Letter from the Editors

Gail E. Hawisher
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Cynthia L. Selfe
The Ohio State University

Greetings from Columbus and Urbana, where we are putting the finishing touches on our line-up of issues for this academic year! Computers and Composition 24.2 offers readers an outstanding collection of articles about the social issues associated with digital composing environments—and we believe these pieces will provide colleagues with much productive food for thought.

With the lead article of this issue, Debra Journet (University of Louisville) provides readers an unusual and insightful description of how one senior faculty member—who has not heretofore specialized in digital media—thinks about new forms of multimodal composing and teaching with digital media. In reflecting on her own experiences learning to compose with different modalities, Journet reflects on “what is at stake for English faculty who, like me, make this move” and offers some valuable “strategies for inducing senior colleagues to compose and teach with digital media.”

In “Narratives in the Database: Memorializing September 11th Online,” Joyce Walker (Western Michigan University) explores social concerns by focusing on the “collective/public aspects of the mourning process in online environments” and more specifically “how the World Wide Web shapes the production of both memorial ‘spaces’ and the process of mourning.” In examining the online memorial spaces that have emerged after the bombing of the World Trade Centers and September 11th, Walker asks us to “to consider how the process of memorialization online might be used to understand issues of space, time, memory, and the continuity of human relationships.”

Plagiarism, too, represents a knot of complexly wrought social understandings for teachers of digital composition, as Martine Courant Rife (Lansing Community College), the author of our second article, contends in “The Fair Use Doctrine: History, Application, and Implications for (New Media) Writing Teachers.” In particular, Rife explains, the technologies of the Internet serve to complicate some of the “thorny issues of copyright law” and help make the job of teaching the “legal and ethical use of others’ materials” challenging in networked classrooms. Rife, drawing on her law degree from the University of Denver, suggests balancing discussions of fair use with discussions of plagiarism to inform discussions of writing in digital contexts.

For fourth article in this issue, “CMS-based Simulations in the Writing Classroom: Evoking Genre through Game Play,” David Fisher (University of Arkansas, Little Rock) considers the social spaces of course/content management systems (CMSs) like WebCT and Blackboard. Describing a CMS that draws on a simulation-building methodology developed by Clark Aldrich, Fisher shows how students can be involved in “discourse-demanding situations” that are not otherwise easily “reproducible within the confines of the (computer) classroom.” Fisher argues that the ways in which CMS are “configured and deployed can provide students with the sense that they are immersed in a social activity other than taking a college course.”

In “Constructing Essentialism: Computers and Composition and the ‘Risk’ of Essence,” Thomas J. Skeen (University of Arizona) offers a socially situated look at the feminist discourses that have appeared in the pages of Computers and Composition. Noting a “subtle reliance on essentialist assumptions about women” in these works, Skeen builds on Laura Brady's discussion of “strategic” and “tactical” deployments of essentialism to argue that these articles, nevertheless, can contribute to feminist goals and to productive examinations of girls’ identity formation.

For our final major contribution, Dene Grigar (Texas Woman's University) in her “Global Dimensions” column explores a key set of socially and professionally informed series of questions that rest at the heart of the digital work for many teachers of composition: “Why are we interested in new media? What does new media offer rhetoric, and just as important, was does rhetoric offer new media?” As Grigar explains, it was her own re-reading of Roland Barthes with graduate students in her “Telematic Texts” class which helped her understand that “new media offered rhetoric the chance to comprehend the breadth of textuality, and rhetoric offered new media the mechanism for putting our experience with text into words.” Personally, Grigar explains, new media provides her a “new way of seeing, a new way of defining, a new way of knowing—of loving texts,” one that is “open and far-seeing” and exciting in its “transdisciplinatirity.”

In sum, this issue helps extend and expand our thinking on the social dimensions of digital environments—and provides us an opportunity to formulate new understandings about how such environments are constructed and shaped by existing social formations. We hope you enjoy reading each of these pieces as much as we have enjoyed bringing them to your attention and, in addition, that they prove generative and productive as you pursue your own teaching and scholarly efforts.

The Ohio State University

www.osu.edu

Volume 24, Issue 3, 2007

Announcements

Letter from the Editors

Gail E. Hawisher University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Cynthia L. Selfe The Ohio State University

Gail E. Hawisher
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Cynthia L. Selfe
The Ohio State University