Chapter 2: Technology within and beyond the Writing Lab/Classroom

A Critical Stance

The centrality of the (sub)field's critical stance toward technologies is illustrated by the enduring relevance of Cynthia L. Selfe and Richard Selfe’s (1994) landmark essay “Politics of the Interface.” The ideological critique that this article offered still rings true at the time of this writing and continues to shape the discourse and analysis around technology as an object of study. As Selfe and Selfe reminded us, “[a]n overly optimistic vision of technology is not only reductive, and, thus, inaccurate, it is also dangerous in that it renders less visible the negative contributions of technology” (p. 482). The 2014 Computers and Writing Conference marked the twentieth anniversary of this essay. With a conference theme of “Evolutions, Revolutions, and Convolutions,” Selfe and Selfe’s ideas were revisited and celebrated at this conference in presentations that focused on topics ranging from digital activism (p. 34) and open access online education (p. 35) to online identity formation (p. 84) and art as “creative resistance” (p. 75) to interfaces as tools of mediation (p. 88). We discuss Selfe and Selfe’s article further in Chapters 3 and 4.

Cynthia L. Selfe (1999) returned to these cautionary ideas regarding ideology in Technology and Literacy in the 21st Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. In part two of the book, she laid out the narrative that naturalizes the connection between literacy and technology and described the “social investment in the new literacy agenda” (pp. 42–131)—effectively drawing the link between “our strong cultural belief in the natural connections among technology, science, democracy, education, and progress” and “decisions about [...] large-scale technology expenditures” (p. 126). Educators, Selfe warned us, need to pay attention so that they can help shape this agenda in ways that avoid inequities and encourage valuing many forms of literacy.

In their edited collection Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies, Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe (1999) assembled a group of teacher-scholars who collectively argued that new technologies were radically changing teacher-scholars' understanding of literacy, text, and the visual. In this critical moment at the turn of the century, the work of computers and writing teacher-scholars became more difficult as they struggled to articulate what they brought to the larger public. Contributors to the collection contended that members of the (sub)field must identify and confront the challenges ahead to articulate how they engage in “the messy, contradictory, and fascinating work of understanding how to live in a new world and a new century” (Hawisher & Selfe, 1999, p. 12). In their chapter of the collection, Hawisher and Selfe offered an idea that has undergirded work in the (sub)field since The History Book: “computers are not simply tools; they are, indeed, complex technological artifacts that embody and shape—and are shaped by—the ideological assumptions of an entire culture” (p. 2).

During 1995–2015, computers and writing assumed an increasingly critical stance toward technologies. The scholarship of the early 1990s, in particular, was characterized by skepticism toward professed liberatory and egalitarian potentials of writing technologies. In 1991, for example, Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe expressed concern over the

‘rhetoric of technology,’ a utopian discourse that masked many of the problems associated with technology and that minimized the barriers to integrating such technology productively in classrooms and the educational system. (p. 210)

While ample scholarship attested to the hope that networked computers would bring about a more just and equitable educational experience (some of which we discuss later in this chapter; see also Faigley, 1992; Harris & Wambeam, 1996), other scholarship signaled a commitment to tempering techno-utopianist perspectives through careful study and critique (e.g. Faigley, 2003; Walker, 2001). In 1991, for example, Cynthia L. Selfe and Paul Meyer pointed to a lack of empirical evidence to support the claim that online discussion forums were a “more engaging and democratic space than traditional classroom settings” (p. 208). In 1995 Sibylle Gruber likewise challenged the idea of computer mediated communication (CMC) as a means of enacting critical pedagogy. She provided a strong critique of faculty who rely “on the technology to facilitate learning and change existing classroom practices” (p. 74). This scholarship supported the idea that it is an instructor’s responsibility to use technologies in concert with critical pedagogy, which meant accepting that conflicts and increased tensions might arise in a CMC and dealing with them in productive dialogue rather than striving to avoid such conflict.

Susan Romano extended these critiques to consider, in particular, students in marginalized positions in the classroom. She questioned the possibilities for equality in online spaces, contending that the early prevailing metaphors of “freedom, open space, and frontiers” used to describe online spaces did not allow women to assume positions of agency online (1999, p. 9). She likewise argued that egalitarian online classrooms were not possible because students only seemed to have more authority in such spaces given that teachers “assign[ed]” them this authority (1993, p. 10). Kristine L. Blair and Elizabeth Monske (2003) returned to this issue when they asked the question of who benefits from the “rush to technologize teaching and learning?” (p. 442). Their answers were uncomfortable, though perhaps in retrospect, unsurprising: certain institutions, faculty, and students benefit most from online learning, while faculty and students of certain genders, races, and social classes benefit least.

Issues of access have long been central to the scholarship of computers and writing. Jeffrey T. Grabill (2003), however, argued that attention to access “has been the primary but unsatisfactory way that the field has dealt with issues of class” (p. 463). To redress this situation, Grabill provided a way of thinking about class

as situated in specific material and institutional contexts and as deeply intertwined with issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and culture. […] Class is a moving target, an issue that requires sustained inquiry. (p. 464).

Teacher-scholars must address, he argued, “how the infrastructure of access operates” (p. 464). Here he returned to the power of the interface originally described in Selfe and Selfe’s (1994) “The Politics of the Interface.” Interfaces, he reminded readers, in their apparent neutrality and transparency, were not a problem for some (perhaps even for many). But he asked, “How might an interface for a community network in rural Michigan look and function? What about in inner-city Atlanta? What about for ‘blue’ and ‘pink’ collar information workers?” (p. 467). These inquiries about real situated interfaces reinforced Selfe and Selfe’s (1994) claims and the enduring applicability of their work.

As we describe throughout this chapter, writing technologies tend to go through a, by now, fairly familiar cycle in the (sub)field of computers and writing: from celebration to critique to a more tempered use of the technology. In the video below, teacher-scholars describe this cycle in varying ways. They point out that while Selfe and Selfe (1994) were instrumental in reminding us of the ideological imperatives at stake, there is still much interest in the pedagogical possibilities of new and emerging technologies.

