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Part 1 Perspectives: education by engagement and construction - a strategic education initiative for a multimedia renewal of American education, Ben Shneiderman is there a class in this text? creating knowledge in the electronic classroom, John M. Slatin varieties of virtual - expanded metaphors for computer-mediated learning, Patricia Ann Carlson cognitive architecture in hypermedia instruction, Henrietta Nickels Shirk multimedia - informational alchemy or conceptual typography?, Evelyn Schlusselberg and V. Judson Harward dimensions, context, and freedom - the library in the social creation of knowledge, Gregory T. Anderson multimedia and the library and information studies curriculum, Kathleen Burnett the virtual museum and related epistemological concerns, Glen Hoptman an epistemic analysis of the interaction between knowledge, education, and technology, David Chen the many faces of multimedia - how new technologies might change the nature of the academic endeavour, Alison Hartman, et al. Part 2 . . . and practices: bootstrapping hypertext - student-created documents, intermedia, and the social construction of knowledge, George P. Landow the CUPLE project - a hyper- and multimedia approach to restructuring physics education, E.F. Redish, et al collaborative virtual communities - using Learning Constellations, a multimedia ethnographic research tool, Ricki Goldman-Segall the crisis management game of Three Mile Island - using multimedia simulation in management education, Thomas M. Fletcher restructuring space, time, story, and text in advanced multimedia learning environments, Janet H. Murray the virtual classroom - software for collaborative learning, Starr Roxanne Hiltz medical centre - a modular hypermedia approach to programme design, Nels Anderson prototyping multimedia - lessons from the visual computing group at project Athena Centre for educational computing initative, Ben Davis Engineering-Design Instructional Computer System (EDICS), David Gordon Wilson computers and design activities - their mediating role in engineering education, Shahaf Gal the need for negotiation in cooperative work, Beth Adelson and Troy Jordan teaching hypermedia concepts using hypermedia techniques, Peter A. Gloor computer integrated documentation, Guy Boy the Worcester State College Elder Connection - using multimedia and information technology to promote intergenerational education, Virginia Z. Ogozalek, et al paradoxical reactions and powerful ideas - educational computing in a Department of Physics, Sherry Turkle.

Recent advances in computer technology make networking an essential skill for the technical communicator. Particularly, the development of local, national, and international computer networks has created a collaborative writing environment. At the heart of the Internet network is the UNIX operating system. The open architecture of UNIX makes it a superior tool for collaborative writing, in the classroom, across the campus, or internationally. Central to the open system is UNIX's mode of allowing users to set file access permissions, restricting some files while allowing others to be open to the public.

New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Ed. Janis Forman. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1992. 197 pp. (Inter)views: Cross‐Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy. Ed. Gary A. Olson and Irene Gale. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 269 pp. Constructing Rhetorical Education. Ed. Marie Secor and Davida Charney. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 452 pp. Nineteenth‐Century Rhetoric in North America. Nan Johnson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 313 pp. The Interpretive Turn. Ed. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. 322 pp. Technical Writing: Student Samples and Teacher Responses. Ed. by Sam Dragga. St. Paul: University of Minnesota, Department of Rhetoric/Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, 1992. 326 pp.

New Visions of Collaborative Writing, Janis Forman Alice M. Gillam Methods and Methodology in Composition Research, Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan Russel K. Durst Gaining Ground in College Writing: Tales of Development and Interpretation, Richard Haswell Robert Brooke Beyond Outlining: New Approaches to Rhetorical Form, Betty Cain Richard M. Coe Portfolios in the Writing Classroom: An Introduction, Kathleen Blake Yancey Karen L. Greenberg Reading and Writing Essays: The Imaginative Tasks, Pat C. Hoy II David Z. Londow To Make a Poem, Alberta Turner Working Words: The Process of Creative Writing, Wendy Bishop Diane Kendig Teaching Hearts and Minds: College Students Reflect on the Vietnam War in Literature, Barry Kroll Lucille Capra Illumination Rounds: Teaching the Literature of the Vietnam War, Larry R. Johannessen Lucille Capra Vietnam, We’ve All Been There, Eric James Schroeder Lucille Capra

In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.

The four‐phase project described here is based both on current social theories of writing and on contemporary studies of writing on the job and in the classroom. Phase one suggests methods for team organization, phase two the proposal submission, phase three the individual discussion chapter component, and phase four group components and team editing. Both teacher and student provide input for report evaluation. The author's survey of 29 formal report groups found positive attitudes toward both the formal report and collaborative writing.

