Conference Announcement and Abstracts

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On behalf of the conference organizers,

Computers and Writing Online 2005 When Content Is No Longer King: Social Networking, Community, and Collaboration

The 2005 Computers and Writing Online Conference begins on Tuesday, May 31, and runs through Monday, June 13. This is the first-ever online conference in our field to be open-access, Creative Commons-licensed, and hosted on a weblog, and it promises to be innovative and insightful. We set out to perform the concepts and values of the conference theme -- networking, community, and collaboration -- in our review process, which was open to the public and emphasized group interaction and helpful, supportive feedback. The responders have done an excellent job engaging the authors' ideas, and the authors' responses to the feedback they received have really demonstrated how enriching this public, collaborative model can be for scholarly work. The conference organizers would like to extend a big "Thank you!" to the authors and the responders. Included with each abstract in this announcement is the link to the original; we strongly encourage you to read the comments.

As with the abstracts, the presentations are accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and anyone with an account at Kairosnews (registration is free) can leave comments. For more information, visit the CW Online 2005 weblog: http://kairosnews.org/cwonline05/home

Drawing upon the conference's theme of exploring the increasing value of the network and collaborative practices within it, presenters examine the role(s) played by social networking applications and other technologies that are intended to foster social interaction, community, and collaboration. Alongside studying the technologies themselves, presenters will observe and describe the ways that writers and users are engaging the technologies and how such engagement is changing our ideas about writing and teaching writing, and, more broadly, the concepts of rhetoric and composition themselves. We very much hope you'll get involved by leaving your comments, or, if you prefer, respond on your own weblog and leave a trackback! Or write a response on your wiki! Or tag presentations on your del.icio.us or de.lirio.us list! You get the idea. This conference is meant to be networked.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM (SHORT VERSION)

May 31: Charlie Lowe and Dries Buytaert: It's about the Community Plumbing: The Social Aspects of Content Management Systems

June 2: Cathy Ma: What's so special about the Wikipedia?

June 4: Olin Bjork and John Pedro Schwartz: E-service Learning

June 6: Bob Stein, Kim White, Ben Vershbow, and Dan Visel: Sorting the Pile: Making Sense of A Networked Archive

June 7: Traci Gardner: From Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine to The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriguez

June 8: Lennie Irvin: MOO-the Second Decade? 7:00-8:30 p.m. CDT ProNoun MOO

June 9: John Spartz: Web Accessibility and Its Impact on Student Learning: A Qualitative Study

June 10: Matt Payne: Digital Divides, Video Games, and New Media

June 11: Marina Meza & Susanna Turci: Desiging an Electronic Bilingual Dictionary for International Trade

June 12: Collin Brooke: Weblogs as Deictic Systems

June 13: Erika Menchen: Feedback, Motivation and Collectivity on del.icio.us

CONFERENCE PROGRAM WITH ABSTRACTS (LONG VERSION)

May 31: Charlie Lowe and Dries Buytaert: It's about the Community Plumbing: The Social Aspects of Content Management Systems

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4282

In the summer of 2003, we worked on creating a general description of Drupal--an open source content management system (CMS)--for the About page on drupal.org. While Drupal is clearly within the class of applications know as content management systems, we felt that to describe it with that term alone would not present a clear picture of the breadth and range of Drupal's capabilities. Thus, the final description ended up describing Drupal with a total of four characteristics, although notably not distinct:

  • content management
  • weblog
  • discussion-based community software
  • collaboration

Why is it then that the term CMS alone would not suffice? The word "content" places much emphasis on the product over process; it fails to emphasize the social use of CMS's, a mislabeling which places too much emphasis on the content itself at the expense of the communication and collaboration the better of these systems implement. The databases that back most CMS's often do much more than just store documents; for example, they preserve and connect conversations internally (commenting), connect Internet sites externally (RSS, aggregation, trackback), manage users (user accounts), and store lists of links to other pertinent websites (blogrolls). In order to better understand how CMS's are being influenced by the precepts of social software and their role in creating social networks online, this presentation will

  • explore Drupal's social software features,
  • narrate its genesis as software serving a community
  • explain the influence of the community itself on Drupal development and the software's influence on the community that creates and uses it.

The presentation is the text of a work in progress, a chapter in preparation for an edited collection. In composing this text, we draw on the coauthors' unique perspectives. One of us is the founder and lead developer of Drupal, and the other a researcher in Computers and Writing and a participant in the Drupal community.

