Why Teachers Must Learn: Student Innovation as a Driving Factor in the Future of the Web

User innovation is the key to the development and vitality of technology. As Huatong Sun wrote, “expanding the scope of localization practices and linking user localization efforts” to design cycles—including pedagogical design—will help bridge the gap between what teachers/designers create and what skills users/students need and want. This article theorizes the role of modern composition students and teachers as co-constructors of productive spaces for learning critical inquiry based on students’ statuses as digital natives. It focuses on a class of first-year composition students who reshaped an assignment to fit their own needs within the physical classroom and also enacted a shift to a virtual classroom. While doing so, they provided ways for each class member to individualize space within that digital environment, and they focused their project on examining the ways in which social networking forums colonize their daily lives. This article argues that by letting student innovation drive pedagogical practice—just as social media creators let user innovation drive the digital structures they produce—composition teachers can be assured of having a text for critique that blurs the lines between “private” student underlife and “public” classroom practice and legitimizes the creation of student-produced learning spaces. Using critical and cyberfeminist theories as lenses, this article draws conclusions about the future of computer usage in composition pedagogy based on students’ abilities to re-appropriate physical and digital classroom space.     

WritingResearchWriting: The Semantic Web and the Future of the Research Project

In this essay, I explore one advancement in particular—the Semantic Web—and discuss ways in which it stands to change students’ interaction with information in digital spaces, and how new forms of interaction could impact the teaching of writing. I go back to the earliest days of the Web in order to remind readers how information retrieval has evolved in the digital age. I also provide a general discussion of the vision, current state, and possible futures of the Semantic Web, and I focus on how the Semantic Web might alter the research process and, more importantly, the research-writing relationship. I also offer suggestions for teaching composition in advance of and for the Semantic Web. Although the Semantic Web is still several years off, I contend that research and writing will merge into a single process, thus presenting new opportunities for the teaching of writing then and, perhaps more importantly, now. These opportunities include helping students to identify the challenges of information retrieval and overload, to see research as more about establishing links and connections between information sources and less about finding the “right” sources, and to write for the Semantic Web—and, in doing so, teach students that researching and writing are inseparable.     

The New Media Writer as Cartographer

With the advent of GPS-enabled mobile writing devices such as smart phones and tablets, writing has become invested with a new power to express place—both through the geo-coding of one's writing location and through the presentation of place-based research on customized digital maps. This essay argues that teachers of writing must learn to accommodate and exploit these new and developing digital modalities while also making students aware of the theoretical and lived implications of digital cartographies. The essay first reviews several digital mapping projects that force their users to reconsider standard notions of place and indexicality. The essay then outlines a curriculum for teaching digital mapping in a composition-rhetoric course and presents successful examples of student work.     

Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric

This article develops a rhetorical theory of delivery for Internet-based communications. Delivery, one of the five key canons of classical rhetoric, is still an important topic for rhetorical analysis and production. However, delivery needs to be re-theorized for the digital age. In Part 1, the article notes the importance of delivery in traditional rhetoric and argues that delivery should be viewed as a form of rhetorical knowledge (techne). Part 2 presents a theoretical framework for “digital delivery” consisting of five key topics—Body/Identity, Distribution/Circulation, Access/Accessibility, Interaction, and Economics—and shows how each of these topics can function strategically and heuristically to guide digital writing.     

Complexity, class dynamics, and distance learning

Classroom participants learn early on that each classroom has its own dynamic comprised of personalities, motivation levels, skills, and other variables. This paper explores features of complexity theory—nonlinearity and emergent self-organization—relevant to dynamics in physical or virtual classrooms. These central notions of complexity theory and their importance in composition classrooms help explain why students in virtual classrooms are often less successful than their physical classroom counterparts in negotiating the eddies of virtual interactions. The paper closes with a brief consideration of how teachers can interrogate all the elements of teaching and classroom context (whether physical or virtual) to influence the emergent dynamic of our classrooms.     

