Letter from the Editors

Gail E. Hawisher , Email Address
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Cynthia L. Selfe
The Ohio State University, USA

We write this letter in the heat of summer knowing full well that readers will have the pleasure of reading these excellent articles in the wintry weather of December. Regardless of the time of year, however, we are certain you will find these articles filled with insights as to what it means to be a writer, researcher, and teacher of writing in these early years of the 21st century. Each article takes on issues related to the changing practices of writing—indeed multimodal composing—and how these changes require that the profession modify its teaching expectations and its views of writing culture while at the same time enacting research practices that go beyond a focus on individual writers. The articles also require we look anew at scholarship in educational policy circles so that emerging policies fully recognize the complexities that attend current work with digital media.

To start us off, Johndan Johnson-Eilola (Clarkson University) and Stuart A. Selber (Penn State University) lead this issue with “Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage” in which they challenge teachers of composition “to reconsider taken-for-granted assumptions about plagiarism and originality.” In the tradition of the social turn, Johnson-Eilola and Selber recognize the importance of remix practices and find that pedagogical practices still tend to privilege traditional notions of authorship. They urge writing teachers to adopt the concept of the “assemblage,” a blend between the concepts of original and plagiaristic productions. For them, assemblage emphasizes the remixing of artifacts and their rhetorical performance in new contexts. This approach, they argue, “can aid invention, leverage intellectual and physical resources, and dramatize the social dimensions of composing in this day and age.”

Next, Jeremiah Dyehouse (University of Rhode Island) in “A Politics for Interactivity: Progressivism and its Limits in Federal Congressional Deliberations of Distance Education Policy” provides an important look at the judicial processes that shape distance education policy. Tracing the use of a single term, interactivity, over several legislative deliberations, Dyehouse shows how the term has been defined and redefined over the course of distance education policy reform. With an analysis of reformers’ discourse, Dyehouse presents a look into the arguments made about online interactivity: “[B]etter informed arguments about interactivity and its complexities,” he writes, “can offer improvements to contemporary educational progressivism, including progressive policy proposals.”

Craig Stroupe (University of Minnesota Duluth) continues with “Hacking the Cool: The Shape of Writing Culture in the Space of New Media.” In this article, Stroupe focuses on what he sees as an incongruity between contemporary “writing culture”—which he defines as “popular cultural practices and assumptions conditioned by the procedures and experience of textual elaboration”—and the traditional discursive practices of academic, literary, and professional realms. With a focus on narrative form, Stroupe shows how individual texts and their verbal performances cannot impose “written shapes on network space.” Parodies, however, he argues, offer productive insights into how “the Web's own generic conventions filter the critical/creative consciousness that has long epitomized writing culture.”

Martin Guardado and Ling Shi (University of British Columbia) then feature a study of peer-review practices in “ESL Students’ Experiences of Online Peer Feedback.” Following a class of 22 second-language learners in their experiences with online peer review and their ensuing revision practices, Guardado and Shi find this text-only peer review environment “retains some of the best features of traditional written feedback” and “pushes students to write balanced comments with an awareness of the audience's needs.” They suggest that anonymity facilitated critique; however, Guardado and Shi also note that some interactions resulted in one-way communications rather than dialogues. They close with suggestions for maximizing the benefits of online peer review.

Finally, turning to issues of research methodology, Jean Marie Rose (Penn State University, Berks) presents “When Human Subjects Become Cybersubjects: A Call For Collaborative Consent.” Rose follows the first two articles by elaborating on the topic of authorship but with an emphasis on research guidelines and the ideological by-products they inadvertently further in the minds of students. The guidelines approved by the Conference on College Composition and Communication for the study of human subjects, Rose argues, “are grounded in an individualist ethos that is an inadequate frame for researching contemporary writing pedagogy.” She appropriately notes that requiring informed, individual consent from students betrays a belief in their individual ownership over written productions. As a possible solution, Rose offers the idea of students’ collaborative consent as a means “to do important ideological work by sanctioning collaboration and validating students’ extracurricular digital literacies.”

With this issue, we also want to thank Envera Dukaj, who has been Associate Editor extraordinaire at Ohio State University. No issue in Vera's tenure has gone untouched by her remarkable editing skills, and for this and her generosity in all things, we thank her sincerely. She will be sorely missed as she goes on to pursue other studies in completing her PhD work. We all hope here at Computers and Composition that you, our readers, enjoy reading the articles offered in this issue as much as we have profited from reading and compiling them as well.

The Ohio State University

www.osu.edu

Volume 24, Issue 4, 2007

Announcements

Letter from the Editors

Gail E. Hawisher , Email Address University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Cynthia L. Selfe The Ohio State University, USA

Gail E. Hawisher , Email Address
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Cynthia L. Selfe
The Ohio State University, USA