DWRL History

What follows is from "The Computer Writing and Research Lab: A Brief Institutional History," by John Slatin, Director of the CWRL 1989–2000. The complete text can be found in Language Learning Online: Theory and Practice in the ESL and L2 Computer Classroom, edited by Janet Swaffar, Susan Romano, Phillip Markley, and Katherine Arens (Austin, TX, Labyrinth Publications: 1998), pages 19–38.

The CWRL and Project QUEST

The CWRL was originally an artifact of a national initiative known locally as Project QUEST, which was the principal means by which computers entered the University of Texas English Department in the mid- and late 1980s. The IBM Corporation sought to expand potential uses and market for its highly successful personal computers, introduced in 1981. Building upon the Athena project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Turkle, 1992), IBM donated millions of dollars' worth of microcomputers to the University of Texas at Austin and other US universities. These were distributed to faculty who submitted proposals outlining innovative uses of microcomputers in instruction and research.

Project QUEST awarded computers to faculty on the strength of competitive proposals. But these awards were also conditional on departmental commitments to provide necessary support for their projects. Such support might involve maintenance, personnel for programming work that faculty members couldn't do themselves, or, crucially, space. Once the project was judged successful (or at least on the road to success), the equipment would be transferred from Project QUEST's inventory to the inventory of the faculty member's home department. It thus became necessary for the local institution to evolve structures, if it didn't already have them, to accommodate these projects—and to accommodate the presence of the computers themselves.

My colleague Jerome Bump and I were among the first members of the English faculty to write successful proposals to Project QUEST. Mine involved developing expertise in using word processing software and synthetic speech to help visually impaired writers, including myself, work more independently, while Bump proposed investigating whether computers could enhance creativity. In the summer of 1986, I taught a computer-assisted writing class for visually impaired students, with mixed but generally positive results; as far as I know, this was the first computer-based writing class at the University of Texas. We met in a vacant faculty office that had been turned over to me for the purpose, six students, two computers, and I crowded into a space meant for one. Later on, as I was trying to improve the clumsy software I had written, I ran into a programming problem I was unable to solve. I asked Bump for help, and he in turn asked one of his graduate students, Fred Kemp—now Director of Composition at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas—to come over and help me out.

Visiting the Computer Research Lab

Kemp and I were unable to solve the problem. Our conversation, however, led to my first visit to the basement of the Undergraduate Library, where he and several other graduate students were setting up what they grandly called a "computational classroom," arranging 24 networked IBM PCs neatly in rows in the manner of a traditional theater-style classroom. This initial replication of familiar arrangements is typical of the way new technologies are introduced, and is of course consistent with what Sproull and Kiesler call first-level effects. But the computational classroom was the second room to which the graduate students had been given access. The first one was across the hall, and this one they had designated the Computer Research Lab.

In an important sense, this ad hoc arrangement of space has been the unique, defining feature of what is now the CWRL. The pairing of adjacent rooms called "lab" and "classroom" provides for the tight and unusual coupling of research and development on the one hand and teaching on the other. Creating distinct spaces for research and teaching, the layout also allows them to "bleed" into one another, so that teaching becomes a research activity and research takes on a strong pedagogical aspect. Perhaps even more importantly, the lab provides a concrete physical space for the emergence of a new academic culture, collaborative rather than solitary, equally committed to research and teaching.

The Bump-Burns Seminar

The Lab began to take shape when Kemp and several other students, including Locke Carter and Paul Taylor, came together in the Fall 1986 for a graduate seminar on rhetoric and computers which Bump co-taught with Lt. Col. Hugh Burns of the Intelligent Systems Division at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. Now director of Academic Computing at Smith College, Burns had received his doctorate in Education from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979, having written the first doctoral dissertation in what is now the field of Computers and Writing (Burns, 1979). His dissertation project—which he undertook in the College of Education because no full-time English faculty were willing to supervise it—centered on a set of programs called TOPOI, TAGI, and BURKE, written in BASIC for the DEC-10 mainframe computer. By the time of the seminar in Fall 1986, Burns had become an expert on the design of artificially intelligent tutoring systems used by the Air Force to train aircraft mechanics. He had also continued to play an important role in the emerging field of Computers and Writing, and Kemp had met him at the Conference on College Composition and Communication earlier that year.