June 2: Cathy Ma: What's so special about the Wikipedia?

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4270

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that invites the participation of everyone. As long as you have internet access, you can be part of their editorial team. For some people, the Wikipedia is a site for them to look up information perhaps in different languages. When most people expect the site to be flooded by vandalism given its open nature, the reverse is true. Instead of getting spammed by vandalism, the website sustains and expands in an exponential rate. Right now there are about half million articles on the English Wikipedia, which was the first language of Wikipedia until it evolved into more than 100 languages since 2001.

But what exactly are so different about wikipedia than other online social project? What is this new mode of collaboration? What are the conditions needed for a site like wikipedia to become successful? Can this new means of collaboration be adopted elsewhere? Who are the participants, and why are they participating? In what ways are they participating and what are they getting out from the whole process? In this paper, the social, political and cultural implications of wikipedia will be explored with the support of research examples in hope of answering the above questions in perspectives.

June 4: Olin Bjork and John Pedro Schwartz: E-service Learning

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4277

In traditional service learning projects, students engage in community service and then write about their experiences. We propose an e-service learning model in which students serve the community through their writing. In this paradigm, students first familiarize themselves with an institution or organization that serves their campus or larger community. Familiarity can be achieved through interviewing the organization's members, observing its activities, touring its facilities, and reading its literature. Students then evaluate the organization's Web site, if it has one, and seek to answer two questions: Does the Web site accurately represent the organization? Does it merely promote an agenda or does it also seek to foster a network of individuals with common interests and goals? Student writing can serve the organization, and thus the campus or larger community, in one of two ways. Students who have experience in accessible Web design, or have an instructor who is prepared to train them, can build a new Web site for the organization or make their old Web site more representative, accessible, and interactive. Students who have no such experience or training but have been introduced to principles of Web design, rhetoric, and networking, can write a detailed proposal for the construction or re-construction of a Web site and send it to the organization. In our presentation, we will discuss projects that, we will argue, fall under the rubric of e-service learning.

June 6: Bob Stein, Kim White, Ben Vershbow, and Dan Visel: Sorting the Pile: Making Sense of A Networked Archive

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4275

The installation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Gates" in New York City was spontaneously celebrated by a massive gathering in Central Park. As we walked through the Gates, snapping pictures with our digital cameras, we noticed hundreds of other people doing the same. It occurred to us that the kind of activity this artwork engendered, impromptu community building and prolific content creation, made it a perfect subject for our first networked book experiment.

We decided to see if we could build an archive, then edit and shape it using existing software. We accomplished the first part of this quite handily, gathering over 3,000 images through the Flickr network, 75 story links on our del.icio.us page, and 50 blog posts with 27 comments. But as we moved into the next phase of our project, editing the assembled archives, we quickly discovered limitations inherent in the software, which does not allow community participation in the organization of content. Programs like Flickr, created primarily as collection, storage, and sharing facilitators, do not set up useful editorial structures for understanding an archive. The problem of how to get the collective to find meaning in the collection is the focus of this paper which describes: our experience building a collective memory archive with social software; the limitations we came up against when we began the editorial process; questions the project raised about the role of the editor in a networked environment; and how social software might be modified to enhance the editorial process.

June 7: Traci Gardner: From Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine to The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriguez

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4290

Quick—how would you say children first learn about and experience technologies? My typical answer used to point to television and movie depictions, commercials and advertisements, video games, access to computers in the home. As I've spent more and more time reading and exploring children's and young adult literature for my work with ReadWriteThink, I've found that computers and other technologies are more and more frequently integrated in the books that students read. Students without computer access may first experience the format of instant messages and e-mail in a novel, and students' experiences with the many netiquette and social issues surrounding technology issues may stem just as often from picture books and novels as it does from what they see on television or at the movies.

Over the last 3 years or so, I've been gathering fiction (and some nonfiction) that is directly aimed at pre-K to 12th grade readers to try to determine how the books that students read shape their attitudes about technology. The earliest picture book, The Little Red Computer, published in 1969, entertains listeners with the tale of a computer that doesn't understand numbers but ultimately succeeds because it is "a computer with a mind of its own" (27). Over the intervening years, children could choose from such picture books as Kermit Learns How Computers Work, Franklin and the Computer, Patrick's Dinosaurs on the Internet, and A House with No Mouse. Chapter books over the years have included The Computer That Ate My Brother, The Boggart, and Doing Time Online. Books published most recently not only include computer technologies as part of the setting, but they also include faux computer-mediated messages and texts as part of the story. M.T. Anderson's Feed shows readers a sci-fi vision where computers feed directly into the characters' heads, feeding these characters just-in-time facts and information. Lauren Myracle's TTYL and Ellen Wittlinger's Heart on My Sleeve are told through IMs and e-mails (and some letters). Click Here: To Find Out How I Survived Seventh Grade by Denise Vega and The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriguez by Judy Goldschmidt tell their stories through blog entries and Web pages.