Coding with power: Toward a rhetoric of computer coding and composition

This article explores the connection between computer programming (coding) and traditional composition. It first looks at how a discussion about adopting the open source community's copyleft publishing model suggests a deeper parallel between coding and composition than has been previously acknowledged. By repositioning the rhetorical triangle as a coding triangle, the article argues that the act of writing programs for a machine informs the process of constructing an audience, in traditional composition. To better inform the act of how a traditional writer invokes an audience, the article summarizes how Walter J. Ong has characterized this process. The article then examines how Claudia Herbst's portrayal of the cultural power of computer code raises questions as to how computer users similarly invoke an author. It also briefly considers how computer programming texts have characterized coding as an act of writing. Next the parallels between coding and composition and their treatment thus far in composition literature and new media theory are considered. The article considers Alfred Kern's work in employing BASIC programming to teach grammar and composition and then offers suggestions for thinking of new ways that a knowledge of coding can inform the teaching of writing. This article concludes with guidelines for writing teachers who wish to incorporate computer coding into their curriculum.     

Anxiety and the Archive: Understanding Plagiarism Detection Services as Digital Archives

Based on a case study of the popular plagiarism detection service Turnitin, particularly its “Legal Document,” this article contends that plagiarism detection services should be viewed as digital archives. Services like Turnitin not only seek to regulate what constitute original texts and appropriate writing practices but also to advance conceptions of the work that archives should do in storing and circulating texts in digital spaces. This article concludes that the services we sometimes use to ensure the integrity of students’ texts can themselves be of questionable integrity—largely through the design of their archives. As increasing numbers of texts take digital form, the problems and promise of digital archives will demand thoughtful responses that do not rush to replace questionable writing and research practices with equally troubling pedagogical and archival ones. These thoughtful responses start with exploring the use of plagiarism detection service archival technology in unadvertised ways.     

Situating L2 writing in global communication technologies

This article draws on the strengths of two fields—technology and intercultural studies—to present a model for theorizing and developing research methods that ethically and accurately situate L2 writing and communication technologies. Much research in communication technologies and writing use so-called localized approaches to intercultural inquiries. However, because these approaches focus on the concreteness of local situations, they do not provide a valid or ethical frame for understanding the influence of communication technologies across cultures. Because communication technologies restrain and reinforce certain communication possibilities and corresponding rhetorical and cultural patterns, they do not relate to or fit each cultural and rhetorical tradition the same way. Rather, communication technologies develop complexly different relations to each cultural and/or rhetorical tradition across the globe. Consequently, each rhetorical tradition uses each communication technology with a distinct sense of purpose, audience-author relations, information needs, and organizational patterns. This article first overviews the debate about technology-culture relationships and then explores how the difference-based lens cannot ethically and accurately situate L2 writing and technology. Next, drawing on research in intercultural studies and international human rights, the article sets up an intercultural frame for examining L2 writing and technologies. Finally, it puts into practice this intercultural-technology frame by looking at L2 writing in Ecuadorian contexts.     

The fair use doctrine: History, application, and implications for (new media) writing teachers

Writing teachers have always had to contend with plagiarism. However, the technology of the Internet and the thorny issues of copyright law complicate how we teach legal and ethical use of others’ materials in the networked classroom. Our pedagogy and curriculum choices and our students’ writing practices are shaped by a legal infrastructure that includes the fair use doctrine. Our understanding and knowledge of the fair use doctrine should become second nature to us. Critical awareness of fair use, the four-factor test, and how to conduct appropriate analyses when using others’ materials must become part of the everyday digital writing/new media classroom curriculum. To this end, the author summarizes the salient points of law and practice of fair use and demonstrates, in small ways, how the fair use doctrine can inform the teaching of writing in digital contexts. As teachers, researchers, and experts of writing, the discourse of fair use must be considered in addition to the discourse of plagiarism.     

