“Writing in Electronic Environments”: A Concept … · “Writing in Electronic Environments”: A Concept ... “Writing in Electronic Environments,” primarily as a comple-

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Jeremiah Dyehouse, Michael Pennell, and Linda K. Shamoon

“Writing in Electronic Environments”: A Concept and a Course for the Writing and Rhetoric Major

Reflecting the digital turn in composition studies, multimedia writing courses have become commonplace in many writing programs. Yet these technology-rich courses take on new significance when located within a rhetorically based writing major, es-pecially as a core course. This article explores a developing writing and rhetoric major through the lens of a core course (WRT 235) titled “Writing in Electronic Environments.” Specifically, we see the course as an opportunity to make its practices and key concept, “writing environment,” more central to the major, and the writing program as a whole. Teaching writing in electronic environments also means encouraging our students to conceive of better spaces for the kinds of digital writing that they—and others—might eventually want to practice.

Developing an undergraduate major in writing and rhetoric presents many opportunities for faculty, including the chance to shape writers’ learning expe-riences over long time periods. With such opportunities comes a potentially forbidding series of challenges, however: of preparing an effective core cur-riculum, of deciding how to teach specialized activities in writing and rhetoric, and of supporting postgraduate majors’ job seeking, to take a few important examples.1 For academics working in schools where technology support for writers is weak, or where students are often underprepared for learning about

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Copyright © 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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writing technologies, teaching digital writing presents another very serious challenge. Writing today means writing digitally almost by definition (WIDE). Yet not all students, much less all writing and rhetoric majors, are equally well supported in their attempts to learn effective digital writing practices.

In rhetoric and composition, problems attending writers’ access to writ-ing technologies are increasingly well understood (Banks; Grabill; Moran), and teacher resources for technology-oriented learning are plentiful (e.g., Gurak; Gruber; Kimball). Even so, teaching effective digital writing in the context of a writing and rhetoric major raises special problems in instruction, course design, and the planning of learning outcomes. Digital or multimedia writing courses can serve as sites for learning about rhetoric, as Michigan State’s Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center Collective has argued. However, within the context of a writing and rhetoric major, where entire courses are devoted to rhetorical theory, reflection, and practice, digital writing courses can also serve as sites for contextualizing, qualifying, and extending—for building upon—prior and future rhetorical learning. At the University of Rhode Island, our writing and rhetoric degree program positioned its main digital writing course, “Writing in Electronic Environments,” primarily as a comple-ment to rhetorical learning available elsewhere in the program. In the process of positioning this course for inclusion in the major, we formulated its latest pedagogical approach, which explicitly emphasizes “environments” for literate and rhetorical activity.

In rhetoric and composition, environments for writing—electronic, digital, and otherwise—have been conceptualized through research on information architecture, ecology, and infrastructure (see discussion below). Sketched very broadly, scholarship on information architecture has promised to teach a more situational view on communicative objects’ design, while research on ecology has emphasized writers’ progressively more sophisticated understandings of the resource relationships entailed in composing. At our university, we have found these concept-metaphors generative but limited for our teaching, especially for the delivery of our degree program. In our own practice, we teach our students about writing environments by emphasizing the materiality of digital literacy, using the concept-metaphor “writing environments.” A perspective on digital writing’s specifically material circumstances works well for our students and our program, and it provides a key basis for future learning and practice in “architectural” and “ecological” modes. Teaching writing in electronic envi-ronments, for our purposes, means helping our students to reflect on digital writing by starting with the spaces within which it occurs. Teaching writing in

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electronic environments also means encouraging our students to conceive of better spaces for the kinds of digital writing that they might eventually want to practice.

This article describes faculty members’ work on three related areas of our university’s writing and rhetoric major: on the major curriculum, on one of its core courses, “Writing in Electronic Environments,” and on this course’s core concept, the “writing environment.” Beginning with a discussion of how the field has conceptualized environments for digital writing, we outline our own commitments to teaching the places of digital literacy. Next, turning to a practitioners’ history of “Writing in Electronic Environments,” we reflect on how the development of the course has conditioned our current understand-ing of it, including our decision to add an “environmental” literacy emphasis to the course.2 Last, we outline our own pedagogical practices for teaching “writing environments,” discussing how we teach about the material situations of digital literacy.

