Computers and Writing Online 2005: Announcement and Conference Program

I know I've blogged about this before, but I'm on the organizing committee of this conference, and I'm going to promote it; that's just the way it is. This is the big announcement, with the long version of the conference program below the fold (I copied and pasted all the abstracts here, which the Attribution-NoDerivs-Noncommercial Creative Commons license encourages me to do, I might add).

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?
• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.