Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature

1. Many educators are interested in creating community within instructional environments and in developing educational spaces that nurture dialogue and deliberate risk-taking (Palmer, 1990; Senge, 1990). Constructivist educators discuss the importance of using technology to support environments in which students comfortably present varying points of view and work together toward the completion of projects that have personal meaning for them (Duffy & Jonnassen, 1992). National organizations representing writing instructors identifiy a need for collaborative writing experiences in classrooms that include diverse elements of language, culture, and opinion into the student's writing (Shea, 1989). The democratic, social and pedagogical advantages of using networks for language development with hearing impaired students was originally investigated during the 1980's by Trent Batson with his Electronic Networks for Interaction (ENFI) project at Gallaudet University: " ENFI blurs social distinctions in the class...ENFI allows the class to become a discourse community in writing, meaning that they share special words, conventions, stylistic features, and a shared purpose for writing," (Batson, 1992). Since then Batson's notions have been tempered in practice by such educators as Warshauer and Romano (Kremers, 1990; Warshauer, 1995; Regan, 1993; Romano, 1993), who have been refining and rethinking the use of networked composition classrooms to support a writer's community in which varying voices and points of view can be represented and used to develop writing projects that have personal meaning.

2. An interesting addition to this mix of interests and educational needs is the networked computer software called groupware, which provides interpersonal, human communication in real, shared time and (possibly) expanded space via a written rather than a verbal medium. The advent of this simultaneous, networked medium has been seen by some educators to extend current definitions of interpersonal communication, small group communication, and mediated communication because multiple voices can be represented simultaneously within personal writing space.

   It is axiomatic that in order for interpersonal communication to take place, verbal messages and their feedback must occur in real time and space. The computer, through a software process known as "groupware", enables "several users to work on the same document at the same time" (MacUser, June 1991, p. 207), while transferring and manipulating "interpersonal text" in real time and space. Thus, with groupware, verbal communication is not required for interpersonal communication to occur, and the computer can be used as a medium of communication. Groupware and its symbolic code of interpersonal text is extending our traditional definitions of interpersonal and small group communication while it challenges our definition of mediated communication. (Greller & Barnes, 1993)

3. The following article describes and discusses the results of three unique college writing experiences that take advantage of synchronous electronically networked computer labs to support personally meaningful and collaborative writing projects. This is an account of two writing instructors' use of simultaneous synchronously-networked groupware, to teach freshman writing classes at a small liberal arts college in Oregon. Their students wrote together at the same time in one shared word-processing document, using their own individual computers. Each student witnessed the others' writing as it occurred and, perhaps, while he or she was writing as well. Finally, the article will present an example of a writing experience called the Freewrite Dance, which is comparable to improvisation in dance or music, a simultaneous, real time artistic experience; it is formed from the combined written expressions of each individual and written responses to each other's writing in a feedback loop that intertwines the individual and group creative process.

4. An explanation of the software and hardware configuration used by the students in these classes will help the reader to understand the groupware environment. Locally networked, Macintosh LC computers comprised this basic writing lab. The groupware software used is called Aspects (see Reference Note 1) and was designed to facilitate collaborative writing, editing and discussion on networked Macintosh computers. The word processor available in Aspects conforms to Macintosh standards and facilitates routine word processing tasks, including some formatting. In Aspects the usual Macintosh window displays a separate cursor for all users. So, an Aspects a window might contain several cursors at the same time, each in its own paragraph. This groupware requires that a name exists for each conference participant, however during the following assignments pseudonyms were used. For the purposes of this study Aspects conferences were restricted to no more than four students at any time, however up to 32 students could have written simultaneously. Users can edit text or graphics together, and they can design their writing space to allow or restrict collaborative options.

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   Writing Assignment #1: anonymous dialogue

5. The first writing assignment was designed to assist a professor who taught freshman writing with a multicultural emphasis. In her syllabus, she identified her course goal as effective prose communication through extensive writing. But, the syllabus also emphasized a theme focusing "on multicultural issues and developing cross-cultural skills in an attempt to sensitize ourselves to the cultural needs and sensibilities of others." The class defined culture broadly as shared language and values. Their definition purposefully included as cultures such groups as those defined by gender, age, or sexual preference. This professor designed class discussions and assignments to highlight issues important to these cultures: date rape, white supremacy, inter-racial adoption. National standards (NCTE & MLA) explicitly recommend that writing instructors facilitate collaborative writing environments in which "every language, culture, and experience is a resource in the classroom" (Shea, 1989), and she wanted to encourage this sort of rigor in her students' writing and during class discussions.