Beyond Critique to Possibility

Thus, while work in the (sub)field stressed careful critique of new technologies, it also saw opportunities to teach students important literacy skills—namely, becoming careful, thoughtful users, critics, and designers of technologies themselves. For example, Madeleine Sorapure, Pamela Inglesby, and George Yatchisin (1998) saw the world wide web as a

real opportunit[y] for us to enrich the curricula of writing courses. [...] Drawing the Web into the classroom enables us to teach more about rhetorical modes and strategies and to expand upon notions of literacy in general. (p. 423)

This “enrich[ed] curricula” involved getting students to become “discerning, skillful readers of Web sites, particularly when they are drawing information from those sites for use in their own writing” (p. 412). For them, new web technologies brought opportunities to prepare students to engage in critical study of these technologies.

Likewise, Alex Vernon (2000) discussed grammar checkers from a stance of possibility. He acknowledged that the “Y2K generation” of grammar checkers did not increase in accuracy over their predecessors, but because they were increasingly functional and ubiquitous he encouraged composition instructors to revisit them as a pedagogical tool (p. 331). He argued that grammar checkers could help instructors teach grammar in context, if they made educating students about their possibilities and downfalls part of classroom curricula. His article evidences a perspective increasingly common to the (sub)field during the 2000s: tools themselves are not inherently good or bad; it is how teachers use them in the act of teaching writing that matters.

Similarly, Wilhelmina C. Savenye, Zane Olina, and Mary Miemczyk (2001) argued that new technologies were here to stay, so their effectiveness was more dependent on instructor implementation rather than the technologies themselves. Savenye, Oline, and Miemczyk’s considerations for making best use of these technologies were drawn from instructional design theory and included analyzing the learners, the context, and the goals of the course; developing effective online materials that are high quality and highly visual; developing course content in manageable chunks or “modules”; and trying “new approaches and be[ing] ready for shifting roles” (p. 375). In a vein similar to Gruber (1995), they reminded instructors to “focus on the instructional needs of the students, rather than on the technology itself” (p 379). This privileging of people over technologies echoes Hawisher et al.’s (1996) mantra from The History Book, which we discuss in the Introduction, and is a theme throughout the (sub)field’s scholarship that we review in this eBook.

As with much of the scholarship from 1995–2015, such underlying theories remain relevant today; however, some of the specific concerns these teacher-scholars faced might seem a bit outdated to today’s readers. For example, Savenye, Olina, and Miemczyk (2001) described faculty without adequate processing power and memory capacity on their computers. They also wrote about email software that could not handle attachments. While such issues related to functionality tend not to plague the (sub)field's members today, at least not in developed nations, the “five most formidable barriers to implementing distance education” that Savenye, Olina, and Miemczyk named are still challenges the (sub)field’s members face in creating online and distance learning: “increased time commitment, faculty compensation and incentives, lack of money to implement programs, lack of shared vision for distance education […], and lack of support staff” (p. 380). Again, Savenye, Olina, and Miemczyk did not engage in the question of whether writing would be taught in online or distance formats. They argued strongly that it already was and, therefore, professed that it should be supported and improved upon.

In his Kairos webtext, Anthony Ellertson (2003) likewise affirmed that new media tools, such as Flash, which he called “‘simulacra machines,’ those software packages with the power and the ability to remix and repurpose any digitized media in the creation of immersive communication environments,” could have positive educational impact, particularly in first-year writing. He studied the use of Flash (chosen because of its ubiquity at the time of his writing) as part of an electronic portfolio component in his first-year writing course. He cited the “transformative powers” of simulacra machines in giving students the ability to “speak back to the popular culture that surrounds” them. At the time of his study, Ellertson argued, writing had been our primary means of responding to culture. Technological tools like Flash, he contended, provided additional media for offering such responses. However, his findings showed that while utilizing Flash seemed to increase students’ awareness of their own production habits in relationship to audience, it did not seem to increase their awareness of themselves as audience members when similar rhetorical techniques were used by someone else. Ultimately, though, he professed that this disconnect could actually be “a potential space for cultivating a deeper critical literacy for simulacra culture and simulacra tools in our students.”

If, like Savenye, Olina, and Miemczyk (2001), the (sub)field operates from the perspective that technologies are an inevitable part of writing instruction, then how might members of the (sub)field describe the relationship between pedagogy and technology? The video below explores ways in which technology and pedagogy are inextricable—at least within computers and writing—and ways in which the (sub)field thinks deeply about the effects of technologies in the classroom and, more importantly, on the people in those classrooms.

This tension between technologies as tools of possibility versus sites of critique was also addressed in Melissa Graham Meeks’s (2004) Kairos webtext “Wireless Laptop Classrooms: Sketching Social and Material Spaces.” In this webtext Meeks made clear her awareness of the ideological weight that wireless classrooms carry; however, as an instructor at an institution that had contracted with IBM in a laptop initiative, Meeks was given little choice but to find moments of learning—some of which helped students critique the laptops in front of them. Ultimately, she outlined a series of “wireless pedagogies that are accountable for the social and material scene of classrooms.” She warned, for example, “Be sensitive to linguistic shortcuts that fuse computer and person.” This advice was in keeping with the (sub)field’s long-time focus on people as ultimately having agency over technologies (though recognizing this agency is inevitably shaped by these technologies). This intertwining of people and technology is reflected in how she also recommended talking “about cyborg politics” in the writing classroom. In cyborg politics, she included the ways in which students, who had the option of purchasing “low-end” or “high-end” laptop models, were marked by their laptops. Meeks argued that students’ identity markers were already abundant: they “need not also be marked by the functionality of their laptops.”

Continuing the (sub)field’s interest in exploring possibilities for online spaces to promote democratic interests, Matthew D. Barton (2005), in “The Future of Rational-Critical Debate in Online Public Spheres,” argued that “wikis, blogs, and online bulletin boards are all potentially valuable tools for the creation and maintenance of a critical public sphere” (p. 179). In particular, he explained the ways in which these “cheap,” “low tech,” and “open” (pp. 178, 179, 182) technologies fostered rational debate through widespread public participation. Drawing on Jurgen Habermas’s discussion of eighteenth century public spaces, including “salons (French), coffee houses (British), and table societies (German)” (p. 180), as well as newspapers, Barton contended these new writing technologies offered opportunities to achieve the egalitarian rational exchange these earlier venues could not.