By sharing our research, reflection, and practice, we hope to advance dis-cussions of the writing and rhetoric major.3 We also hope to demonstrate the rich conceptual and practical problems raised by our decision to place digital writing at the center of the major. (Even for those readers without a major, we advocate a review of how courses such as “Writing in Electronic Environments” fit into the writing curriculum. Our position is that such courses can function as more than “how-to” computers and writing instruction. Rather, we believe that they can introduce and reinforce curriculum-wide approaches to rhetoric, offering an alternative perspective on traditional “new media” or computers and writing courses.) Finally, we see ourselves responding to a call for “innova-tive instructional models” that include “new visual and multimodal literacies” articulated by Cynthia L. Selfe, Gail E. Hawisher, and Patricia Ericsson: “it is incumbent upon new freestanding composition programs to lead the way in incorporating the full range of composing strategies into their curricula” (242). Our course offers an example of such curricular innovation.

Concept Metaphors for the Places of Writing: Information Architecture and EcologyInquiry into environments for writing has characterized scholarship in rhetoric and composition at least since cognitive models of composing (e.g., Flower and Hayes) began to give way to more explicitly socially situated writing research (Cooper). With increasingly widespread adoption of electronic and digital literacy technologies, however, inquiry into environments for writing has

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taken on increased urgency, leading to several scholarly proposals oriented toward stabilizing perspectives on them. Unlike research into the materiality of literacy (e.g., Haas; Reynolds), which describes digital literacy’s actual places and tools, proposals for stabilizing perspectives seek to metaphorize the places, spaces, and situations in which people practice digital literacy. “Architecture,” as in Richard Wurman’s “information architecture,” tends to represent digital literacy as a process of practical design, encouraging novel and creative de-velopments in usable digital communication. “Ecology,” as in Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day’s “information ecologies,” by contrast, suggests an explicitly analytical view on literacy systems in place, encouraging reflection on their strengths and weaknesses.

“Architecture” and “ecology” have had their proponents in rhetoric and composition, with the result that any present conceptualization of “writ-ing environments” is an exercise in multiplying perspectives. Indeed, as we discuss, we settled on our place-oriented strategy for teaching a perspective on “writing environments” through a reflective comparison of the merits of other concept-metaphors. We believe that such reflective activity is not only appropriate for our discipline’s specialists, however. Developing writers have a great deal to gain from comparing differing perspectives on digital literacy: trying them out, learning their capabilities and constraints, and examining their weaknesses for particular literate activities. We attempt to teach such an activity, although we finally settle on the “writing environment” concept-metaphor as providing a particularly useful perspective for our majors. When grounded in the consideration of the actual places where literacy occurs, we believe, a perspective oriented toward understanding “writing environments” can provide a useful complement to rhetorical learning.

Information ArchitectureAs outlined by Richard Wurman, “information architecture” engages in the “building of information structures that allow others to understand” (17). Of late, accounts discussing information architecture have taken up the networked possibilities of the World Wide Web (Rosenfeld and Morville; Lipson and Day; Morrogh), extending and updating Wurman’s suggestive formulation. Some in the field of technical communication have advocated information architecture as a productive area of study and a useful tool for educating technical com-municators. Michael Salvo, in particular, pushes for the inclusion of informa-tion architecture in technical communication pedagogies. In his “Rhetorical Action in Professional Space: Information Architecture as Critical Practice,”

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Salvo describes information architecture as a “user-centered art of rhetorical design” (41). Rather than merely describing situations, information architec-ture, according to Salvo, allows for and illustrates the potential for action on the part of technical communicators as they design information objects. In other words, information architecture serves as a “critical rhetorical strategy for intervention” that “ensures opportunities for agents to participate in long-term design and planning” (“Rhetorical” 54).

Given its practical focus on the design of communications and its func-tional attention to effects on discourse participants, perspectives drawn from “information architecture” make a good fit with variously “social” views of rhetoric and composition (e.g., Berlin; Faigley; see Brown). Comparing writ-ers and architects suggests the former’s identification with engaged, active, expert rhetor—or, at least, with the trained, professional freelancer. Addition-ally, comparing writers with architects helps to emphasize both the sites and constraints for which experts design communications. However, unlike much in social perspectives on rhetoric and composing, accounts of information architecture like Wurman’s also place special emphasis on the communicator as an individual, courting those with an expressive view. In a late statement on information architecture, for instance, Wurman describes “[u]ncovering the central purpose of any endeavor”—arguably a social kind of inquiry—through a process that involves “asking [the endeavor] what it wants to be and discovering how that relates to what you want or need it to be” (52). As a concept-metaphor for composing, information architecture retains a critical investment in the writing person, stressing the unique view that expert producers bring to pro-cesses of digital and multimedia literacy production.