6. However, the professor noticed in her classroom discussions and student essays that students seemed to avoid substantial discussion and relied on pat, feel-good phrases like "everybody is really the same inside," minimizing the importance of differences between them. She understood this phenomenon as that described by multiculturalists as the minimization-of-difference stage, an ethnocentric stage that must be overcome before ethnorelative states can emerge (Bennett, 1986). During the minimization-of-difference stage, experts describe that people recognize and accept superficial cultural differences while they also hold on to the assumption that all human beings are essentially the same. At this stage people are not ready to recognize nor in fact value fundamental cultural differences. This professor was committed to her goal of developing cross-cultural skills and wanted her students to be prepared to discuss relative cultural values and sensibilities in depth, and yet she knew that her student's may in fact not feel safe enough to voice or even become aware of their own differences.

   Fear is a driving force behind the kind of education that makes students into spectators...Fear, not ignorance, is the great enemy of education. Fear is what gives ignorance its power (Palmer, 1990).

7. In order to overcome fear, affect change, and to facilitate the students' expression of their differences openly, she carefully designed a sequence of instructional activities, using the writing lab, to engage students toward the creation of an instructional community. She decided to adapt a technique described by Parker Palmer in the following quotation:

   ...when a divisive issue is up for debate and my students retreat into privatism, I sometimes give each of them a 3"x5" card and ask that he or she write a few lines expressing a personal opinion on the issues. I collect the cards and redistribute them so that no one knows whose card he or she is holding. Then I ask each student to read that card aloud and take sixty seconds to agree or disagree with what it says. By the time we have gone around the group, the issue has been aired, diversity has been spoken, and a foundation for real conversation has been laid. (Palmer, 1990)

8. This professor created an electronic version of Palmer's assignment that was at once an anonymous discussion and a writing activity using groupware in the networked writing lab. In this assignment no handwriting could reveal a student's identity and many opinions could be written within a class period.

9. Other writing instructors (Kremers, 1990; Warshauer, 1995; Regan, 1993; Romano, 1993), who have used networked writing to facilitate multi-cultural discourse, warn that use of a network without carefully establishing a safe pedagogical framework may be counter-productive and result in further marginization of the very voices that the experience is designed to evoke. This instructor envisioned the context of the electronic writing to be like David Bohm's model of group dialogue, which consciously avoids win-lose discussion and encourages self-reflective exposition, and she devoted class time and reading assignments to establish this understanding.

10. Bohm points out that the word "discussion" has the same root as percussion and concussion, suggesting a Ping-Pong game model of bouncing back and forth between many points of view.

    ...the purpose of a game is normally "to win" and in this case winning means to have one's views accepted by the group. You might occasionally accept part of another's view in order to strengthen your own, but you fundamentally want your view to prevail. A sustained emphasis on winning is not compatible, however, with giving first priority to coherence and truth. Bohm suggests that what is needed to bring about such a change in priorities is "dialogue," which is a different mode of communication. (Senge, 1990)

11. Senge described Bohm's dialogue as a technique to help individuals become observers of their own thinking, helping them become sensitive to and acknowledge incoherence in their own opinions while they develop an understanding of a topic that is intentionally based on collective knowledge. In dialogue all participants are urged to suspend their assumptions, literally to hold them up, as if suspended in front of a group of colleagues, observing and questioning their views rather than defending them as fact. Bohm's dialogue groups, which are verbal and face-to-face in practice, require hours and sometimes years to develop. However, the instructor felt that Bohm's notion of dialogue provided the right context, and she felt that the groupware environment might facilitate sufficient quantity and quality of dialogue for her purposes because of its anonymity and quick interactivity. She approved of writing on computer as an appropriate way to dialogue in a writing class. As a follow-up activity, she decided to distribute a print copy of the dialogue as representative of the class mind or constellation of opinions as a point of departure toward building a community of writers.