Future scholarship reflected Barton’s attention to these technologies’ affordances, created excitement about their potentials for democratizing the creation and circulation of writing, and justified these potentials through application of a postmodern theoretical lens. Stephanie Vie (2008), for instance, echoed Barton’s (2005) enthusiasm for wikis, blogs, and online discussion boards, as well as other technologies, including Second Life (deWinter & Vie, 2008), because of their potential to empower students. She argued that because "students are familiar with but do not think critically about” technologies like blogs, wikis, social networking sites, and online audio editors, computers and writing teachers “need to familiarize themselves with these technologies” and incorporate them into their teaching. (p. 10)

For her, the exigence for this work was both that these online technologies can allow for creating democratic spaces and that students often fail to realize the effects of writing for and with these technologies—including their potentials for challenging entrenched power hierarchies and providing opportunities for more egalitarian exchange in (and out) of the classroom. Vie (2008) noted, for instance, that students’ familiarity and facility with social networking sites allowed them to “surveil their instructors,” placing students in positions of power. Like Barton (2005), she concluded, “traditional classroom power differentials easily break down in convergent spaces that allow for and encourage individual participation” (p. 19). For scholars like Barton and Vie, these new technologies provided new opportunities to explore ways in which to achieve the (sub)field’s goal of democratizing education. But as with other “new” technologies analyzed in the (sub)field, this enthusiasm was later tempered before scholars accepted their presence and attended to best practices for use.

Close ties between ideology and writing instruction are nothing new to the (sub)field, of course. The ideas that writing is inherently social, always contextual, and created within and by a community were already widespread in the parent field of writing studies (e.g., Berlin, 1982, 1987; Bizzell, 1993; Hawisher & Selfe, 1991). But the recognition of such ideologies as infusing writing technologies was arguably new—and a hallmark of work in the (sub)field—making it distinctive in academic scholarship. Additionally, these examples of teacher-scholars using technologies as both sites of critique and possibility are illustrative of the cycle we found to be characteristic of attention to new technologies: initial discovery and excitement, followed by intense critique, and, in the end, more thoughtful pedagogical use of the technology.

As we note throughout this eBook, computers and writing has a long history of studying and thinking about the relationship between humans and technologies. We note in this chapter a cycle of scholarly response to each new technology: excitement, critique, and acceptance. This video highlights that cycle, while also showing that thoughtful pedagogical use takes into careful consideration the people affected by computer technologies.

Hopeful Orientation

The ongoing hopeful orientation of the (sub)field is illustrated by Charles Moran (2003) in his Computers and Composition article, “What We Hoped For.” Ever the optimist, Moran reviewed the (in hindsight) naïve hopes from the early years of computers and writing that computers were “agents for good” (p. 354). Through a linguistic analysis of articles published in Computers and Composition from its inception through the early 1990s, Moran described how the (sub)field disaggregated the terms computers and writing “into their elements,” making computers specifically refer to “word-processing,” “online discussion,” “hypertext,” and so forth, while writing became “revising” and “invention” (p. 349). In doing so, he pointed to specific ways, through language, that the (sub)field attempted to temper utopian notions of the relationship between the terms. Moran named critical pedagogy as the “current hope” for doing this work, arguing that “If we choose to do so, we can use technology in our writing classrooms to produce ideological change, to value difference, and to transform oppressive power relations” (p. 354, emphasis in original). That is, for Moran, the (sub)field’s acknowledgement of the limitations of new computer technologies did not preclude the use of these technologies for the (sub)field’s goal of democratizing (writing) education. But it meant instructors had to be mindful of consciously using computer technologies to accomplish this end rather than presuming that the mere presence of such technologies would lead to this democratization.

In keeping with the potential to democratize education, networked writing classrooms brought to life the act of writing and made visible the difference between private and public forms of writing in ways that highlighted the concept of audience for students. In the video below, teacher-scholars Charles Moran and Michael Palmquist describe these kinds of moments in the networked writing class.

Jim Porter (2003) would later applaud the (sub)field for just this type of consciousness when it came to understanding the significance of the "technological past" on current uses (and abuses) of technologies. In his personal history of how technology use “aided, abetted, obstructed, and/or changed [his] writing processes and habits” between the years of 1960 and 1995, Porter wrote,

The technological past matters. It shapes the writer and writes the body in significant ways—etching itself on the writer’s consciousness and body, influencing how the writer learns to compose and how the writer communicates in a social milieu. (p. 389)

In this same piece, Porter, like Moran, looked at the words used to name and describe the (sub)field. In addressing the word computer, he expressed concern that naming the (sub)field after a machine “leads us down the trail to technological instrumentalism” (p. 389). However, he was also quick to point out that computers and writing’s “critical focus through the years has never been just the machine. It has always been some kind of writing application," and it has always been attentive “to questions of human use, interaction, the composing process of the cyberwriter, etc.” (p. 389).

Rich Rice, as a contributor to Bill Hart-Davidson and Steven D. Krause’s (2004) “Re: The Future of Computers and Writing: A Multivocal Textumentary,” later echoed this point that the term computer is not what matters:

What’s important isn’t the computers in computer and writing. What’s important is that we deconstruct or reflect on the tools used, whatever they are, to communicate something. [...] Writing isn’t about computer technology. It’s not about computers. It’s about technology in the sense that all tools are technologies, and it’s about composing. [...] Rather than computers and writing[,] how about technology and composing, or just plain old composing? I compose [, ...] therefore I am.” (p. 157)

From this perspective, computer serves as a placeholder for any digital writing technology.

Evolving Theories of Technologies

This ongoing critical view of technologies, their use, and their relationship to humans is also reflected in the theoretical work of the (sub)field. Scholarship from the years leading up to the turn of the century was marked by reflective gestures, especially in thinking about relationships between old and new technologies. In 1999, for instance, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin published Remediation: Understanding New Media, a text subsequently invoked frequently in the (sub)field. In it, they offered a theory of media that argued “new” media always contain echoes of earlier media. In this way, media are refashioned—or “remediated,” as Bolter and Grusin described it—not divorced from their predecessors but rather derived from them.