Information Ecology“Information ecology” represents an oppositional concept-metaphor, in many cases, to information architecture. Even within Salvo’s illustration of the possibilities information architecture offers technical communication, for instance, he introduces information ecology in order to distinguish the two metaphors (“Teaching”). Gaining one of its first treatments by Marilyn Cooper in her 1986 article “The Ecology of Writing,” ecology as a metaphor provided an alternative to cognitive writing models’ typical emphasis on the solitary author. Ecological systems, according to Cooper, are “inherently dynamic” and reflect the fact that “all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all the other writers and writings in the system” (368). Focused on the act of writing,

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Cooper described a model of writers mediating information systems as they compose. Similarly, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day, in their book Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart, rely on information ecologies as a metaphor for our interaction with (and understanding of) information tech-nology. They define an information ecology as “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment” (49). Rather than focusing on technology, information ecologies highlight humans’ interaction with technologies.

In the field of technical communication, the ecology metaphor has been employed in the study of workplaces, especially of the proliferation and evolu-tion of genres within workplaces. In particular, Clay Spinuzzi has developed the analytical framework of genre ecologies as means for investigating compound mediation in workplaces through a “community-centered interpretive view” (“Compound”). Through his investigation (tracing) of genres in organizations, he shows how genres mediate the interactions between humans and technology (Tracing). In other words, genre ecologies are the “dynamic and unpredictable clusters of communication artifacts and activities” mediating humans’ interac-tions with complex technologies (Spinuzzi and Zachry 170–71).

Spinuzzi’s novel studies can suggest the typical emphasis of information ecology’s perspectives on the analysis of literate activity, not its production. Nardi and O’Day do push their readers to “get involved in the evolution of their information ecologies—jump into the primordial soup, stir it around, and make as many waves as possible” (58). And, echoing Wurman’s vision of information architecture, Spinuzzi and Zachry see genre ecologies as a means for both ana-lyzing and responding to the (over)flow of information. Yet, perspectives based on ecological metaphors do remain mostly analytical, oriented toward study, not production. Cooper’s early proposal for an “ecological” view was, after all, an intervention into scholarly analyses of writing, not into practice or pedagogy.

In their emphasis on analysis (as opposed to production) of literacy, perspectives drawn from the information ecology concept-metaphor usefully complement those drawn from information architecture. But they also comple-ment perspectives drawn from information architecture in their focus on the places of communication, not just on people who communicate. “Information ecologies,” Nardi and O’Day argue, “have a sense of locality” (51). Perspectives drawn from information ecology can emphasize, in their focus on locality, what Christina Haas has studied as the materiality of literacy: writers, technologies, and texts in interaction. The emphasis on locality, however, can also help fo-cus attention on the materiality of writing (and of rhetoric) in the way Nedra

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Reynolds, extending Haas’s work, has proposed it. In other words, attending to digital literacy’s localities—the copy shop, the library, the hospital intensive care unit—can emphasize how “bodies engage in writing under certain physical or material conditions” (Reynolds 42).

Information Infrastructure and the “Where” of Digital LiteracyA focus on literacy’s people, places, and things makes up the central empha-sis of our developing pedagogical investment in “writing environments,” our program’s core concept for its course on “Writing in Electronic Environments.” Drawn out against orientations toward (literate, rhetorical, and communicative) activity presupposed by rhetorical and other teaching approaches, our digital and multimedia writing course helps students attend to material dimensions of the places in which they act. In adopting this emphasis, we believe we are teach-ing our students to think toward an “infrastructural” perspective advocated by Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. In our view, infrastructure functions more as a scholar’s concept-metaphor, and, therefore, we do not explicitly teach it. Rather, by developing our students’ sense for the material and local aspects of literacy we seek to capture in “environments,” we are preparing them to learn about not only the “where” but also the “when” of digital literacy, with all that such an understanding might entail.

Christine Borgman has described the global information infrastructure as “a means for access to information” (30). In the teaching of writing, infra-structure, as DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill have advocated it, consists of the “institutional and political arrangements that [. . .] make possible and limit, shape and constrain, influence and penetrate all acts of composing new media in writing classes” (16). Infrastructure, in this view, embraces a critical materi-alism—it attempts to describe how writers struggle to negotiate the political arrangements that DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill describe. However, their infrastructural perspective also adds a temporal emphasis to materialism’s traditional focus on spaces and places. Their perspective is more concerned with conditioning than with conditions as such; for this reason, DeVoss, Cush-man, and Grabill emphasize the “when” of new-media writing over its “where.”