12. Her students came to the lab intellectually prepared to engage in dialogue via the anonymous, networked computer environment. She prepared the writing lab by setting up Aspects conferences in which up to four students could write together. She was careful to create conferences with computers that were not physically close together. Students joined conferences at random by sitting down at the machine of their choice. They did not know which machines were joined to form each conference, and so, they did not know with whom they were writing. The first 15 minutes of the class hour was devoted to practicing the specific use of Aspects software for this assignment, leaving 35 minutes for the assignment itself.

13. She "seeded" (Warshauer, 1995) the dialogue with 17 blank documents headed with evocative statements such as: "The primary response to date rape is `she wanted it' (or she wouldn't have been here in the first place)"; "The `open-door' policy to admit more minorities to U.S. colleges and universities is seriously limiting the quality of education American students receive"; and "White men need to suffer reverse discrimination before they can appreciate the position of minorities in American culture," (see Appendix A). The students were assigned to chose four statements and create dialogue about those statements within the conference. The instructor did not participate as a writer during the dialogue, but she used a hard copy of the dialogue, which of course remained anonymous to stimulate later dialogues in which she participated as usual.

14. An analysis of the resultant student writing revealed two categories of information: the quantity of on-task writing and the quality of the student dialogue. Taken together they help to convey the student's high level of engagement with the issues. The kinds of paragraphs written, including questions to each other, descriptions of real life experiences, arguments, agreements, the long sequences of meaningful exchange, and the quantities of each of these kinds of paragraphs, indicate that the anonymous network dialogue did provide the kind of environment that nurture risk-taking and honest dialogue, and can be used to propel a class beyond the minimization-of-differences stage of ethnocentrism.

    The Quantity of Writing

15. The following numerical analysis was prepared from a phrase-by-phrase classification of the written dialogues and is intended to enhance the qualitative descriptions of assignment outcomes. From two participating classes 33 students formed into nine conferences. In each conference students used an on-line chat box to organize their conference and to select the statements they wanted to write about in their dialogues. None of this organizational writing was included in the following analysis of written work.

16. As a whole students wrote at least 7680 words (there was evidence that a student erased some portion of a conference before printing), with a minimum average of 233 words written per student. The average conference dialogued about two and a half statements, writing an average of 349 words in each dialogue document. Students wrote 172 responses directly to each other (indicated by paragraphs, formatting and context), which varied in length from one word to 180 words; the average response was almost 45 words long. To put those numbers in a context, think of a typical, 30 minute, classroom discussion. The above numbers indicate a discussion in which on the average six different student responses (45 words in length) were articulated every minute. That would make an average of 260 words directed toward an issue every minute of class

17. To put those numbers in a context, think of a typical, 30 minute, classroom discussion. The above numbers indicate a discussion in which on the average six student responses (45 words in length) were articulated every minute. That would make an average of 260 words directed toward an issue every minute of class. Bear in mind that each minute included the time necessary to read the writing of others, formulate a response, and write.

18. A traditional class may have produced this quantity of words under some circumstances. For example, students may have easily written that many words in that amount of time if they were writing as individuals not in communication with others. Or, student groups might have been formed to create that much off-line, verbal, dialogue, but in that case the written nature of the assignment and the final printout would have been lost.

19. The anonymity of the assignment made it impossible to determine which students responded, but research with electronically networked writing indicates that this sort of environment tends to be more democratic than face to fact talking. Students who don't normally speak tend to speak in this circumstance (Batson, 1989; Spitzer, 1989).

    The Quality of the Dialogue

20. A qualitative analysis of the student writing helped to demonstrate a qualitative difference between face-to-face discussion and anonymous classroom dialogue. Students were able to express controversial personal experiences as well as opinions in this environment, and they posed a surprising number of questions and problems for each other to solve and answer. The two classes posed 31 questions to each other during this 30 minute session. In addition, the students wrote 12 descriptions of their own personal experiences regarding the issues under discussion, including one rape experience and one homosexual experience. For example, the following is a sequence of excerpts from one dialogue about homosexuality:
    I agree that men generally feel threatened who are not gay when they are around other gay men, but women don't feel as sexually threatened when around lesbian women. ... Do you think in general most men have hangups about other men more than women? Are they more prejudiced in general? Is it just because they want to be stronger as the dominant gender and therefore have ideas and values that support such?