That same year, Christina Haas (1999) posited a similar theory of technologies in her Computers and Composition article “On the Relationship Between Old and New Technologies.” Haas used Vygotskian theories alongside Bjiker’s theory of sociotechnical change to stress the need for a history, an understanding, and a theory of technologies, especially in relationship to writing, that are fuller, richer, and more nuanced than the “old and new” model comfortable to most people. Old and new technologies, Haas illustrated through her study of workplace literacies, coexist and mutually influence each other. In this article she sought to move beyond both the “replacement model” of technology (the idea that the new replaces the old) and the “straightforward progress model” (the idea that technologies develop in a linear fashion and the new is always better than the old). In doing so, Haas was quick to remind readers that the print book and the quill pen were technologies, too: “In short, technological change cannot be simple replacement of one technology with another—nor even an historical rupture between technologies—because technology is anchored so closely both to individual histories and to cultural practices” (p. 212). As a result, she called for readers to take the long view in looking at differences and similarities that exist between emerging technologies and their predecessors: “Understanding twentieth-century literacy means understanding the multiple technologies that support it, have supported it, and continue to support it” (p. 213).

While words like technology, digital, and computer are often associated with modern or contemporary writing practices, computers and writing has long known that writing itself is a technology, ancient as it is. As we pointed out in the Introduction to this eBook, scholars (Bolter, 1991; Haas, 1996, 1999; Baron, 1999; Havelock, 1977, 1982, 1988; Palmeri, 2012) have often reminded us that writing itself is a technology made possible through other technologies (e.g., clay tablet, codex, pencil, paper, computer, and so on). The (sub)field called into question dichotomous distinctions between “old” and “new” technologies and media. Teacher-scholars in the video below discuss various writing tools and highlight ways in which conceptions of writing technologies need to account for the full range of tools that have become so naturalized that we might no longer see them as technologies.

Dennis Baron (1999) echoed Haas' (1999) sentiment in his “From Pencils to Pixels” chapter of Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe’s Passions, Pedagogies and 21st-Century Technologies. Baron argued that the computer was not unlike the pencil and other previous writing technologies, as all literacy technologies go through similar stages of development. These stages start with the technology having a “restricted communication function” available to only a select few. The technology is then used by a larger population to imitate previous writing technology and, subsequently, in new ways that influence the older technologies it sought to imitate (p. 16). Opponents then argue against these new uses of the technology because of concerns of fraud, while proponents seek to demonstrate the “authentic[ity]” and “reliability” of the new technology so it is more widely accepted (p. 17). Bolter and Grusin’s (1999), Baron’s (1999), and Haas’s (1999) calls to take the long view and historicize new and emerging technologies increasingly characterized the (sub)field’s research.

Also illustrating the (sub)field’s evolving thinking about the relationship between old and new technologies, particularly as it pertains to how teacher-scholars research and theorize their work, was Beth L. Hewett. In her 2001 webtext, Hewett joined the calls for more qualified theories of technologies with a “new theory for Online Writing Instruction” (OWI). Under the umbrella of OWI, she included “computer-mediated communication (CMC) for classroom and writing/peer group situations, computer-based literary study, as well as individualized writing instruction such as that found in online writing lab (OWL) tutorials.” While OWI was still in its early stages of development, Hewett voiced concern that much of the research associated with OWI was grounded in anecdotal evidence: “New theory about OWI ideally would be grounded in a cycle of empirical practice-based research, analysis, synthesis, discussion, and theorizing.” Lore as evidence, she argued, had outlived its usefulness. After all, she wrote, the “byproduct” of OWI was a rich source of recorded data “that can be mined for issues, inconsistencies, concerns, and problems that need attention—such as efficacy of instructional methods and/or platforms, learning styles and/or disabilities and OWI, and professional development.”

David Alan Sapp and James Simon (2005) mined some of this data in their study of students’ grades in online and face-to-face writing courses. They found that a “disproportionately high” number of students failed or did not finish online writing courses as contrasted with face-to-face writing courses (p. 472), which they characterized as a “thrive or dive” phenomenon for students taking writing courses online. That is, in their study the majority of students (71 percent) taking online writing courses either did very well (i.e., earned an A, A-, or B+) or did not earn a passing grade (i.e., earned a D, F, W, or I) (p. 474). This focus on more empirical and less anecdotal research called for by Hewett and illustrated by Sapp and Simon reverberated in writing studies more broadly, especially with Richard H. Haswell’s 2005 call for “RAD” (i.e., replicable, aggregable, and data-driven) research, and subsequently characterized work in the (sub)field into the latter 2000s.

Online Writing Centers

In the Introduction to this eBook, we compare the social turn in composition during the mid to late 1980s to the ways in which the emergence of increasingly collaborative digital technologies in the mid to late 1990s facilitated a move toward more social and interactive forms of writing instruction, including online writing labs (OWLs) and other forms of online tutoring. David Coogan (1995), in his article “E-mail Tutoring, a New Way to Do New Work,” described the role that email tutoring played in the shift away from individual writing processes to social forms of writing instruction. Coogan opened with a critique of the process movement and the kind of “reverence for the individual writer” it created (p. 172). When computers came into writing centers as a technology that could facilitate the writing process, Coogan asserted, they “secured [...] not so much a future, as [...] a kind of servitude to the process movement in its cognitivist and expressivist forms” (p. 171). Computer networks, and email in particular, Coogan argued, had the ability to disrupt

the most familiar boundaries in the writing center: shared space and limited time. [...] E-mail changes the [writing] conference’s discipline by slowing it down (from 30 minutes to several days), and by collapsing the self into text where it becomes a rhetorical construct, not a social given. (p. 171)

By dispersing the writer’s subjectivity in this way, Coogan contended, email served to “interrupt the monological ‘I’ that informs most academic writing and the garret center” (p. 173). According to Coogan, this dispersal was achieved when the writing tutor became not a “technician of writing” but rather an “equal” where “writers [were] responding to other writers” (p. 176). This relationship was made possible, Coogan argued, because of “the methodological constraints of email,” which caused writing to lose its traditional hierarchy and order (p. 176).