I'd like to propose a conversation about the resources that students are likely to encounter, how they are likely to think about technologies as a result, and how we can tap these experiences in the classroom. It's unlikely that participants in the conversations will know (let alone, have read) the various texts that will contribute to this conversation. As a result, I'm thinking of this discussion as a highly hypertextual series of book talks that provide summaries and key issues from several of the books and then invite discussion about these texts. Rather than a polished piece, I am thinking of this presentation as an extended opportunity to make online resources that share the information that I have been gathering on my bookshelves. My goal is to begin and develop a project on technologies in children's literature that will be an ongoing source of information for K12 teachers as well as college teachers who are exploring how students' literacy skills are shaped before they reach the college classroom.

June 8: Lennie Irvin: MOO-the Second Decade? 7:00-8:30 p.m. CDT ProNoun MOO

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4288

MOO, or Multi-User Object Oriented Domains, were one of the first real time synchronous tools that connected "online" users within composition classrooms or virtual communities in the early 1990s before the Internet. But the text-based origins of MOO have not weathered well the growth of the Internet and the blog-era. Other online tools like blogs, CMS platforms like Drupal, and course platforms like WebCT or Blackboard have dominated the online teaching space for writing teachers in recent years. Some question has been raised whether (as Tari Fanderclai stated) "MOO is dead." Last year saw a number of MOO decline landmarks—the shift of the Computers & Writing Online synchronous discussions to another platform than a MOO and the death of Connections MOO. Can MOO evolve to fit a modern Internet environment?

This presentation will discuss the present state of MOO for the field of Composition and Rhetoric. Is it still relevant and why? In particular, it will showcase the new evolutions of the enCore Learning Environment and discuss the effort of the new enCore Consortium created to support development of the enCore. The presentation will highlight the unique aspects of MOO (especially within an enCore interface) that are still desirable features for teaching and collaborative learning. It will showcase the new enCore version 5 and discuss the new directions enCore is taking to make MOO a viable online learning environment for the future.

June 9: John Spartz: Web Accessibility and Its Impact on Student Learning: A Qualitative Study

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4287

On the heels of a presentation at the 2004 ATTW conference that analyzed the literature and rhetorical appeals used by authors to advocate for the embrace of web accessibility standards issued forth by the W3C (WAI) and Section 508 of the Educational Rehabilitations Act Amendments, I have begun to do further research on web accessibility issues, specifically addressing their impact on student learning. Unfortunately, there is a serious dearth of existing literature addressing web accessibility in the academy. My research focuses on this gap and hopes to address accessibility issues that students face when attempting to be successful at a large, public, postsecondary institution.

For about the past five months, I have been attempting to gain access to students with disabilities who receive services through the Adaptive Programs office. This process has been a long and somewhat patience-testing one, but has finally resulted in the powers-that-be allowing me to send out an invitation to participate in an informal conversation regarding accessibility issues they face when using the web for academic purposes. My initial invitation has yielded two students who are willing to begin this dialogue.

In the existing literature, students are rarely given the formal right to be heard in order to articulate the severity of the problem. This lack of voice is the catalyst to numerous questions about web use at the university level:

  • How do the expectations of professors and instructors encumber the achievement of students?
  • How do the expectations of the university as a degree-granting institution hinder student success?
  • What types of technologies are available to students with disabilities at any particular institution?
  • How do these technologies play a role in aiding students in being successful? Are they sufficient?,/li>
  • Do postsecondary institutions provide the "equal opportunity" for students with disabilities that the law requires?

Ultimately, the goal of the research is to illuminate the accessibility issues of university students and advocate for an institutional embrace and implementation of the aforementioned accessibility and usability standards. This will be done through a qualitative approach, including a series of interviews, a focus group, and finally a longitudinal case study of subjects with a variety of disabilities.