Das ökonomische kalkül eines anbieters von mediendateien bei filesharing-diensten

Filesharing has recently proved to be one of the most controversial applications in the Internet. Millions of users enjoy downloads of billions of media files such as songs or movies. But where do these files come from? While the economic rationale to download files is obvious, the rationale of individuals to actually share and therefore internalize the costs (i.e. the risk of being sued for copyright infringement) is not obvious. Consequently empirical studies have shown a large proportion of users not offering any but demanding files and therefore freeride on their peers. Nevertheless sharing can be rational. This article offers a theoretical base to explain sharing and proves that the users’ utility considerations depend heavily on the networks life cycle. The user’s utility of sharing decreases over time. In order to prevent the (theoretically) inevitable break-down of the filesharing network, the authors present strategies for filesharing networks to enhance the user’s willingness to share.     

Public Writing in Gaming Spaces

Although recent composition scholarship has focused on public writing and civic participation, classroom practices do not (yet) seem to match the theory. This trend should not indicate, though, that public writing is not being done—rather that we may have to look beyond the classroom to see our students participating in it. “Public Writing in Gaming Spaces” argues that the writing computer gamers do in and for their online communities is not only directed to clearly definable audiences and with specific purposes, but also has the potential to institute real, measurable change within gaming communities and the larger gaming industry. What is more, unlike conventional academic spaces and workspaces, the playspace in which gamers write is comprised of textual exchange that is self-motivated; the writers themselves collaboratively construct them. “Gamer-authors” ultimately discover that they are agents who have the power, through writing, to shape the electronic worlds—games and other online spaces—they regularly inhabit, putting into sharp relief how writing does, in fact, matter. It can institute change.     

Challenging Intellectual Property Law in the Internet: An Overview of the Legal Implications of the MP3 Technology

This paper attempts to provide an understanding of the contrast between the fundamental notion surrounding the Internet that global society should benefit from access to free flow of information, whilst unauthorised copying of material normally protected by copyright can be facilitated. The paper focuses on the legal implications of the emergence and widespread use of the MP3 technology for the digital compression and distribution of audio music files over the Internet. The analysis explores issues of copyright infringement and unauthorised reproduction and distribution of copyrighted music over the Internet as highlighted in two separate cases concerning two start-up Internet companies, MP3.com and Napster. Additionally, to the extent that the outcome of the aforementioned cases are likely to influence the future of copyright protection in the online environment, the paper addresses the legal implications of the MP3 technology in relation to the applicability, adequacy and effectiveness of the existing legal framework to reach to a fair balance between the rights of the users of the Internet to free access to information and the protection of the rights of copyright holders thus providing us with the opportunity to question the fundamentals of copyright protection in the electronic environment.     

Ethical and legal issues for writing researchers in an age of media convergence

With the convergence of digital media into ever-widening social and technological networks for creation and distribution, the contexts for writing and the study of writing and writers have certainly changed. Researchers must navigate a dense matrix of ethical and legal issues in all phases of research when studying the ever-changing processes and products of digital communications. In this article, I draw from numerous sources to articulate a few of the challenges facing digital writing researchers in this age of convergence, focusing on issues of representation (researcher, participant, third-party), issues of informed consent, and issues of copyright and fair use.     

Negotiating What's at Stake in Informal Writing in the Writing Center

How do students learn expectations for “informal” online composition? This article details the results of a qualitative study that examines how students and writing consultants negotiate and define writing conventions for “low-stakes,” digital composition: that is, writing assignments that are composed for Blackboard discussion forums and receive only completion grades. Study results are based on both a survey of student experiences with digital composition and a writing center consultation case study at a large, southeastern, RU/VH university. Student anxiety about digital composition and classroom instruction have contributed to writing centers’ status as space for students to work out their fears and questions about new media. This study reports on how digital composition in writing classes has impacted the ways in which writing centers must address issues of audience, consider new methods for invention, and contend with a renewed focus on grammatical correctness. The article presents suggested pedagogy for emerging digital composition and poses questions to those in computers and composition about how we might best approach classroom instruction as digital composition genres evolve.     