At the time of this writing, one of the most enduring and highly utilized Online Writing Labs (with 248 million hits in 2012–2013, "Purdue OWL," n.d.) is the Purdue OWL. Founded in 1994 by Muriel Harris and David Taylor, this original OWL was supported by an email server and Gopher designed by Taylor. Stuart Blythe later moved the OWL to the world wide web. A major revision of the site was completed in 2004, and usability testing performed in 2006 guided changes made from 2007–2009 ("Purdue OWL," n.d.).

In 1995 Harris and Michael Pemberton published, “Online Writing Labs (OWLs): A Taxonomy of Options and Issues,” outlining their newly hatched online additions to their campus writing centers. Their proposed taxonomy for understanding network technologies frequently used to support OWLs consisted of the categories “reactive,” “interactive,” “realtime,” and “time-displaced.” For example, “Gophers and Worldwide Webs (WWWs) and automated retrieval systems” (AFR) were described as “reactive and decontextualized,” whereas “synchronous chat systems, newsgroups and e-mail” were “interactive, contextualized systems” (p. 146). Each of these models, according to Harris and Pemberton, had strengths and advanced particular views of writing center session interaction, so selecting a configuration depended on the type of writing center, its goals, and its access to technology. In other words, they affirmed that one approach was not inherently better than another. Some of these options, of course, no longer exist as such: Gophers and AFR are no longer technologies used for tutoring; email and newsgroups, while still in existence, are not used as much by writing centers and certainly not in the same way that the early OWLs used them.

Harris and Pemberton also addressed a barrier to the success of OWLs at the time: computer illiteracy. While digital literacy is certainly a skill (or set of skills, given preference for the language of digital literacies) still addressed in the (sub)field, the level of illiteracy Harris and Pemberton refer to—“Only 3 students of 34 raised their hands” to say that they “had used the campus computing system” (p. 153)—no longer appears in such stark numbers at the majority of Western institutions of higher education. Certainly developing nations may experience this issue of access on the scale Harris and Pemberton addressed, but the institutions where most computers and writing teacher-scholars work at the time of this writing do not.

International and Second Language Writers

The (sub)field’s ongoing concern with the democratizing potentials of new technologies led to consideration of the impacts of these technologies on writers for whom English was not a first language. The early 2000s were marked by an interest in the international focus of computers and writing, particularly connections between computers and writing and second language learners. George Braine’s (2001) comparison between online (what Braine called, in the language of the time, “LAN,” or local area network) writing classes and traditional writing classes ultimately illustrated that, despite strong first drafts produced in the online classroom, overall improvements to EFL¹ students’ writing were seen more clearly in the traditional classroom. Paige D. Ware (2004) focused on ESL students’ confidence levels writing online as opposed to their improvement writing online. Based on the findings of her study, she ultimately critiqued “one-way claims about the spaces opened up by online writing,” which, she pointed out, do not take into account varied classroom contexts nor student feedback (p. 465).

Frank Tuzi (2004) added to this scholarship attention to the role of online technologies in delivering feedback on student writing. He studied effects of e-feedback—typed digital messages, in this case—on the revision process of L2 learners in the context of “an online application developed for the specific purpose of posting student writings online and accepting e-feedback from website users and visitors” (p. 218). Tuzi advocated for e-feedback as one valuable form, among many, for L2 learners. E-feedback, his study showed, increased revisions related to adding to and changing ideas. This finding was in contrast to the more granular, sentence-level changes L2 students made in response to a writing center session. Tuzi did point out that the online interface itself most likely affected the feedback given: “For example, it may be easier to describe a macro-level problem in a paper [...] than it is to describe a micro-level problem like a grammar or spelling error” (p. 231). Additionally, the fact that the application was designed expressly for posting writing and getting digital feedback, along with instructor implementation, led to what Tuzi described as a successful expansion of the writing process “to include more revision” (p. 231).

In 2004, Computers and Composition added Global Dimensions, a new regular section on the international writing scene. Dene Grigar developed this section after attending the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) in 2002 and realizing the abundance of work done outside the United States of interest to computers and writing. The section was predicated on the idea that “[t]he proliferation of networked technologies has made the global exchange of information possible—a situation that, in turn, makes a continued exchange of that information necessary in a rapidly growing global economy” (2004b, p. 471). Grigar’s section—which sometimes comprised essays written by other authors but usually comprised pieces written by her—included essays on topics such as the trAce Online Writing Centre (Thomas, 2005) and the International Research Conference (Grigar, 2005b), kineticism (Grigar, 2005a), as well as “celebrities” Ted Nelson (Grigar, 2004c) and Kate Pullinger (Grigar, 2004a).

This international focus of the (sub)field is evidenced in the prevalence of special issues of Computers and Composition on the topic: Computers and Composition published a special issue in 2005 dedicated to “Second Language Writers in Digital Contexts” (DePew), another special issue in 2007 on “Global Issues: International Perspectives on Computers and Writing” (Sugimoto), and another in 2015 on “Online Writing in Global Contexts: Rethinking the Nature of Connections and Communication in the Age of International Online Media” (St. Amant & Rice).

Social Networking

The (sub)field’s scholarly focus on the democratizing potential of new computer technologies extended to these technologies’ potential for democratizing various modes of communication, including casual electronic forms of synchronous communication. Attention to instant messaging (IM) technologies, for example, brought attention to visual features of writing, in particular, emoticons. In their study of naturally occurring IM conversations, Anthony Garrison et al. (2011) argued that the emoticon was “integral” to IM communications, largely because it could be “rhetorical” and served as its own independent utterance, not necessarily reliant on other text for meaning (p. 123). For Garrison et al. the emoticon was not a secondary feature of IM discourse but one as communicative as the “text.” Based on their study, they also made a methodological argument echoed by other scholarship in the (sub)field; they called for studying “language phenomena as they occur in and outside the classroom” (p. 114).

