Computers and Composition最新文献

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.

Speech to text (STT) technology, also called voice recognition or speech recognition technology, automatically transcribes users’ speech to a computer screen. Research indicates that STT shows promise as an alternative mode of composition, supporting students in making fewer errors, writing more, and writing better. Much of this research takes place in elementary and middle schools, often focusing on students with identified learning disabilities. The current study extends STT research into general education high school classrooms, where students (N = 120) were invited to use it as much or as little as they wanted during one school year. We asked: Who used STT? Did subgroups, such as students labeled with learning disabilities, differ in their choices? When students chose to use STT, what kinds of writing did they do? Did STT compositions differ from non-STT compositions? Finally, what were students’ and teachers’ perceptions of STT? We analyzed field notes, interviews, surveys, and student writing with and without STT, and found mixed results: On average, students wrote more when they used STT than not. A little more than half of students found that STT eased the cognitive load of composition. A little less than half of students found that the tool constrained their composition. Some were put off by technical problems or embarrassment attendant with speaking out loud in class. Students’ choices to use STT correlated with special education designation, but not other designations. Despite students’ mixed reports, teachers were consistently positive about STT and planned to use it in future classes.

This article argues that rhetorical invention in social media environments includes key differences from invention in other spaces and thus demands its own specific consideration that foregrounds its contributing elements. When invention occurs on social media, a variety of forces come together to participate in that act of invention. These forces, which include a varied array of humans, hardware, interfaces, online communities, digital cultures, discourses, moderators, code, algorithms, and infrastructures, all contribute toward processes of rhetorical invention. This article offers a theory of network-emergent rhetorical invention that accounts for the array of actants that converge to make rhetorical invention in social media environments possible. Rather than considering humans as sole agents who autonomously act alone on other forces, network-emergent rhetorical invention considers how humans act with other actants to engage in rhetorical invention on social media.

Using a multiple-case study approach, this research study examined how the students (pre/in-service teachers) addressed the same linguistic topic but created three distinctive multimodal products across digital genres in a multimodal composing project. Drawing on New London Group's (2000) pedagogy of multiliteracies, we specifically examined how the students individualized choices and interpretations of a multimodal task, and how they orchestrated multimodal resources (e.g., linguistic, visual, and spatial) to represent their linguistic knowledge, construct meaning, and address potential audience in multimodal composing. The three illustrative cases show the students’ unique approaches to engaging in the digital multimodal task on "word formation" through digital storytelling, digital poster, and gamification-based presentation. This paper concludes with pedagogical implications on incorporating digital multimodal composing tasks in the teacher education curriculum.

The video-centered platform, TikTok, has gained popularity due to its position as an entertainment app, but it is still underexplored as a tool that generates awareness and discussions about mental health. This article explores TikTok's data-point ranking system to analyze how mental health rhetoric is shaped and how public health communities are formed around the term anxiety. Through a multimodal discourse analysis of the top 10 TikTok videos using the hashtag, #anxiety, this article seeks to establish how discussions of anxiety disorders are facilitated through the use of TikTok's socio-technical features and affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association in order to build digital communities of support. I identify recurring themes in users’ narrations of anxiety by studying in-frame content that creates meaning and contextual messages about mental health. Ultimately, these multimodal expressions of anxiety allow users to intervene and discuss often serious topics related to mental health through video, text, images, and sounds that other users can relate to and recognize. These features and affordances create networks of community and attract conversation where others can share their experiences and practices.

This article describes how eleven feminist activists enact digital tactics of feminist affective resistance, transformative rhetorics and literacy practices that challenge dominant pedagogies of emotion. These activists “make their feed work” for them through specific tactics: creating feminist affective counterpublics and sustaining these communities through affective dispositions, enacting community care, curating social media by seeking out content and users, embracing productive discomfort, and eliding content by blocking, muting, and stepping away. The article concludes with recommendations for future technofeminist research.