Computers and Composition最新文献

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.

In the fall of 2020, the nation was grappling with a global pandemic, a racial reckoning, and historic levels of political divide and uncertainty, leading up to a national election in November. During a time when it seemed nothing could manifest itself without being constituted in opposition to a political “other,” memes responding to the counting of ballots in swing states, particularly Nevada, flooded social media. In this article, I use a collection of Nevada election memes to show the power of harnessing humor and community values across national and local audiences. Because memes rely on community norms, their ability to build rhetorical bridges lies in fostering shared commitment and redistributing power dynamics away from institutions and towards the public. Using visual typology and rhetorical topological coding, I will discuss how Nevada election memes showcase strategies of solidarity (linked to common topoi and endoxa), helping audiences cope through a difficult time in our national history and offering an example of how political discourse can be configured around and above political binaries. In our communities, classrooms, and digital spaces, applying this technique reframes political discourse that traditionally capitalizes on division by instead focusing on building discourse grounded in commonality and community.

This quantitative study investigates the capacity of a girls’ summer technology camp, Girls Go Digital, to foster girls’ confidence with and interest in STEM subjects. Following in the lineage of compositionists’ local technofeminist camps to promote girls’ digital literacies (Haas, Tulley, & Blair, 2002; Blair et al., 2011; Almjeld & England, 2015; Macdowell, 2015; Mathis et al., 2016; England & Canella, 2018; Almjeld, 2019), Girls Go Digital is designed to reach girls who may feel discouraged by the environment of the company's mixed gender tech camps. Girls’ confidence is an important target for technofeminist outreach, as it's confidence more than skill that predicts girls’ and women's persistence in STEM. The study's results find that a week of camp at Girls Go Digital led to statistically significant positive impacts on girls’ confidence in their technology skills, as well as their attitudes relating to technology. Camp staff's intentional building of girls’ confidence and interests suggest promising tactics for future technofeminist interventions.

Even though Wikipedia is the 5th largest site on the internet and largely the number one source of information for internet searches, it is often ignored or dismissed by academics who teach writing, research, and information literacy. This article explores the potential value of including instruction in Wikipedia writing in the first-year composition (FYC) classroom. This kind of writing project aligns with existing learning goals for FYC and facilitates instruction in digital literacy, multimodal, and public writing skills. This article provides a case study of teaching Wikipedia writing to FYC students with the support of the Wiki Education program. Through writing for Wikipedia, my students practiced advanced research and writing skills as well as process steps such as drafting and soliciting feedback from external readers. Through working with the Wiki Education program, students learn digital literacy skills such as markdown and working in sandboxes. I also discuss the challenges of teaching Wikipedia writing to first-year students, especially in larger classes or when teaching more than 1–2 sections at a time. I conclude with advice for implementing a Wikipedia writing project in the first-year composition classroom.