This approach of examining language use in its natural settings was taken up by other teacher-scholars who likewise argued for the rhetorical nature of writing in particular technologies. For instance, in her webtext “Can we block these political thingys? I just want to get f*cking recipes”: Women, Rhetoric, and Politics on Pinterest," Katherine DeLuca (2015) argued, “everyday composing practices on social media sites, from sharing and/or liking content to comments and comment-thread discussions, are significant rhetorical engagements” (“Conceptual”). Through presenting a case study of user Jane Wang’s pins, including a repinning of an Obama campaign infographic "The Life of Julia" and the pinning of a Big Bird meme from the blog The Impolitic, she contended, "the mundane rhetorical and civic engagements that occur on Pinterest are significant and representative of the public rhetorics that shape the everyday composing practices and experiences of digital citizens” (“Politics”). Deluca ultimately affirmed that “Pinterest is a space in which cyberfeminism can flourish in multiple forms" (“Cyberfeminism”).

Elisabeth Buck (2015) offered a similar argument for the social media apps available on many mobile phones, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr. By sharing survey results and interview responses that illustrated that “students already intuitively negotiate and define audience, exigencies, and constraints,” the elements of Lloyd Bitzer’s (1968) rhetorical situation, Buck argued student smartphone users “make important rhetorical decisions when selecting a social media app on their device.” She reinforced, however, that students need instruction in the “critical vocabulary and distance” necessary to gain a more “complex, multifaceted understanding of rhetoric.”

Blogs

The arc of initial enthusiasm tempered by critique followed by attention to careful pedagogical implementation characterized scholars’ studies of other new computer technologies as well. For instance, Jason Tougaw (2009), in recounting and analyzing student use of blogs in writing-intensive seminar courses at Queens College and Princeton University, expressed excitement that writing for blogs allowed students to cultivate personal voices in engaging in academic work. Likewise, J. Elizabeth Clark (2010) offered blog writing tasks as an important part of her digital rhetoric curriculum that she claimed effectively connected to students’ non-academic everyday writing activities. And Warren Mark Liew (2010) presented blogs as a productive space for students to resist existing power structures, including negotiating student-teacher power dynamics.

Subsequently, however, Wei Zhang (2010) was more cautious about the potentials of blogs. In discussing a study of non-native English speakers’ use of blogs, Zhang noted that while these students saw blog posting as assisting them in constructing their writerly identities, blog posting had limited potential in helping them co-construct knowledge. Additionally, based on interviews with students and teachers in the United Kingdom, Jen Ross (2014) examined ways in which online reflective writing, including blog writing, opposed the coherent, authentic writing valued in the humanities and caused anxiety about issues of “ownership, control, and safety” (p. 96).

The arc is again evident in the (sub)field’s treatment of social networking. For instance, Derek N. Mueller (2009) offered Facebook (as well as blogs and Twitter) as part of students’ productive “digital underlife” (p. 241, emphasis in original). Subsequently, in their frequently cited and downloaded “Paradox and Promise: MySpace, Facebook, and the Sociopolitics of Social Networking in the Writing Classroom,” Gina Maranto and Matt Barton (2010) criticized Facebook and MySpace for compelling users to present themselves according to predetermined lists and templates rather than allowing them to assert unique identities. While they saw potential for such spaces in helping students (and teachers) understand postmodern constructions of identity and public engagement, they ultimately warned that social networking profiles harm the ethos of both students and teachers (particularly when teachers “friend” students) and can have lasting negative consequences.

Following this critical take on social networking sites, Lindsay Sabatino (2014), through discussing the game Mafia Wars, shifted to focus on ways to integrate Facebook gaming into the composition classroom. Though her portrayal of Facebook was more positive than negative, her concern was less whether Facebook should be used as a tool for writing instruction and more how best to use it as a tool for writing instruction. In other words, she assumed Facebook’s endurance as a writing technology and focused on a suggested use of it in the classroom. Deborah Balshizer et al. (2011) likewise assumed Facebook’s enduring presence in the classroom. In their collaborative webtext “The Facebook Papers,” they discussed one assignment for integrating Facebook into the classroom, which contributors recorded their use of over time.

Additionally, in his Kairos webtext “Baby, We Were Born to Tweet: Springsteen Fans, the Writing Practices of In Situ Tweeting, and the Research Possibilities for Twitter” William I. Wolff (2015) archived and coded a corpus of tweets to study “the composing practices of members of the Springsteen community at or tweeting about one particular concert” in order to “learn more about the various ways people are writing in public online spaces.” In this webtext, Wolff not only shared insights about the kinds of tweets written in response to a specific April 4, 2012 concert event, but he also discussed a grounded theory approach to coding tweets adaptable by others, identifying tweeting practices such as conversing, notifying, mediating, integrating, historicizing, and others. He claimed,

Grounded theory studies have the potential to continue to transform how scholars, teachers, students, and the general public understand the community-wide importance of composing, even especially in 140-character bursts. (emphasis in original)

Such work evidences a focus on how to help others research writing practices in Twitter to better understand its use rather than whether people should or should not use Twitter (or teach with it).

Certainly, there are recursive moments in scholars’ treatment of writing technologies. This arc is not linear. For instance, in 2012 Kate Tzu-Ching Chen presented blogs as positive platforms for peer review for undergraduate EFL students, after Zhang’s more critical treatment of blogs in 2010. And such positive and negative approaches exist simultaneously. For example, Clark’s and Zhang’s expressions of enthusiasm and critique, respectively, were both published in 2010. Moreover, individual teacher-scholars certainly made all of these moves (i.e., expressed excitement, offered critique, reported student use) in a single publication. However, this general pattern—initial excitement about a new technology, particularly its potentials for realizing democratic ideals, followed by critique of those possibilities, and then acceptance of that technology’s presence in students’ lives—still holds across scholarship published since The History Book through 2015.

Wikis

Scholars’ work on wikis from 2005–2015 serves as a further example of the (sub)field’s arc in attending to new computer technologies: initial enthusiasm followed by criticism followed by calls to look past affordances and constraints of technologies to get at best practices for use. For instance, Tony Carr, Andrew Morrison, Glenda Cox, and Andrew Deacon (2007) examined the use of wikis in a South African University political science course through the lens of activity theory. Though a bit guarded in their enthusiasm, noting the possibility of student resistance to the writing practices encouraged in wikis, they emphasized the beneficial affordances of wiki technology, in their case, for serving as “a mediating artifact” for collaborative writing (p. 270). Looking at another undergraduate writing space, the American first-year writing classroom, Rebecca Wilson Lundin (2008) proclaimed the ways in which wikis could be used to support a pedagogy based on the idea of the network. She argued that wikis can “challenge a number of traditional pedagogical assumptions about the teaching of writing” in four areas: “new media composition, collaborative writing, critical interaction, and online authority” (pp. 432, 434).

