Over the past months we have posted various tools for teachers who are bringing electronic writing technologies into their classroom, including links for Pedagogy and Games and Computers and Composition. The question remains how to present these effectively without overwhelming the audience that might not already be immersed in emergent technologies? The context […]

Facebook as a Genre
As students and, increasingly, faculty move into Facebook, the slew of applications catering to their needs have been slewing fast, sent forth by the release of the API back in May. While many of these merely add on a new infective meme to the wildly-popular social network, […]

[This post comes as the first of several provocations to spur a reexamination of the electronic literature scene. Unlike our usual mild posts, these posts Will Raise Temperatures on elit.]
With the first arguments for electronic writing as an artistic medium, as in literary hypertext, came the attendant claims at its democratic nature. In George […]

The world of chatbots still thrives today because of its user-creators. Whether made by kids who dream of making their computer talk even in print statements or adults who enjoy playing with programming toys, the chatbot is a means of evoking a conversation with your computer. Consequently, there may always be a market […]

After a semester of testing out the all-computer writing classroom, during the somewhat-contested reign of Web 2.0, I append the following update to my earlier post on Computers and Composition. Soon, I will add a version of this page to the Pedagogy and Games subpages.

The question of the day is how is the composition class a social or 2.0 experience? To any of us who have taught comp, who know write away that writing is a tremendously social activity. What many of the tools below emphasize is the ways in which research is also a fundamentally social activity. We not only stand on the shoulders of giants, but we follow their RSS feeds, we enjoy their bookmarks, and we share their PowerPoint presentations.

The second set of tools has to do with building a browser that is a research engine, something that can act as a notebook (literally, in the case of Google). From Diigo to Zotero, student writers can build custom browser that can enhance their research experience, while often linking them to other scholars or at least allowing them to share information easily.
For last, I save the novelties.