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Our online conference format allows session leaders and attendees to enjoy highly interactive presentations. That's why we've come up with the neologism "keynotable" to describe our three featured presenters, Trent Batson, Bill Condon, and Carolyn Handa. Their presentations will be like keynotes in one aspect -- there's no question Trent, Bill, and Carolyn are leaders in the field of computers & writing, and will have very interesting things to say -- but attendees will be able to ask questions and discuss the ideas presented with each other.

All keynotable sessions take place in C&W Online Conference Center in the MOO Connections. Learn more about using Connections.

Here are the position statements and short biographies for each of of our keynotables:

Bill Condon
Director of Writing Program
Washington State University

Fomenting Pedagogical (R)evolution: Using Assessment to Overcome Technology Avoidance
Friday, March 23, 6:00 pm ET
View session log

I'd like to have a conversation with all and sundry that centers on several significant questions:

• How can we develop assignments that build in the kinds of assessment that establish the effectiveness of computer-supported writing instruction of various kinds?
• How can we make our students' knowledge visible--to them, to us, to our colleagues?
• How can we translate our experiences as pioneers/early adopters so that our colleagues in the mainstream "get it"?
• How would we describe the underlying strengths and advantages of teaching with technology, and how can we help those less technologically inclined perceive and take advantage of those strengths and advantages?

Like many of you, I continue to be frustrated by the continuing failure of the Computers and Writing community to reach out successfully beyond our borders. Newbies to C&W frequently complain that we are not talking to them, but to ourselves. And the newcomers who find their way into the community are basically, like those of us already in the community, pioneer/early adopter types--adventurous, entrepreneurial, etc. So how to we reach out to mainstream faculty? How do we spread the good news about our student-centered, inquiry-based, computer-supported pedagogies? Finally, how do we, ourselves, broaden and deepen our own practices, growing beyond the technologies we know and the tricks we've mastered to discover and take advantage of a wider range of possibilities?

Bill Condon has taught writing for just over half his life--beginning as a 7th and 8th grade teacher in 1974. Along the way, he has been a Writing Program Administrator of one kind or another for 20 of those years, at a wide variety of institutions--the University of Oklahoma, Arkansas Tech University, the University of Michigan, and, Washington State University, where he is Director of Campus Writing Programs and Professor of English. Co-author of Writing the Information Superhighway (with Wayne Butler) and Assessing the Portfolio: Principles for Theory, Practice, and Research (with Liz Hamp-Lyons), Bill has also published several articles in the areas of writing assessment, program evaluation, and computers and writing. His current teaching interests include graduate seminars in writing assessment and in the theory and practice of teaching college composition; and undergraduate courses in which he can apply some of the innovative uses of assessment and computer-enhanced pedagogy that he has encountered over the years.

Trent Batson
Senior Associate
TLT Group

Writing in Email Space and How We Teach It
Thursday, April 19, 6:00 pm ET
View session log

Most of the writing we do now is either IN email space or is transmitted through email space. This is as true of the corporate setting as of academia. Writing teachers may think of email space, now, as a convenient tool to support their teaching of traditional written forms. But, others are beginning to look at writing in email space as communication with emerging rules and conventions that should be taught for itself. They are heading toward teaching writing in email space in the same way as they teach the essay.

But, the question is whether they know enough about email space as a discourse space to teach it in that way. Where do they look for guidance in developing a curriculum to teach writing in email space? Is email space even a stable communication environment? Is email space the same space for everyone? or do Internet connections and email clients vary so much that we have multiple spaces instead of just one?

What have we learned from those who have built the teaching of writing in email space into their curriculum? How do we approach this task?

Some might argue that all writing we do in email space is influenced by the medium. Is this evident now? If we write a cover letter, for example, that will be sent as an email or as an attachment, do we compose it differently than if we intend to print it and send it through the Postal Service?

And others point out that, since so much work is done through email, we need to teach our students more about the rhetorical considerations in email. Their success in college and afterward may be influenced by how well they understand these considerations.

This session is based on an online course taught in 1999 and 2000, and a follow-up panel at 4Cs 2001 with Wini Wood and Tamara Fish, along with Wayne Butler who read my contribution. I look forward to a very lively conversation. The courses were over-booked in both cases. I hope you'll join me and others for this discussion.

Trent Batson is known best for the early work he did with ENFI, Electronic Networks for Interaction, that was the basis for all the subsequent work on the networked classroom. His work with the networked classroom starting in 1985, was funded through a number of major grants, and won a couple of significant awards -- EDUCAUSE and Smithsonian Computerworld (finalist). Along with John O'Connor and Fred Kemp, he started the Alliance for Computers and Writing. In 1996, along with Judy Williamson, he launched the Epiphany Project, a steps model for faculty making the transition to "technologically enlightened pedagogies." Most recently, he was at Seton Hall University during that campus's shift to ubiquitous computing, involving a campus-wide laptop requirement. During 2000, he worked at WebCT. He's currently a senior associate with the TLT Group.

Carolyn Handa
Director of Expository Writing
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Digital Rhetoric and the World Wide Web
Monday, May 14, 6:00 PM ET
View session log

I will present a few theories, both mine and those of rhetorical scholars, regarding the ways that we need to view rhetoric in our increasingly digital age. I will also present statements about the problems of integrating visual elements in a meaningful way into Web pages.

I would like members of the audience to come prepared to this Keynotable Presentation by being able to describe one site they consider either successful or unsuccessful if we examine its digital rhetoric. This site can be student work or professional work.

I hope to discuss, briefly, connections between the theories outlined at the beginning of the presentation and the work described by session attendees. I would like to offer ways that we might think, in particular, about figures of "speech," in the construction of Web pages containing both words and images.

We will end the presentation with a discussion about the attendees' concerns and hopes about the increasingly visual nature of our writing classrooms and their students' abilities to handle the visual/verbal/aural mix that is coming to characterize writing in the 21st century.

For well over two decades, Carolyn Handa has taught writing courses ranging from basic and developmental writing to freshman writing, advanced composition, and graduate classes in the teaching of composition. She was a lecturer at the University of California, Davis, for a number of years and a professor of English at American River College, a community college in Sacramento, California, for an even longer number of years. Currently she is Professor of English and Director of Expository Writing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Several computer generations ago, she edited Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-first Century. She has also written about the pedagogical implications of computer classroom configuration. More recently her research has focused on visual/digital rhetoric and the ways in which we see such rhetoric reflected on the World Wide Web. She guest-edited two special issues of Computers and Composition (March and June 2001), has contributed a chapter to a collection on visual images edited by Mary Hocks and Michelle Kendrick, and has made numerous conference presentations on visual/digital rhetoric.