We believe that by teaching a perspective on the “where” of writing envi-ronments, we provide a starting point for learning the “when” of infrastructure. Of course, our focus on writing environments is hardly novel for the field. Descriptions of composing in an environmental framework appeared in the middle 1980s as the possibilities of composing with personal computers spread. In particular, John B. Smith and Marcy Lansman, in “A Cognitive Basis for a

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Computer Writing Environment,” connect the “revolution” in computing to the new writing environment made possible for writers. More recently, writing environments have been extensively discussed among computers and writing specialists. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber exemplify this kind of discussion when they write, “[t]echnologies are no longer tools to users; they are environments, spaces, worlds, and conversations” (x). Arguably, the field’s current understanding of “computer writing environments” has achieved its most public usage in the WIDE Research Center acronym, its studies, and prac-tice. In their “Why Teach Digital Writing,” for instance, the Center Collective points to a “changed writing environment—that is, to writing produced on the computer and distributed via the Internet and World Wide Web.”

Rhetoricians, too, have had recourse to the “writing environment” concept-metaphor (e.g., Hocks), as have literacy theorists (e.g., Johnson-Eilola; Taylor and Ward) and information theorists (e.g., Morrogh). We believe that we are doing something new, however, when we teach writing environment as a concept-metaphor, and particularly when we teach it in the context of our writing and rhetoric major. In “Writing in Electronic Environments,” our students study the concept-metaphor explicitly, comparing the perspectives it makes available with the views on electronic writing afforded by “information architecture,” “information ecology,” and another concept-metaphor, “rhetori-cal situation.” In our understanding, reflecting on writing environments means reflecting on electronic writing’s people, places, and things, combining elements from the views offered by information architecture and information ecology. Where architecture suggests an emphasis on the person of the communicator, ecology suggests a focus on locality, as we have argued. Considering writing environments as places and in terms of their people, we combine these em-phases in a consideration of the “where” of digital literacy.4 (Unfortunately, in our current laptop computer classroom configuration, students are confronted with this “where” on a daily basis—as they navigate, for instance, a power cord maze that compensates for our classroom’s faulty laptop batteries.)

As a part of their becoming more skilled writers, our majors will need to learn about digital literacy’s places, what defines their boundaries, and how to access them. Also, as reflective producers and consumers of writing, our majors ought to understand how writings’ circulation coordinates many—but still all material—places for writing and reading (Trimbur). For instance, when they graduate, we hope our majors will understand how scientific writing’s places include not only academic labs but also grant agencies and international pub-lishing houses, or that even “local” news presupposes a global media industry.

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Most generally, we conceive of teaching about writing environments as a key complement to the training in rhetoric and rhetorical theory we offer our majors. When rhetoric is taught other than as interpretation, its dynamism can become overwhelming for learners: acts of persuasion engage many complex and dynamic temporalities, including those of lived relationships, writing and its technologies, and development or process, to name just a few. Perspectives available in thinking about writing environments do not simply settle learners into some comfortably academic “space,” but they do often provide a begin-ning for working through questions about rhetorical strategy or function, for instance. “Writing environments” can also suggest the conditions that writers and rhetors have to work with and within, leading toward a more materialist appreciation of Aristotle’s available means. Finally, thinking about writing en-vironments can help writers appreciate how locations for writing can, might, and will change. Our desire to develop such an appreciation has increasingly influenced our thinking about where “Writing in Electronic Environments” fits in our major (and into students’ learning at our university). How we arrived at this curriculum development goal has been a process with its own history, however.

“Writing in Electronic Environments”: A Practitioners’ HistoryWith the approval of our undergraduate degree program in writing and rheto-ric, the 200-level “Writing in Electronic Environments” course became a core requirement for the major, one possible starting point in a sequence of five required courses. In this class, students finish the semester’s instructional se-quence by learning about writing environments’ theory and design, and they put this concept-metaphor into action by completing a digital writing project that brings them face-to-face with the need to alter or design a specific writing envi-ronment. For example, students, working in collaborative teams, have designed “collaboration stations.” This project and the environment concept-metaphor that drives it are part of the fifth iteration of this class in our program. In our view, the course has developed in a manner that parallels the development of computers and writing as a field, moving from the periphery of a rhetorically and critically concerned writing program toward the center of the curriculum.5

With assistance from the published literature on computers and writing, our group has developed this course through an extended reflective process. This reflective work has helped us generate real improvements for the course without sacrificing past innovations; indeed, we continually remind one an-other of what we have developed before, preventing collective forgetting.6 It is

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with this resource that we revised the course to support our new writing and rhetoric major, with the result that our core digital writing course became our site for teaching “writing environments” in concept and application.