Rik Hunter (2011) continued to attend to wikis and collaborative authorship in his study of the World of Warcraft (WoW) wiki. Hunter analyzed the talk pages of the WoW wiki to identify patterns of language use characteristic of interactions among participants. He argued that participants shared habits of mind around and beliefs about communal notions of authorship, challenging the idea of single authorial textual ownership. He concluded,

For wiki writing to be successful, it appears that writers must always be aware that readers of a wiki article can, at will, become co-authors of the text. What WoWWikians did maintain individual ownership over were the suggestions they made about revising articles and the theories they constructed to explain gaps and discontinuities in Warcraft lore. (p. 54)

That is, Hunter affirmed that successful wiki writing depended on a revised understanding of collaboration as well as a writer’s willingness to relinquish individual control and ownership—at least over the textual product. His recognition that wiki authors still laid claim to their revision suggestions recalls the (sub)field’s valuation of process and understanding of writing as “technologically inflected” (p. 55) but not technologically determined.

Characteristic of the (sub)field’s tendency to temper earlier enthusiasm for new writing technologies, Thomas Sura (2015) studied the use of wikis in the space of the American introductory writing classroom through the theoretical lens of materiality and infrastructure to identify challenges to achieving the potentials heralded by prior work. Sura argued that calls like Lundin’s (2008) did not adequately consider writing instructors who themselves were not experts in using wiki technology. In collecting “immersion narratives” from two such instructors (p. 15), he found that the success of wiki use in the first-year writing course depended on its level of “embeddedness in a course” (p. 24), noting “wikis influence and are influenced by the infrastructures they belong to” (p. 14). Sura called for more use of immersion narratives as a way to attend to this infrastructure and consider instructor experience (pp. 16, 26).

Leigh Gruwell (2015) likewise critiqued these earlier celebrations of wikis’ potentials for offering new possibilities for collaboration and understandings of collaborative authorship. In particular, she claimed this work failed to acknowledge the significant “gender gap” in Wikipedia’s contributors, noting that the vast majority of Wikipedians were men (p. 117). Drawing on interviews with female users and analysis of Wikipedia’s editorial policies, Gruwell argued that Wikipedia was a “rhetorical discourse community” whose “conventions also often run counter to feminist ways of knowing and writing, and can exclude rhetorical acts that are embodied and experiential” (pp. 118, 125). Here, again, Gruwell invoked the (sub)field’s feminist origins, urging that a (sub)field explicitly aligned with feminist ideals should be critical and cautious in its approach to a writing space like wikis, which, in some ways, did not embrace these ideals.

Massive and Mobile

While early teacher-scholars in the (sub)field were busy studying and advocating for writing labs and networked classrooms, the years from 1995–2015 saw the rise of ubiquitous computing and more mobile means of learning and composing. For instance, in her article “Emplacing Mobile Composing Habits: A Study of Academic Writing in Networked Social Spaces,” Stacey Pigg (2014) addressed ways in which the movement from stable academic writing spaces like labs and computer classrooms to those of mobile devices like tablets, cell phones, and laptops presents writing teachers with new and additional challenges. Pigg suggested that “public social places like coffeehouses and social learning places offer a temporary place to dwell and locate writing, which is a need experienced by composers who […] frequently move” and work primarily with mobile, networked technologies (pp. 252–253). Pigg described Jonathan Mauk’s concern that students are often lured away to nonacademic spaces, thereby jeopardizing their ability to “fully establish foundations in academic places and discourses” (p. 253).

Ultimately, however, in her qualitative study Pigg provided examples of two students who successfully used “shared social spaces and personal technologies to support learning processes over time through informal but sustained writing processes” (p. 269). Yet she was quick to remind readers that these examples cannot be generalized to all college students, and, in fact, “[t]o assume that all students will acquire strategies for effectively locating mobile composing habits on their own is likely to privilege some students while leaving others underprepared” (p. 269). For these reasons, Pigg urged teacher-scholars in writing studies to become actively involved in thinking about, designing, and creating the places and spaces in which students “dwell with mobile technologies” (p. 270). Additionally, she argued, “the emplacement of mobile composing habits should be a more visible component not only of writing research and theory but also of pedagogy” (p. 269).

Regarding the use of cell phones specifically as mobile devices for learning and composing both in and outside of the classroom, Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder (2015) critiqued Sherry Turkle for not being nuanced enough in her criticisms of cell phones as isolating devices. In his Kairos webtext, Pflugfelder argued, “it can help to consider cell phones as more than objects that can coerce people.” To do so, Pflugfelder drew on Jane Bennett’s concept of “thing-power.” In this way, Pflugfelder made the case for the kind of power that cell phones play in the lives of writing teachers and students. For Pflugfeder, making arguments like Turkle’s and banning cell phones in class was not simply futile but

shaming a literacy habit, emphasizing the divide students already feel between "accepted" and "inappropriate" literacies, and avoiding the larger concerns, namely, that students’ literacies are constantly shifting, due to the powers of different forces in their particular networks.

Recognizing and getting students to recognize that they (and we as their instructors) are “involved in specific networks of power” should be a pedagogical goal, argued Pflugfelder.

Another manifestation of the shift in location of composing and learning activities was MOOCs, massive open online courses. The years 2013–2015 saw the rise and (possible) fall of the MOOC. In his concluding chapter to Invasion of the MOOCs, the volume he co-edited with Charles Lowe, Steven D. Krause (2014) depicted MOOCs in a manner that reflected the (sub)field’s ongoing critical attitude toward technologies (which we describe throughout this chapter). Krause was quick to acknowledge the many ways in which MOOCs failed to do what they promised, but he also pointed out the ways that MOOCs provided further education to the already educated (in fact, Future Learn’s MOOC on corpus linguistics played an important role in helping us with the data work we do in Chapter 3 of this eBook). More importantly, he called attention to the fact that higher education has a long history of employing seemingly “revolutionary” technologies that have contributed to and helped shape higher education. MOOCs, Krause reinforced, have given educators an important opportunity to look critically at the technologies used in higher education in order to figure out where to go next and how to better get there. As book contributor Alan Levine, whom Krause quoted, put it,

If anything has come from this experience[, it] is a putting into serious discussion nearly at every institution what should be their stake in online education. [...] Perhaps there will be realization that education is not a mass manufactured experience and that there is more to an education than a letter of completion. (p. 226)

Ultimately, Krause reminded readers that regardless of the status of MOOCs, distance education will remain part of higher education. As Alexander Reid, in his chapter for the volume, “Writing and Learning with Feedback Machines,” put it, “conceptually the potential for people to learn in massive, distributed ways remains” (p. 225).

