotape
recordings for sessions two through four including the final interview. When analyzing the texts we
focused on the type of information the students chose to cross-reference given the different
contexts, i.e .• group work, their own texts, etc. From the transcriptions of the students' interaction
while they worked we inferred the students' authorial preferences and strategies and their influence
on the hypertexts created as a group. During the interview the students discussed their feelings
about hypertext in general and how they believed they had made decisions to cross-reference certain
information. They also shared with us their concerns regarding its implementation into existing
classroom environments.
Our study suggests that the information students chose to highlight in a hypertext differs
depending on the following factors: the individual student's goal in manipulating information;
personal approaches to academic writing; the context in which the text was created; and the affect
of modelling. FinaUy. the astute concerns expressed by the students regarding the implementation
of hypertext within existing classrooms revealed the underlying structure and goals of traditional
academic settings. We conclude that these settings must be fully and clearly understood before
deciding whether hypertext systems should be implemented within them and that, without such
understanding, the students may be at risk academically and hypertext may fail to reach its full
potential.
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Department of Education.