The first iteration of “Writing in Electronic Environments” began in 1991 with a working title of “Writing with Computers in Career Settings,” reflecting both a targeted population of professional students and a sense that using computers for writing was a workplace phenomenon. Within two years of the course’s first offering, arguments drawn from writing process research had begun to replace occupational justifications for the course, changing its ratio-nale and, to some extent, its basic focus. A document offered to curriculum oversight committees, for instance, described the course’s second iteration in ways explicitly recalling research into writing process. For “Writing with Com-puters,” changing course goals, too, reflected the language of writing process approaches: for instance, “[t]his course aims to change the way you write on computer, helping you to use the computer to add depth to each step of the writing process” (Shamoon “WRT 235”).

In 2000, writing faculty members revised the title of the course to “Writing in Electronic Environments,” signaling a significant change in course design and a new iteration of the course. This third iteration was, in part, a response to work underway in the burgeoning field of computers and composition. Kristine Blair and Elizabeth Monske have argued for a “critical evolution” in computers and composition scholarship in the 1990s, prompted, they argue, by “rhetoric and composition’s collective turn toward critical theory and cultural studies” (444). Research and teaching-oriented scholarship in computers and composi-tion did grow more attentive to issues of culture, social power, and difference, and these issues were reflected in our course’s new iteration. Special themes or topics—for instance, the Internet and democracy or hate speech online—were a prominent new feature of “Writing in Electronic Environments.” Instructors gave conscious attention to critical analysis of the social hopes and promises for the uses of the technology, matched against students’ actual experiences as writers. For example, one project prompt focused on helping students ex-plore the disconnect between popular conceptions of the Internet as a site for democratic discursive practices and the actual literacy experiences of students. While attempting to engage students in the online deliberation of important social issues (through participation in the Internet E-Democracy Project; see, e.g., McKee), the course encouraged students’ critical habits of mind about literacy technologies and the claims that circulate around them.

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The fourth major revision of the course, begun in 2005, added an explicitly rhetorical dimension to instruction.7 But perhaps the most notable feature of this course was its emphasis on multiple layers of literacy instruction, recall-ing Stuart Selber’s “multiliteracies” pedagogy.8 In Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, Selber outlines his approach to teaching functional, critical, and rhetori-cal literacies, arguing for their combination in the “multiliterate” individual. Functional literacy, for Selber, involves “effective employment” of literacy technologies; critical literacy, “informed critique”; and rhetorical literacy, “re-flective praxis” (25). Published accounts of two key course assignments help to illustrate the revised course’s multiliteracies approach, which includes a blog project, a wiki project, and a website “redesign.” In each of these projects, students learn functional practices for effectively employing real-world writing technologies, recalling some of the professional and process-oriented emphases of the course’s first iteration. Students’ work in Wikitravel, a publicly maintained travelers’ information archive, can “[ask] students to consider the creation of knowledge in their digital-native culture,” opening the classroom for practice with Selber’s informed critique (Pennell 86). Finally, a third project, based on Melinda Turnley’s description of a website redesign project, emphasizes rhe-torical literacy. Through the process of identifying, analyzing, and planning out revisions to existing websites, the course’s students “engage,” as in Turnley’s account, “technical skills and design principles not as ends in themselves but as strategies for responding to particular rhetorical situations” (144).

Spring semester 2007 saw the teaching of a fifth and latest iteration of the “Writing in Electronic Environments” course, which now includes explicit attention to the concept-metaphors discussed above. As in the “Writing in Elec-tronic Environments” course’s fourth iteration, course units in the fifth iteration emphasize Selber’s functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies. A first project, centered on the design and maintenance of an “enthusiast blog” (Stefanac), engages students in the production and circulation of writing on the Web. As an introductory project, the course’s instruction places special emphasis on the functional literacies involved in setting up and maintaining a Weblog or blog: acquiring a Google account, for instance, or working through Blogger.com’s blog design “wizard.” A second project, on writing entries for Wikitravel, asks students to engage an online writing project as contributors, and provides a basis for learning critical perspectives on digital literacy in an ongoing project. A version of Turnley’s website redesign, the course’s third project, continues to engage students in both rhetorical analysis and the production of a “redesign” proposal, emphasizing Selber’s reflective praxis.

