Computers and Composition最新文献

Despite being subtitled “the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” Wikipedia's editors are not nearly as diverse as Wikimedia, its nonprofit parent organization, would hope. In fact, the English version's encyclopedic community has long suffered from gender inequality in both its editorial demographic and its coverage of content representing and of interest to women and non-binary audiences; this despite boasting nearly 7 million articles as of 2024. Educational initiatives have so far proven to be one of the most effective strategies for mitigating Wikipedia's gender gap, the common term for what has become the encyclopedia's most pervasive systemic bias. However, even within educational projects, engaging and onboarding minority editors is challenging. Working from a feminist affective framework, this article reports on a study of student-editors' experience with Wikipedia-based writing, using their reactions to a key editing guideline, “Be bold,” as an entry-point for examining their affective experience. The “Be bold” guideline, which encourages would-be editors to “just go for it,” is nearly as old as the English language version of Wikipedia itself yet has received little critical attention. Drawing on survey and focus group interviews from participants at the undergraduate and graduate level, this study's findings provide new understandings of novice editors’ affective experiences in Wikipedia while offering a critical analysis of the “Be bold” guideline.

While “big data” approaches to writing center research represent promising angles from which to understand the intellectual labor happening during tutorials, aggregation strips away the context in which writing center texts and data are originally constructed. In fact, new methods such as the large-scale corpus analysis of writing center session notes highlight the need for more critical analyses of the administrative software used to generate, archive, and distribute these texts. Drawing on Bogost's (2007) conception of procedural rhetoric and Manovich's (2013) understanding of softwarization, this article seeks to address this gap by recontextualizing writing center session notes within the layered arguments constructed by TutorTrac, a scheduling platform used by many centers. I argue this software advances a rhetoric of recordkeeping that, left unrecognized, risks shifting center practices away from stated commitments and values. In demonstrating how writing center practitioners can employ an understanding of procedural rhetoric to interrogate such applications, this study suggests more attention be dedicated to critical readings of software in writing centers.

The predictive relationship between handwriting automaticity and children's writing performance is well documented. However, less is known about the relationship between keyboarding automaticity and children's keyboard-based writing performance. In this exploratory study, we examined the unique contributions of automaticity in both writing modalities in predicting Grade 2 students (N = 49) paper-based and keyboard-based writing performance (i.e., compositional quality and fluency) after controlling for students’ literacy skills (i.e., spelling, word reading, and reading comprehension), attitudes toward writing, gender, and nesting due to classroom. Multilevel modelling results showed that automaticity predicted students’ paper-based compositional quality and keyboard-based compositional quality and fluency. Findings further suggested that the relationship between automaticity and writing performance was stronger in keyboard-based text composing than in paper-based text composing. These results reinforce the role of automaticity of transcription skills in predicating the writing performance of beginning writers across modalities and stress the significance of explicit pedagogy and frequent instances of practice to promote the mastery of transcription skills across modalities in the early years of schooling.

The importance of peer review practice in writing courses has been strongly supported by pedagogical research. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, this study investigated three peer review modes in an undergraduate academic writing course through the lens of students’ writing performances and perceptions. The three modes are (i) face-to-face peer review (F2F), (ii) anonymous computer-mediated peer review (CMPR), and (iii) blended peer review (a blend of F2F and anonymous CMPR). Three classes enrolled in an academic writing course participated in this study. Students’ assignments were collected to analyze their writing performances. Focus group discussions (FGDs) were administered to investigate students’ perceptions of the peer review modes, including their perceived usefulness of the feedback and the review processes. The findings show that the students’ writing performances significantly improved after the peer review session in all three peer review modes, with the anonymous CMPR and the blended mode showing stronger effectiveness as compared to the F2F mode. The participants generally preferred the blended mode, which addresses the limitations of both F2F and anonymous CMPR by leveraging the merits of both. We propose the use of the blended peer review mode to accommodate different learning needs and maximize the effectiveness of peer review practice.

Addressing potential research paucity on L2 international graduate students’ academic discourse socialization in online contexts, this study investigated students in graduate programs in the United States. The study focused on how graduate students perceive the impacts of online learning on their academic discourse socialization experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adopting a qualitative approach, four participants’ perceptions were investigated through semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that while digital tools, including Zoom, created some spaces for academic discourse socialization for L2 international graduate students during the pandemic, the tools also disrupted their learning in some areas. Importantly, the lack of informal social interactions in online contexts affected graduate students’ learning and participation in their communities of practice. This study suggests that in addition to in-class Zoom interactions, informal interactions are important for L2 international graduate students’ academic discourse socialization in online contexts. Pedagogical implications on incorporating Zoom and other digital tools to facilitate academic discourse socialization in online contexts are provided.

Virtual reality (VR) presents a significant opportunity to expand remote access to educational materials and writing skills development for students not able or unwilling to participate in person. However, to ensure that VR-based learning is inclusive, research designs must incorporate user experience feedback. This study examines community college students’ feedback on a virtual library tour (VRT) for an Introduction to Writing course. Because building library skills is a key objective of this course, decreasing barriers to student library access is critical. Findings from the study indicate (1) most participants had a positive response and experienced a heightened sense of control (over 70%), though nearly half (48.1%) felt that the virtual experience did not fully replicate the real-life experience, (2) participants valued the structured guidance of the tour but recommended more flexibility and user agency within the VR environment, and (3) noted technical problems related to motion sickness, sound levels, and visual clarity. The study presents specific suggestions for enhancements and underscores the importance of utilizing design research to improve user experiences with VR. Directions for future research are also discussed.

Within the growing use of peer-to-peer mobile payment apps, Venmo has proven most popular among the college-aged population in the United States. “Venmo me” is a common phrase overheard among students on college campuses. Spurred by an exchange in a course focused on social media, we investigate the uses of Venmo among students on our campus. Through interviews, we examine students’ relationships to not only the transactional but also the rhetorical aspects of Venmo, especially the social feed (unique among peer-to-peer mobile payment apps). We reflect on three recurring themes in these interviews using the concept of public displays of belongingness: insider versus outsider, requesting payment, and digital intimacy.

We share our experiences working with large-language model generative AI for a full semester in a professional writing course, integrating it into all projects. We discuss how we adapted our teaching, learning, and writing to using (or purposefully not using) AI. Issues we discuss include balancing integration of AI to avoid potential overreliance, the importance of centering authorial agency and decision-making, negotiating grading and evaluation, the benefits and drawbacks of AI throughout the writing process, and the relationships we build or could build with AI. We close with recommendations for faculty and students.

Our First-year Writing program began intentional student engagements with generative AI in the fall of 2022. We developed assignments for brainstorming research questions, writing counterarguments, and editing assistance using the AI tools Elicit, Fermat, and Wordtune. Students felt that the tools were helpful for finding ideas to get started with writing, to find sources once they had started writing, and to get help with counterarguments and alternate word choices. But when given the choice to use the assistants or not, most declined. Generative AI at this stage is unreliable, and many students found the tradeoff in reviewing AI suggestions to be too time consuming. And many students expressed a preference for continuing to develop their own voices through writing. Our experience in engaging AI led to the creation of the DEER praxis, which emphasizes defined engagements with AI tools for specific purposes, and generous use of reflection.