June 10: Matt Payne: Digital Divides, Video Games, and New Media

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4267

The "digital divide" has traditionally pointed to the social schism between computer and Internet haves and have-nots. Recent ICT-related research indicates that while issues of access may be improving, other information gaps have since emerged: such as, inequities in gender, race, and skills and usage. The last gap, skills and usage, is otherwise known as new media literacy, and represents a problem that technological access alone will not solve.

This paper focuses on the "black sheep" of the new media family, video games, and argues that particular types of interactive texts can contribute to new media literacies. The paper concludes by investigating three recent ventures into critical gaming design and advocacy. While it does not suggest a "video game divide," the paper maintains that critical video games are an underutilized resource that could suture broader digital divides.

June 11: Marina Meza & Susanna Turci: Desiging an Electronic Bilingual Dictionary for International Trade

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4289

A dictionary is considered to be a main element towards understanding a foreign language, in this case English. In fact, it represents a link between words and their conceptual units that reflect standardised and specific meanings. Electronic dictionaries are a way of encoding all relevant information associated with lexical entries in a manner easily accessible to users. Nowadays, a wide variety of English dictionaries are electronically available on the web. Kent (2001:74) argues that …a benefit of utilizing the bilingual dictionary is that it allows learners to search for terms they wish to express in the target language… This paper presents a project currently in progress at the Simón Bolívar University which has as main objectives: 1) to construct an electronic bilingual dictionary for International Trade; 2) to supply succinct definitions of terms used in international trade; 3) to support students, researchers, teachers and the trade community; 4) to demonstrate the effectiveness of hypertext in education and research. The dictionary will be based on the English language terminology for International Trade and will contain standard definitions of the terms accepted worldwide. The project has been divided into stages and will take at least three years to complete. Phase One is related to the planning and design; this is what we have been developing. The work consits on the preparation and designing of the dictionary, the selection of headwords, the development of computational support systems and the creation of templates that will be used when the complete dictionary will be compiled in the course of Phase Two. In Phase One, the corpora will be selected, classified and analysed in order to derive the headwords for the new dictionary. During Phase Two, the entries will be collected, organised and written for the printed and electronic versions. The International Trade bilingual electronic based dictionary will be based on a through revision of existing related materials in the field and its corpora will include a wide range of useful entries and web links. This bilingual dictionary will be available in print and electronic format.

June 12: Collin Brooke: Weblogs as Deictic Systems

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4273

In his recent Kairos article "When Blogging Goes Bad," Steven Krause suggests that the fit between weblogs and the writing classroom isn't perhaps as seamless as we might wish it to be. His article recounts a "failed experiment" where weblogs failed to provide a "dynamic and interactive writing experience."

My presentation takes Krause's article less as a "cautionary tale" and more as a challenge to understand where the friction between weblogs and the writing classroom is located. Drawing on Kathi Yancey's discussion of deixis in her 2004 CCCC Chair's Address, Carolyn Miller's work on ethos in Human-Computer Interaction, and Duncan Watts' work in network theory, I suggest a couple of conclusions. I argue that the "community" we work towards in our classrooms is largely a clustering, or centripetal, type of networking, while much of the "dynamic and interactive" nature of weblogs comes from connective, or centrifugal, activity (or more accurately, a healthy mix of the two). Furthermore, the energy of blogging is highly context-specific (deictic), in a way that can be difficult to accommodate (or value) in a classroom setting.

Ultimately, I do not argue that weblogs and classrooms should never mix, but rather that their mixing should be informed by a more careful articulation both of what weblogs can accomplish and of our pedagogical expectations for this particular technology.

June 13: Erika Menchen: Feedback, Motivation and Collectivity on del.icio.us

See the comments provided by responders and the author's responses at http://kairosnews.org/node/4285

Distributed classification systems (DCS), also called folksonomies, are not just an interesting way to find content, they are global grassroots classification systems. Classification is a basic mental process that determines how we see (or ignore) the world. I performed a pilot study survey of del.icio.us users that helped me to develop a survey that will aim to find out if certain types of feedback via the del.icio.us site, web syndication (RSS), or through third party tools, influences user collectivity, i.e. how much they think of others when they tag their bookmarks. I want to find out just how social del.icio.us actually is, and if feedback influences the level of collectivity. DCS can function even if most users do not think of others when they classify the content they store, although they can be improved if more users do. Preliminary results from a full survey may be available at conference time, otherwise the pilot study and revised design will be discussed.

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