Student Perceptions and Uses

As a (sub)field that keeps the human at its center, computers and writing has never lost sight of the student while studying writing technologies. How students use these technologies, particularly how they should use them and be taught to use them, has long been paramount to the work of the (sub)field. For example, in Literate Lives in the Information Age, Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher (2004) included students as co-authors on each of their chapters. They shared 20 case studies of current and former students “who have become proficient, to lesser and greater extents, with the literacies of technology during the last 25 years or so” (p. 3). This work elevated case study subjects to co-authors in an effort to highlight student voices.

This case study approach was common in our corpus. An early example comes from Chelley Vician and Susan A. Brown (2000), who “emplo[yed] a case-study methodology [...] to provide a qualitative view of student interaction and CBCT [computer-based communication tool] usage behaviors involved in completing computer-based communication assignments” in two university courses (p. 213). Drawing on interviews and recorded online interactions, they reported that students used CBCTs in ways called for in their course assignments—even outside of class time and “normal” work hours (p. 211).

Despite the prevalence of the case study approach, however, publications using this method sometimes had lower citation counts so did not initially stand out in our analysis. For instance, another early example of studying students’ uses of writing technologies through case studies is “Breaking the Island Chains: A Case Study Exploring the Intricate Powers of Language Shared on the World Wide Web,” an article with only 11 citations according to Google Scholar. In this article Tammy Winner and Theodore Shields (2002) recounted their experience of having students in two first-year writing courses at two very different kinds of colleges complete a literacy autobiography assignment. They explained, “this case study illustrates how the Web can reinforce the power of language and communication by building a bridge between socially, culturally, geographically, economically, and ethnically distinct students,” in particular, students from the small Bahamian island of Abaco and students from the southern United States (p. 274).

Other publications reporting student case studies looked at a variety of students’ technology uses. This variety includes non-native English speakers’ and native English speakers’ wiki-delivered peer review feedback (Bradley, 2014), an undergraduate writing consultant’s use of Microsoft Word for writing center sessions (Buck, 2008), two undergraduate L2 students’ non-ESL course computer-based reading and writing activities (Hirvela, 2005), undergraduate college students’ perspectives on taking a writing and technology course in a computer lab (Kirtley, 2005), attitudes and activities of undergraduate students in two online first-year writing courses (Rendahl & Breuch, 2013), experiences of three African American students in an undergraduate technical writing course (Taylor, 1997), a Korean 1.5 generation high school student's extracurricular composing choices and activities (Yi & Hirvela, 2010), and more.

In order to better understand students’ use(s) of computer technologies, scholarship in the 2010s increasingly shifted from qualitative to quantitative studies of student perceptions and uses of those technologies. That the (sub)field moved in this direction is illustrated by four articles from 2015. First, in “Revisualizing Composition: How First-Year Writers Use Composing Technologies,” Jessie L. Moore et al. (2015) shared results from their survey of “1,366 students from seven colleges and universities” (p. 4) regarding their “self-reported writing choices” in composing with “different kinds of texts using a wide range of composing technologies, both traditional (i.e., paper, pencils, pens, etc.), and digital (i.e., cell phones, wikis, blogs, etc.)” (p. 2). Second, in “Do Digital Writing Tools Deliver? Student Perceptions of Writing Quality Using Digital Tools and Online Writing Environments,” Susanne Nobles and Laura Paganucci (2015) presented results of an online survey of “high school freshmen English students’ perceptions of writing skills and quality using digital tools and online writing environments versus pen/pencil and paper” (pp. 19–20). Here, again, they focused on the ways in which students used and perceived their use of writing technologies, drawing on quantitative data to support their conclusions. In their case, they found that students perceived their writing composed with digital tools to be of higher quality than their writing composed with more traditional tools like pencil and paper (p. 24).

Third, Randall W. Monty (2015), in “Everyday Borders of Transnational Students: Composing Place and Space with Mobile Technology, Social Media, and Multimodality,” reported on a mixed methods study of how students living in and attending institutions of higher education near the Mexican border use mobile devices and social media as well as their “awareness of popular modes of writing, academic genres, and rhetorical concepts affecting writing practices” (pp. 126, 135). Fourth, Ryan Shepherd (2015), in “FB in FYC: Facebook Use Among First-Year Composition Students,” reported results of a survey of 474 first-year writing students about their Facebook use and attitudes toward writing (in Facebook and first-year writing courses), again using quantitative survey data to substantiate his findings. For his study, those findings were that, while students do not view their writing practices on Facebook and in first-year writing as connected, they are “enacting several skills commonly associated with composition classes in their Facebook use, such as audience awareness, awareness of the rhetorical situation, invention, and even process writing” (p. 87).

Conclusion

As a (sub)field, computers and writing adopted a capacious definition of what constitutes the “computer” in computers and writing. To account for the variety of technologies writers used to make meaning, teacher-scholars during the period under review studied a range of communication technologies, from blogs and social networking sites to Twitter and wikis to cell phones and MOOCs. Scholarship in the (sub)field considered what it means to teach and tutor writing online; what it means to engage audio and visual media; and who is enfranchised and disenfranchised by the uses of particular platforms, media, and technologies.

Such scholarship followed a recognizable arc with each new technology, with scholars initially sharing excitement about the democratizing possibilities of the technology, then turning to critique of the technology and recognition of its constraints, and finally tempering their perspectives to focus on ways in which student writers use the technology, ways in which they could or should use the technology, and/or how teachers might instruct them to do so—particularly with the goals of promoting democratic ideals and welcoming diverse voices.