    Did you read the article in the last Collegian on the Womyn's Center? It didn't sound to me like that guy could even stomach the idea of a lesbian.

    I think that I am not sure about which is easier to accept, I have never really thought about it that much, because I think that homosexuality/lesbianism is wrong no matter what, and that it is not natural and not biological. But, both of your statements are logical and seem plausible to me. ...

    I think we all might have a little homophobia in us. One time a gay guy made a "pass" at me and I could have killed him. I was so angry and embarrassed. I mean, he thought I was gay. ...

    ...I am a man, and I would rather be around lesbians than male homosexuals. ...It's not like homosexuals turn me on or anything, I'm just saying that we could try being a little more accepting of them. I saw two women kissing right before I came into Smullin, and I almost turned away. As for the person having a gay guy make a pass at you, just say, "No thanks, I'm straight." Honesty is the best policy (cliche).

    I'm a girl, and I'd much rather be around gay men than lesbians.

    I had a good time once with a couple of girls who liked me and each other. OOOh, that was fun.

21. For the purpose of data analysis one pair of comments, the initiating comment and the response directed to that comment, was called a response exchange. The longest number of successive response exchanges around a single concept was 16 exchanges. In a traditional class, 16 student exchanges about a single issue would be rare, and in Professor Showers' class such extensive group dialogue had been conspicuously absent, even though discussing controversial issues was an explicit part of the curriculum. In every conference students wrote statements in disagreement with each other. The largest number of successive disagreeing responses was 12 exchanges. In Professor Showers' class previous off-computer discussion had not revealed this much student disagreement, and on the whole, around sensitive issues, student differences of opinion previously had been unstated and unrecognized.

22. Using anonymous, simultaneous, networked word processing, students vigorously expressed their opinions, disagreements, and experiences, asked each other questions, and engaged in meaningful written communication. Educators face significant difficulty creating this kind of trust within the traditional classroom environment. This assignment encouraged live, interactive, written communication and provided an opportunity for honest expression of student assumptions without the need-120 to be personally connected to them in front of classmates and teachers. The element of anonymity provided the initial safety some of the students seemed to need in order to suspend their assumptions in the classroom environment. Each student's writing was visible immediately to everyone sharing the same groupware conference, which underscored the social nature of written communication. Later, Professor Showers used the print outs to direct further, off-computer dialogue and individual essay writing.

23. Professor Showers felt the assignment achieved her process as well as product oriented instructional goals. Unlike face-to-face discussion groups, the anonymous groupware dialogue produced extensive student engagement with the issues throughout the class period, eliciting descriptions of personal experience and providing a context for students to ask and answer each other's questions. For a copy of the student's assignment and a summary of student responses to each issue see Appendix A.

    Writing Assignment # 2

24. Professor May Flowers taught writing with an emphasis on Joseph Campbell's Myth and Mythology. Her students read and wrote about the hero's journey, which Campbell outlined in stages. One of the stages in the hero's journey is the Encounter With the Other, and Professor Flowers assigned her students to prepare to write a story in which there is an Encounter With an Other. She set up Aspects conferences in random pairs. Each student sat down at a computer and wrote with another student anonymously. The experience of writing with an anonymous persona via the computer was designed to match the content of writing about Encountering the Other. She assigned her students to write their tales to each other, with the suggestion that each student feel free to participate in the writing of the Other's story. Further, she suggested that the two students could eventually write the same story collaboratively.

25. The students learned the basic commands to use the Aspects, networked word processor during the first ten minutes of the class and then wrote their stories together. Professor Flowers remarked while watching her Encountering the Other assignment that the experience of the authors was a surprisingly social one. Writing tends to be an isolated act, and audience is often remote. Yet, the animated atmosphere in the computer lab, the laughter and concentration, showed that many of these students had a live social and communicative experience while they were writing. Even though the professor envisioned this as a short, prewriting exercise, the students asked to meet again the next class period so they could continue what they had started.

26. At the end of the second session Professor Flowers asked students to complete a survey to evaluate the exercise, and she asked them to continue writing their stories at home to turn in individually. The following frequency table displays the most common evaluative responses tabulated from the 14 written surveys turned in. Student evaluations were in the form of written responses to questions rather than multiple choice answers. A sample survey can be found in Appendix B.

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