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Class work on concept-metaphors helps students and teachers focus on the functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies emphasized in each unit. Thus, during work on their blogs, students explore the concept-metaphor “in-formation architecture,” reading Wurman’s “The Business of Understanding” and responding to it in class. Likewise, student work on Wikitravel entries is enriched by the group’s reflective consideration of Nardi and O’Day’s “Informa-tion Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart.” Additionally, during the website redesign unit, students consult a textbook account of the “rhetorical situation,” a third concept-metaphor, using it to prepare their rhetorical analyses and redesign proposals.

Table 1 summarizes the first three units of the present course: in each unit, instruction leads students toward the completion of a writing project through a particular concept-metaphor, emphasizing one of Selber’s three literacies.

A fourth course unit teaches a fourth literacy emphasis—on the material and social spaces in which literate activity occurs—and a fourth concept-metaphor: writing environments. Bringing together functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies, a fourth course project engages students in work on design-ing electronic environments for writing. This project asks course participants to design and propose technological “collaboration stations” for community agencies, schools, communities, or business, encouraging students’ under-standing of the places in which literate activity occurs. Students design their collaboration stations materially and spatially—in terms of geographical loca-tion, and in terms of setting and furnishings—in addition to technologically. By engaging students in the process of designing and proposing a particular collaboration station, we teach “writing environment” as a concept-metaphor.

Teaching Writing Environments: The “Collaboration Stations” ProjectResearch on “co-present collaboration” and “single display groupware” (Beder-son, Stewart, and Druin) indicates two scholarly paths into a human-computer

Unit 1 2 3

Project/deliverable “Enthusiast” blog Wikitravel entry Website redesign

Concept-metaphor Information architecture Information ecology Rhetorical situation

Literacy emphasized Functional Critical Rhetorical

Table 1. The Fifth “Writing in Electronic Environments” Iteration’s First Three Course Units

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interaction problem highlighted in the present iteration of “Writing in Elec-tronic Environments.” Co-present collaboration means working together on a computer, sharing input devices, for example. Single-display groupware, a near-synonym, emphasizes the single output device that collaborating computer users might share. In a last project before work on portfolio assessment begins, students learn about, conceptualize, and propose technological environments that can support collaborative writing groups—groups, in researchers’ terms, that will practice co-present writing collaboration in single-display groupware installations. Bringing together several elements of previous course projects, students share published accounts of “collaboration station” research and design, question this research, these designs, and one another, and design and propose a local installation for their particular project.

In an initial offering of this project, students conceptualized and designed a wide range of collaboration stations, including an environment for collabora-tive marketing and product development, a station for local park planning, several music composition environments, and a collaboration station for the university’s writing center. Drawing on research and technology examples from the course’s asynchronous discussion, good proposals articulated a problem to be solved, detailing the station, its users, and their roles. As a part of the assignment, each proposal also attached an equipment list and a diagram for the proposed installation of all equipment. A design for the university’s writ-ing center, for instance, showed proposed collaboration stations in a drawing of the actual space where they would be housed. Illustrating furniture and computer technology in a particular writing center room, this proposal also detailed specific working roles for writers and tutors.

Our “collaboration stations” project builds upon research into collabora-tive writing (e.g., Lunsford; Lunsford and Ede) and includes perspectives drawn from human-computer interaction (Neuwirth, Kaufer, Chandhok, and Morris).9 Moreover, with our requirement that students conceive the technology instal-lation both spatially and materially, we encourage students to think about co-present collaboration’s potential purposes. Almost none of our students, for instance, had considered the prospect of composing in groups together, each with simultaneous access to a keyboard. Those who knew of co-present collaboration conceived it mostly technologically (in one memorable case, as fighting over the cursor in a campus computer science lab) or in the social con-text of computer gaming. As they work on their designs, our students consider the strong, shaping influences that physical and material writing environments exert on writers and writing activity. For example, in the development of a

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collaboration station for a sorority house’s common room, one student team explicitly addressed the room’s daily uses in relation to the writing that house members might do.

