Computers and Composition最新文献

Inspired by lessons hard won during a pandemic year spent simultaneously teaching university students online and parenting reluctant online learners at home, this article argues for a radical rethinking of course policies and practices that use normative interpretations and applications of time. Online composition pedagogy is built on paradoxical temporal models: the field's longstanding belief in process-oriented theories of writing demands a flexible, recursive understanding of time while the demonstrated benefits of online student engagement seem to require more rigidly temporal policies and methods, like regular, graded discussion boards. This article draws from Alison Kafer's concept of “crip time” and a year's worth of observation and practice to recommend that online teachers prioritize the narrative shape of their online classes. Such a reframing, I argue, may create not only more successful classes but more just and accessible ones.

At a time when many writing studies faculty are both rising to and collapsing under the challenges of teaching during a pandemic, this article argues that our field is at a decisive moment concerning accessibility. Using mixed-methods data from eight first-year composition courses, this research analyzes and articulates how some students discern the accessibility of instructional materials through the framework of Universal Design (UD). The visibility of such student perceptions must be increased and shared widely, as we seek to be more inclusive and reflective professionals. As we look to a future of post-pandemic tech-mediated teaching and learning, this article also demonstrates how one might replicate, refine, and apply similar study designs which can ultimately help us to be more attentive to inclusivity in the initial stage of course development and research.

This article explores applying User-Experience (UX) research and a software development approach called Continuous Delivery (CD) to the process of designing, developing, and maintaining online courses. We will illustrate how readers can use our PARS (personal, accessible, responsive, strategic) framework, UX best practices, and CD to create more accessible content for the users of their online courses.

This article examines the construct of student success that is forwarded by readiness assessments designed to evaluate students’ preparation for online learning. These readiness assessments emphasize factors such as time management, motivation, and access to and fluency with technology, suggesting to students that if they possess strengths in these areas, they will likely do well in a course. For students who struggle in OWCs–often disproportionately representing minoritized and historically disenfranchised populations in higher education–these readiness assessments fall short of providing the resources that students need to understand the cognitive demands of OWCs. I propose recasting student performance through a trauma-informed lens to focus attention on what students can learn in order to be successful in their online courses.

We examine how rules and mechanics act as attractors, or stabilizing end points within the multitude of trajectories in a possibility space, within games that form dispositions through the habits of material gameplay, which players can either resist or accept through a process of phronesis and metis. We videotaped a playthrough of the card game Illuminati and interviewed four players before and after the game. We discovered that the rule of allowing cheating and a player role with an unbalanced mechanic acted as material attractors (DeLanda, 2013; 2016) for gameplay dispositions. However, through a process of metis and phronesis, players resisted the dispositions of cheat and spoilsport and materially played the game so that they embodied the Aristotelian virtue of friendliness instead.

For some time, rhetorical games studies have been interested in the potential for serious games to materially affect and embody change in users, in social systems, and in the gaming industry itself. In this study, we use the occasion of the first videogame cleared for marketing as a medical device by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—EndeavorRx—to examine material-discursive processes that transform a game into medicine, and that produce our ideas of “medicine,” “gaming,” and “seriousness.” Allowing scholarship from rhetorical games studies and from the rhetoric of health and medicine to inform one another, and analyzing textual evidence from materials that produced EndeavorRx’s identity as “medicine,” we argue this more-than-serious transformation habituates the public to a new market, affecting patients, institutions, and disciplinary boundaries.