A world of texts
CWRL classrooms are uniquely equipped to teach critical reading and persuasive writing across multiple media: DLP projectors, DVD and VHS players, image scanners and CD players (among other hardware) allow our instructors to incorporate photos and web sites, movies and music, in our courses. And students can respond in kind: image and web editing software, digital cameras and multimedia production stations make it possible for them to create a wide range of projects alongside traditional essays. For example, students have produced and provided commentary on web sites, "blogs" (online diaries or journals), photo essays, and short films as part of CWRL courses.
As humanities instructors help students become savvy readers of a world of texts--literary, cultural, historical--being able to bring a world of texts into the classroom is a valuable capability.
Investing imagination
CWRL instructors and students unflatten the printed page by studying and producing online and multimedia texts--indeed, learning in the Lab sparks students' imagination in special ways. CWRL instructors use our Multi-User Domain (MOO)--an online environment that allows students to interact with each other (through typed comments) and with objects, images, and sounds--to imaginatively render literary spaces, role-play, or take virtual field trips. (Visit the CWRL's Multi-User Domain at http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu:7000.) For example, one instructor, who teaches the rhetoric of museums, asks students to redesign exhibitions of a Texas history museum in this online space; another creates T.S. Eliot's Waste Land with his class; another simulates an air raid in a 1940s London home.
These projects, few of many, allow students to experience--affectively, even viscerally--course subject matter in new ways.
A lively, lasting conversation
E-mail lists, online discussion forums, and blogs enable different kinds of communication in CWRL courses: students can electronically post responses to issues and texts considered in class, and respond to each others' responses. Adding electronic discussions to the ones we conduct face-to-face gives shy students voice and bypasses the instructor-to-student, student-to-instructor, instructor-to-student circuit of the physical classroom. Lines of discussion spring up independent of instructors--and the demands of these discussions help students become clear and pointed written communicators. Moreover, because these discussions are written, they preserve and document the evolution of students' thinking.
Electronic discussions ask students to bring course material home with them in new ways: students can keep conversation alive outside the physical confines of a classroom and easily plan group projects and assignments.
Speech acts
CWRL instructors have designed innovative ways to illustrate the ways language performs. For example, some instructors show students the HTML coding that makes familiar web sites look the way the do. By revealing the many authorial choices and distinct textual elements that produce certain easy-to-see effects, instructors can give students a sense of the choices and distinct elements that are a part of the printed texts they read--and write--for our courses. (See CWRL Program Coordinator David Barndollar's "A Rationale for Teaching Hypertext Authoring in Literature Courses.")
More than that, hyperlinks help us talk about transitions and footnoting. "Mind mapping" software allows students to physically map and manipulate essay parts and raw brainstorming ideas; annotating applications allow students to insert their own comments into web sites and blocks of text. In short, CWRL technology helps our students perceive texts not as fixed, monolithic blocks, but as series of rhetorical maneuvers that can be commented on and intervened in--another important lesson in most humanities classes.
Going public
Many CWRL instructors post student work online to help them strive to make their writing good enough to share--and to help them imagine a larger audience and purpose for their work than a single instructor, a single letter grade. Instructors, too, go public with their work: all our instructors create web sites for their courses, many also create professional web sites that articulate their academic interests and goals.
Thus, CWRL instructors invite others to use their work as a resource and encourage connections with other instructors and interested people more generally. Teaching, we hope, becomes more than private, individual practices in individual classrooms. Rather, it becomes part of a larger conversation on best practices--and a larger part of how we see ourselves and are seen as academics.