In instruction, the collaboration stations project supports the commit-ment of the course and the major to teaching a perspective on “writing environ-ments” explicitly. A summary statement from the course’s project description asks their groups to prepare a proposal for a specific kind of collaboration station, complete with diagrams or drawings, equipment lists, and descriptions of intended users, locations, and uses for the technology. In this project, that is, they imagine and design an environment for electronic writing. In addition, students gather and report on collaboration stations’ scholarly and practical literatures, providing them the chance to observe and interrogate others’ inquiry into (collaborative) writing environments. Using an asynchronous discussion board, students write posts on research (e.g., on “single display groupware”), on practical projects, and on questions raised by discussion. Collaboratively, that is, students discuss the design of collaborative composing environments, drawing out the ramifications of composing separately and together.

The course’s main in-class discussion of the “writing environment” concept-metaphor arrives at the end of the collaboration stations project, when students reflect on all four of the course’s concept-metaphors (“informa-tion architecture,” “information ecology,” “rhetorical situation,” and “writing environment”). For students, this discussion functions in several ways, includ-ing as preparation for writing their reflective portfolio introductions. For the university’s writing and rhetoric faculty, this reflective discussion emphasizes the kinds of conversations we want to stimulate throughout the writing and rhetoric major. At this moment in the course, instructors have the opportunity to highlight how a perspective on “writing environments” can complement other rhetorical learning. For example, students may be led to reflect on the concepts learned in “Writing Argumentative and Persuasive Texts,” another 200-level course required for the major, by addressing the impact of “where” in the crafting of arguments.

New media composing may take place in time, in a “when,” as DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill have argued. Our university’s students can benefit from considering how forms of digital literacy require a “where,” as well, as do all kinds of writing and rhetoric. The perspectives are not mutually exclusive; indeed, in our estimation, focusing on “where” may lead us to “when,” as stu-dents’ and majors’ experiences with technology foreground the fundamental interconnections between rhetorical activity and environments for writing. On

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the one hand, as the proposal element of the course project helps to indicate, digital writing environments are the objects of rhetorical negotiations taking place in community, school, and business institutions. On the other hand, as dead batteries, network problems, and outdated classroom software can sug-gest, physical, material situations are not the only problems facing denizens of digital writing environments.

Most abstractly, but perhaps most importantly, our focus on writing en-vironments lays some conceptual groundwork for future learning in the major, which tracks through different writing activity areas (e.g., “Writing Culture,” “Public Writing,” “Writing for Community Service,” and “Travel Writing,”) and different rhetorical learning opportunities (e.g., “Composing Processes and the Canons of Rhetoric,” “Writing and Rhetoric,” and a “Capstone in Electronic Port-folios”). Grounding majors’ sense for the materiality of writing environments can enrich their learning about rhetorical situations, for instance. Also, encour-aging lower-division majors to think about altering writing environments can help them to envision change in rhetorical activity’s ever-present mediations, which, for many, appear as fixed forms and channels. Finally, by emphasizing not only the “where” but also the “who” of writing environments—the course project’s intended users and uses, for instance—majors can begin to develop a stronger sense for how rhetorical activity affects individuals and groups differ-ently, and how some may be simply left out of planned writing environments.

A Concept and a Course for the Writing Major When our faculty considered the role of digital composing in majors’ learning, we treated it initially as a kind of additional instruction, repeating English and writing teachers’ early marginalization of digital writing and its practices. In time, however, we changed our stance, reconceptualizing digital writing as a central feature of the major. Adapting an existing offering in “Writing in Elec-tronic Environments” as one of the major’s five core courses, we have devised a curriculum that emphasizes digital writing as central to our students’ pro-ductive, reflective, and rhetorical activities. Correspondingly, and as we have described, we devised an approach to this key digital writing course that em-phasizes its “writing environment” concept. Developing the major occasioned our most recent revision of the course. But these revisions, in turn, draw upon a history of course development that predates the major, its concerns, and its opportunities.10 We believe that the result will enrich the major (and our majors) much as it has enriched our own understanding: by providing a novel series of perspectives through which we can view writing and rhetorical activity.

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At our university and in the field more generally, there is still much to do, however. We look forward to a time, for instance, when we can guarantee all our students access to multimedia writing environments for all of their writing and rhetoric courses. We cannot now. Yet we agree with Selfe, Hawisher, and Ericsson when they argue that programs “that exist at institutions lacking both material and electronic resources” might benefit most from developing “an expanded understanding of composition and multiple literacies” (275). Many of our students know intimately those “infrastructural” and “environmental” barriers to practicing effective digital literacy that we in rhetoric and composi-tion find ourselves well equipped to observe. Nevertheless, these same students sometimes arrive in our classrooms with inordinately high expectations for what they will be able to accomplish in a semester, or even in four years. For these students, we have begun to develop our understanding of what difference a focus on writing environments can make in undergraduate writing and rhetoric education. In addition to the other plans we have for this concept, we hope that our students, by using it, might begin to see their own situations more clearly.

As DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill explain, one of the benefits of an infra-structural perspective on digital writing is the creation of “space for reflection and change within institutional structures and networks” (14). We hope that by concentrating attention on the “where” of digital literacy, our students can gain some facility for thinking about its “when”—about change, for instance, or about infrastructures’ historical dimensions. However, and more basically, perhaps, we are deeply concerned with offering our students a perspective on writing and rhetoric that is particularly rooted in the here and now, in the actual spaces where digital writing—and writing in general—takes place. In our course, we focus on how what some call “shoulder-to-shoulder” writing collaborations can suggest the need for new or different digital writing environments. We will be content to begin with students’ learning about how appropriately designed writing environments can function centrally in effective writing practices.

Ultimately, placing “Writing in Electronic Environments” at the center of our writing and rhetoric major commits us to bettering our students’ conditions of access to digital literacy resources. Placing the course’s core concept, “writing environments,” centrally in the course and in our major provides one means, we think, for beginning to honor this commitment. If we are to be successful in accommodating schooling to our students, we must do more than change the curriculum, although that is an important beginning both for our program and for the field. We must also begin to change both program and campus

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resources for the learning of digital literacy. In this endeavor, too, our learning about “writing environments” may provide us with some critical resources.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank our colleagues in writing and rhetoric for their dedication, ideas, and dialogue.

Notes

1. Other opportunities and challenges for the writing major (and for the advanced writing curriculum more generally) are described in Shamoon, Howard, Jamieson, and Schwegler’s Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum.

2. We recognize that our focus on “writing environments” does not do justice to natural or living environments currently at risk, including in our locality. Derek Owens’s Composition and Sustainability treats the issue of composition’s relation-ship to “environmentalism” at length.

3. For recent research on writing majors, see O’Neill, Crow, and Burton; Adler-Kassner et al.

4. See Nagelhout and Rutz, as well as Myers, about the “where” of digital literacy as it applies to the classroom. We build upon such work to push writing environ-ments beyond the classroom.

5. As an anonymous reviewer pointed out to us, “it seems as though only theory is driving the curriculum revisions” we describe in this article, “not student outcomes.” As we move forward in programmatic assessment of our general education courses and our writing major, we will generate outcomes-based evaluations that can influ-ence future iterations of “Writing in Electronic Environments.”

6. Writing this article has provided one important way for us to remember les-sons that might have been forgotten from past iterations of “Writing in Electronic Environments,” and work for it has included formal meetings, a dedicated “blog,” and many hallway conversations. In addition, two from our group have designed a joint syllabus for “Writing in Electronic Environments,” and two others of us con-sult regularly on the design and teaching of daily lessons. In this way, we hope to avoid computers and composition scholarship’s occasional amnesias (Holdstein).

7. We do not expect “Writing in Electronic Environments” to teach our students rhetorical theory. In our vertical curriculum, we have other courses that focus on rhetoric, for instance, “Writing Argumentative and Persuasive Texts.”

8. Although we rely on Selber’s levels of literacy in this section and throughout the article, we feel we ought to draw attention to Ed Nagelhout’s depiction of four primary literacies for technical writing classrooms. These literacies—rhetorical,

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visual, information, and computer—echo our use of Selber’s literacies. However, we find Selber’s levels resonate more with our curriculum and major, as well as the “Writing in Electronic Environments” course’s design.

9. Functioning versions of the collaboration station concept exist in increasing numbers in industry locations (see, e.g., Huang, Mynatt, Russell, and Sue) and in colleges and universities (e.g., Cornell University, University of Oregon, and Stan-ford University).

10. Shamoon et al.’s focus on the advanced writing curriculum in Coming of Age suggests one piece of this rich and complicated history. Another statement of our program’s collaborative work on issues in course development can be found in Miles et al.’s “Thinking Vertically: A Response to Downs and Wardle’s ‘Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions.’”

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Jeremiah DyehouseJeremiah Dyehouse, assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island, teaches courses in scientific and technical writing, writing in electronic environments, and rhetorical theory, and he directs the University of Rhode Island’s Writing Center. He has published articles on rhetoric and educational technology in Written Communication and Computers and Composition.

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