Watermarking protocols: an excursus to motivate a new approach

Digital watermarking is one of the techniques that can be used to support digital copyright protection. It enables copyright owners to insert a perceptually invisible watermark within any copy of content that is distributed on the Internet. The main aim is to use watermarks to implement copyright identification and content tracking. However, digital watermarking is not sufficient to ensure an adequate copyright protection, if it is not employed in conjunction with watermarking protocols, which define the schemes of the web transactions by which buyers can purchase protected digital content distributed by content providers in a secure manner. Therefore, watermarking protocols play a central role in the field of digital copyright protection by means of watermarking techniques. They have to ensure both a correct content protection and an easy participation of buyers in the purchase transactions of the contents distributed on the Internet. This paper presents a new watermarking protocol based on an innovative, buyer centric, and mediated design approach. The result is a secure protocol that enables buyers to easily participate in the transactions by which they can buy digital protected content, and this makes the protocol suited for the current web context.     

Hacking the cool: The shape of writing culture in the space of New Media

Beginning with a problematic assignment in a “New Media Writing” class, this article demonstrates, first, the significant, perhaps irreconcilable differences in the writing/reading environments of print as opposed to New Media: the interiority, on one hand, of the individual text implied in the “shape” of narratives and other elaborated verbal performances and, on the other hand, the mythic exteriority of networked, information space and the market logic of its “attention economy.” These differences pose a challenge not only to the traditional practices of academic, literary, and professional discourse communities, but to what this article terms “writing culture”—that is, popular cultural practices and assumptions conditioned by the procedures and experience of textual elaboration. Examining student hypertexts, key critical works on New Media, web sites, and literary theory and history, this article suggests a solution to this challenge, arguing that the future development of online writing genres ultimately cannot depend on imposing written shapes on network space. Instead, a close analysis of a hoax from the auction site, eBay, suggests how parody can constitute a lens through which the Web's own generic conventions filter the critical/creative consciousness that has long epitomized writing culture.     

The politics of the code

This article explores the software behind the interface of the programs we use in composition classrooms—the principles of Structured Programming (SP), file structure, and some other significant issues in programming—and places the production of software in a cultural context. Programming protocol is shaped by two major strands: the profit imperative and the hierarchical structure of corporate America. The assumptions and procedures of Structured Programming are critiqued, and hypertext, structured programming, and natural-language writing are compared. This article suggests that writing instructors think about ways to customize programs used in their composition classes and to understand the implications and limitations of the necromancy of software.     

Exploring the Digital Divide on the U.S.-Mexico Border Through Literacy Narratives

Building upon the work of Scenters-Zapico's (2010) Generaciones, this article examines the digital literacy development and practices of two students passing through three different educational institutions on the U.S.-Mexico border. The author makes the argument that literacy narratives such as the ones shared here are vital for complementing the work done by broader quantitative studies on the digital divide, as they document differences that may be otherwise overlooked. In exploring the very different narratives of two students transitioning through high school and into a two-year college or four-year university, this article complicates understandings of the digital divide by exploring technological divides between educational institutions and the role that gateways, external sponsors, and self-sponsorship play in students’ technological literacy development, especially when confronted with limitations on access. The discussion and findings have implications for writing program administrators as well as composition teachers and researchers, including those teaching in online environments.     

Facilitating fair use in the digital age

The paper refers to the response of the digital content industries to the threat of large scale digital copyright piracy and their successful lobby of legislatures on a global scale for laws that prevent it. It points to the basic problem of the resulting laws in not striking an appropriate balance between the interests of digital copyright holders and others who may have legitimate claims to access and use a protected work. It argues that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (and other similar laws) takes an all or nothing approach to circumvention technologies. This article advocates a new approach, namely developing a simple and inexpensive procedure to resolve disputes before an administrative agency about lack of access to a protected work for legitimate purposes. It contends that such an approach will prove more effective than current legislation and legislative proposals.