Computers and Composition最新文献

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.

This article analyzes the Twitter account @SheRatesDogs to determine if and how it rhetorically constitutes a technofeminist counterpublic. Ultimately, this essay argues that SheRatesDogs is a technofeminist counterpublic because it brings together Twitter users who want to end harmful, volatile, and sexist online discourse. The counterpublic uses common themes—humor, anger, and calls to action—to promote the public's awareness of these harmful discourse norms and to demand policy changes from various institutions.

The literacy-as-success myth is prevalent in print-based literacy narratives but how students relate to this dominant myth in modes beyond print is still unknown. To learn more about how students characterize literacy in a non-print-based mode, I analyzed 170 audio literacy narratives (ALNs) from students who uploaded their essay to the Digital Archives of Literacy. Findings show that students ignore the literacy-as-success myth and instead offer a capacious view of literacy as an ongoing, fluid process of experimentation, communal connection, and play. Students promote literacy not as an end point but rather as a place to invent and reinvent oneself and to rethink previously held definitions of literacy. They also utilize creative and innovative composing approaches that not only expand the literacy narrative genre but also facilitate reimagination of their literate lives. Ultimately, audio literacy narratives provide a valuable means to disrupting the literacy myth and promoting a more expansive understanding of literacy development that breeds curiosity, creativity, and invention. As a result, it is an important assignment in writing classrooms.

Ours is a time of epistemological break that requires a dramatic shift in our theorizing of the socioeconomic relationship of internet-articulated writers to data-mining corporations before we may formulate liberatory pedagogies and practices of internet writing. In the past, Computers and Writing (C&W) theorists joined others in describing a relationship that takes various names: surveillance capitalism, algorithmic capitalism, platform capitalism. Yet, to advance beyond the break, we posit that C&W theorists must recognize data mining as an exploitation belonging instead to a feudal mode of production. Unable to exploit the labors of proletarianized producers, capitalists on the internet transitioned to feudalism by enclosing the digital commons; distributing the commons as universal private property; using the rent form to alienate digicultural producers; subsuming producers’ sociolinguistic behaviors under the feudal mode; appropriating surplus labors of the class of unwaged labor; and placing heterogeneous, differentiated agents on the internet into two economic classes: peasants and lords. In this condition, the peasant class of digicultural producers cannot distance themselves through regulation, volunteerism, cloaking, and shielding. Their subsumed sociolinguistic activities cannot relieve exploitation because the two-sided act of languaging becomes three-sided with the addition of computer programs and AI acting as agents of digital lords.

As a prerequisite for the use of ChatGPT in writing classes, instructors should scaffold students’ (critical) digital literacy of the technology. Part of such scaffolding should include the exploration of relevant frameworks for conceptualizing ChatGPT, including the use of multiple metaphors, like tool and collaborator. By analyzing recent scholarly and news discourse regarding ChatGPT, prompts and outputs from ChatGPT, and the author's own writing process, the essay illustrates the limitations of the tool and collaborator metaphors, while emphasizing the value of multiple metaphors. In particular, the tool metaphor fails to account for ChatGPT's human components – namely its repurposing of thousands of authors’ writing and ideas, from which it draws with no transparency on sources. While the collaborator metaphor appears to address the need to cite ideas that are not one's own, ChatGPT fails to provide the accountability of a human author, even as it includes biased output derived from its training corpus, and while again failing to identify original sources. Medical and surgical metaphors highlight the ways that ChatGPT acts upon both the enormous corpus, or body of human writing, on which it was trained and our social body in our academic communities and beyond.

There have been few studies examining the variation that exists within modes of feedback: for example, comparing how electronic text feedback created using Google Docs differs from electronic text feedback created using Microsoft Word or how audiovisual feedback created using TechSmith Capture differs from audiovisual feedback created using Screencast-O-Matic. However, the programs that instructors use to create feedback have different affordances, meaning that even within a single mode, the feedback students receive on their writing can vary significantly. To better understand the variation that exists within a single mode, this study investigates how affordances of Canvas Speedgrader, Google Docs, and Turnitin GradeMark impacted electronic text feedback.Based on analysis of 131 feedback files created using the 3 programs, in conjunction with 5 student surveys, and 2 instructor interviews, the study provides insights into how instructor written commentary (location, form, type, focus, and mitigation) varied by program and how participants perceived of feedback provided through the 3 programs. The study...s primary finding is that the affordances of the programs used to create electronic text feedbackresulted in significant differences ininstructorcommentary and instructor and student perceptions of feedback.