Computers and Composition最新文献

Writing researchers, teachers, and writing program administrators face significant challenges in promoting inclusive collaboration that brings together diverse perspectives without overburdening vulnerable stakeholders. This article reports on a case study in which a virtual design sprint was used to facilitate inclusive collaboration for a human-centered design project focused on redesigning a graduate teaching assistant mentoring program. The virtual design sprint was conducted over one week by a transdisciplinary team, including writing program administrators and graduate teaching assistant mentors and mentees. By providing a highly structured approach to intensive collaboration, the virtual design sprint enabled efficient integration of diverse perspectives while minimizing demands on participants. Furthermore, it helped the design team produce promising solutions aligned with their experiences and needs. Findings suggest virtual design sprints offer an effective method for inclusive collaboration that can be adapted to promote inclusivity through a wide range of writing program, writing instruction, and writing research activities. The structured collaborative process allows teams to rapidly develop empathy, ideate, prototype, and test solutions using human-centered design methods and develop solutions that are beneficial for diverse program stakeholders.

This study provides an account of the development of computers and writing via the history of a regional conference, fondly known as the Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing (GPACW). We employ oral history and archival study methods to uncover the influence of grassroot organizing efforts in the greater scheme of computers and writing's maturity as a field. We then discuss the reasons rhetoric and writing scholars need to pay attention to local networks that could shape the trajectories of sub-fields in the discipline. This project offers a timeline about the field of computers and writing and documents important narratives regarding the growing field.

Despite a surge of interest in teachers’ purposeful integration of technology into classrooms, research on L2 writing teachers’ digitallymediated writing instruction through lesson study (LS) is essentially lacking. To address this void, we investigated how L2 writing teachers perceived and practices professional development (PD) through technology-assisted writing pedagogy within the three LS phases, i.e., collaborative LS design and implementation, peer observation and feedback, and peer revision. The data sources included the participant teachers’ screencasts, peer reflective comments/responses, and semi-structured interviews. The findings demonstrated that the experience of LS-oriented, digitallymediated writing instruction facilitated the writing teachers’ firsthand exploration of digital spaces and promoted their digitallymediated teaching competence through peer reflection, team coaching, and project-based practices. Additionally, the experience enhanced their pedagogical flexibility, confidence, and autonomy for adapting writing instruction to virtual platforms, assisted them in developing technology-mediated writing lesson plan, task design, and assessment rubric, engaged them in a small community of L2 writing teachers as digital materials co-producers, and helped them use digital tools to meet learners’ context-specific writing needs. The study promises implications for CALL teachers and CALL teacher education programs.

Traditional students spend about four years residing at their undergraduate institutions. During those years, commuter students visit campus mostly on an as-needed basis, limiting their opportunities to establish a sense of belonging. Exacerbating the physical separation between students and their schools, covid-19-related lockdowns and closures challenged traditional means of community-building for institutions of higher education. A year without in-person classes in 2020–21 meant that in Fall 2021, both first- and second-year students, plus two cohorts of new employees, were new to campus facilities. Disbursing work and classes away from a centralized physical campus created a gap in experiential institutional memory. This article considers the problem of belonging within an urban-grant university community; shows how sound- and location-based digital composition projects preserve collective memory, provide forensic documentation of institutional legacies, and strengthen students’ awareness of temporal context; and theorizes the role of soundwriting projects in creating a sense of belonging for college students.

This article provides an inquiry-based, participatory framework for incorporating digital storytelling into first-year composition for the purpose of cultivating a participatory culture and empowering students to compose for rhetorical and digital delivery. The framework aims at reifying Henry Jenkins (2009) notion of participatory culture and engaging students with the core media literacies that are central to active participation in the digital age. To gauge the effectiveness of the framework, this study utilizes NVivo to code and thematically analyze 19 students’ reflections based on James E. Porter (2009) theoretical framework for digital delivery: body/identity, access/accessibility, distribution, interaction, and economics. This article also presents three case studies of student-created videos to further demonstrate the robust potential of the framework to foster social activism in the classroom and to spur students to cultivate rhetorical agency and awareness.

This article examines the potential uses—and limits—of so-called “distraction-free” writing software, especially in academic writing contexts. It does so by presenting findings from two different qualitative studies, one in which graduate students experimented with such tools and reflected on their experiences, and another study in which undergraduate students composed reflective essays about their writing processes. Taken together, these findings indicate that distraction-free writing may only prove useful within a relatively narrow band of composing activity. Moreover, they suggest that participants’ beliefs and understandings of what constitutes writing activity—and distraction from it—are both broader and more fluid than tacit assumptions embedded in distraction-free writing software. Ultimately, the point is not necessarily to critique this class of software, but instead to use it as an occasion to better understand phenomena related to composing processes, such as attention, distraction, and motivation.