Humanities and Language Computing Proposal

The first proposal I wrote focused on the needs of the CRL as a departmental facility. Dean Standish Meacham asked me to expand the proposal's scope, incorporating the modern languages and Classics into an interdepartmental framework. I then wrote a proposal to establish a Center for Humanities and Language Computing, or CHALC. I envisioned a set of computer classrooms and labs in a wheel-like arrangement with the Computer Research Lab at the hub of the wheel and facilities in Classics, the Language Labs, and English connected to the hub by the campus ethernet. The Center would be run by a faculty Director supported by an interdepartmental faculty committee, and the CRL itself would be staffed by graduate students from participating departments. I proposed a budget of $650,000. The CHALC proposal was approved, but never fully implemented. The Provost did not favor creating new Centers at that time, and the interdepartmental administrative and staffing arrangements I had envisioned were never put in place. Purchasing was coordinated, but individual departments proceeded on their own once the equipment had been bought and installed.

It was another year before funding actually came through; when the money finally came, it was in two installments a year apart. In the spring of 1991—midway through the Poetic Conversations course—we received $300,000 for the initial phase. After several months of negotiating, we were able to replace the original IBM PCs awarded by Project QUEST, by then ancient and failing, with new IBM PS/2 model 70s. At the same time, we set up a second, Macintosh-based computer classroom which I had first proposed to my English Department colleagues in 1988, and upgraded the equipment in the CRL itself. The new facilities came on-line just in time for the beginning of the Fall 1991 semester.

Establishing the CRL as a Departmental Presence

At the time I thought that would be the entire allocation. Much to my surprise, however, we received an additional $250,000 the following year, bringing the total allocation for 1991–92 and 1992–93 to $550,000. I began by planning a multimedia lab in Parlin Hall, where most English faculty offices are located and most English classes are taught, and eventually persuaded department chair Joseph Kruppa to let us convert what had been the department's media room—a windowless room in the basement, equipped with a movie projector and a sound system, which had long since fallen into disuse and become a storehouse for broken chairs, lampless overhead projectors, and other junk that no one knew how to dispose of.

I had two goals in doing this. The first was to establish the CRL as a physical presence in the department. Second, mindful of the goal of establishing network connections in all faculty offices and still hopeful that the CHALC proposal would be fully implemented, I wanted a way to connect the building to the campus-wide network backbone, which would otherwise have been impossibly expensive. Predictably, there were delays. By the time the work was done and the Multimedia Lab actually came on-line in the Fall of 1993, the institutional structure to which the CRL belonged had changed substantially and the Lab itself had changed hands.

The Current Staffing Model

Since the Division of Rhetoric and Composition took over administration of the Lab in June 1993, we have formalized the ad hoc arrangement whereby instructors provide practical support for one another. I believe this arrangement has been crucial to the success of the renamed Computer Writing and Research Lab. Graduate students are now assigned to the CWRL for a full year; their appointments require that they teach one course per semester and work an additional seven hours per week as members of the Lab staff, with some additional time for scheduled staff and project group meetings. Staff work involves both routine classroom support and participation in Lab projects such as the development of computer-based instructional materials (courseware) and documentation, as well as identification and documentation of successful teaching practices and research into other applications of computer technology which may have pedagogical potential.

Rationale for the Staffing Model

There are several reasons for doing it this way. First, pedagogically informed technical support is an essential component of successful computer-assisted teaching and learning, especially in environments where intensive and fast-paced personal interaction depends upon computer use. That is, support staff should understand and share the instructors' pedagogical goals, recognizing the impact of technical arrangements on learning and instruction (by contrast, computer services staff are often focused primarily upon the technology).

This staffing arrangement has other important advantages also. In particular, it provides the time for staff members to become involved in designing and implementing computer-based projects specifically addressing problems that arise in actual classroom practice. This makes the Lab a learning environment for the graduate students as well as the undergraduates whom they are directly responsible for teaching. The graduate students "learn the classroom" from two perspectives at once—of the teacher and of the support staff—and see firsthand what it takes to maintain an effective instructional environment. They also become members of a growing community within the department, entering an ongoing conversation about computer-based teaching in particular and about teaching in general that extends beyond the Lab to include others in the department and beyond.