More than ever before, workplace professionals are facing the challenge of collaborating regularly and effectively with those situated in social contexts quite different from their own. Yet, knowledge of the rhetorical processes and social dimensions characterizing this type of collaboration remains scant and inadequate. This essay takes the stance that if rhetoricians hope to make significant strides forward in understanding writing that takes place both within and external to a single workplace culture, they will need to develop a much more expansive, complex, and sophisticated vision of collaboration across multiple organizational cultures. It suggests how, to accomplish this goal, rhetoricians might build on the strengths and overcome the limitations of past scholarship in organizational and related studies and in rhetoric, and it introduces new directions these scholars might take and new questions they might explore in future investigations in this area of inquiry.

M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. xi + 312 pages. John Frederick Reynolds, David C. Mair, Pamela C. Fischer. Writing and Reading Mental Health Records: Issues and Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992. 109 pages. Nathaniel Teich, ed. Rogerian Perspectives: Collaborative Rhetoric for Oral and Written Communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1992. 303 pages. $24.50. Gerald McNiece. The Knowledge That Endures: Coleridge, German Philosophy and the Logic of Romantic Thought. London: Macmillan, 1992. 226 pages.

Professional educational philosophers C.A. Bowers and D.J. Flinders (1990) describe the classroom as an ecology comprising interrelated linguistic and cultural patterns that determine how information is communicated in the classroom. their classroom ecology model centers on the observation of three interconnected areas: the metaphors that the teacher and the textbook use to introduce students to the formal and informal curriculum, the manner in which the teacher frames student expertise and classroom relationships, and the nonverbal communication between teacher and students. Using Bowers and Flinders' model, a technical writing class taught by a teacher who emphasizes relationships, understanding and acceptance, and collaboration was studied. The teacher's metaphorical language, framing of instruction and student relationships, and nonverbal language are shown to reflect a rhetorical approach to technical writing, a caring approach to teaching, and a supportive, community environment for learning. This ethnographic study provides a snapshot of how one teacher defines technical writing and how he answers the question of how is should be taught.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Do university writing experiences prepare students for future job-related writing tasks? If not, how can we create a smoother transition from the academy to the workplace? The author analyzes the differing discourse communities of academic writing and technical communication which may limit the transfer of skills from one arena to the next. The discussion considers the ways process, collaborative learning, writing across the curriculum, and language theories can form the foundation for constructive communication among disciplines. As the focus of academic writing moves from an emphasis on the individual to social context and wider audiences, it bridges the gap between disciplines and can ease the movement from the classroom to real-world settings.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The inclusion of a course in gender issues in a technical communication curriculum affords students the opportunity to confront objectivist and rationalist paradigms still found in the discourse of technical communication. The theoretical and practical foundations of a course that examines feminist inquiry into the production and dissemination of knowledge, as well as the language practices associated with professional writing and communication, are discussed. Issues of gender roles within organizational collaborative work groups, as well as issues related to gendered assumptions in science and technology, are also integral parts of the course design. A description of objectives, assignments, and tests for the course, as well as a full syllabus, are included.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Twenty years ago I had no idea what a computer was. Ten years ago I knew what computers were, but I had never sat at a terminal. I just assumed that computers were machines used in those “other” disciplines, certainly not in English courses. Today, I teach my technical writing classes in a collaborative computer classroom. The classroom consists of twelve networked computers which my twenty-four students per class use in tandem. Despite my original ignorance of computers, I'm now happily ensconced in a computer classroom. In fact, computers are so important, I've concluded, that teaching writing without the aid of computers does our students a disservice. How did I make such a complete turn-around in attitude? I realized that far from being anathema, computers helped to create a perfect marriage for teaching and writing. First, computers let students write more effectively because computers are compatible with the writing process (writing and rewriting). Next, teaching students to write in a collaborative computer environment prepares our students for business and industry where they will be asked to work on group projects and to communicate electronically. Despite the values of computerizing our instruction, however, computers in the classroom present problems. Do the benefits outweigh the deficits? My answer is yes.

Although “community”; is an important concept for writing, writers have been unclear about how a sense of community relates to the writing process or to the documents produced. This study reports a comparison of several technical reports showing the influences of a writer's identification with a community on features of the resulting document. Features most affected were personal and community references within the document, writer's stance toward the reader, and definition of the rhetorical problem.

The essay begins with an intellectual framework for describing a visual‐verbal interface. Applying the implications of the framework to collaborative work, the authors illustrate ways in which they used this framework to observe and teach collaborative teams of graphic designers.

Over the past decade researchers, instructors, and people in industry and academia have begun to understand the value of teaching people how to collaborate. This selected annotated bibliography compiles some of the theories and research on collaboration from disciplines such as small group management, composition, scientific and technical communication, computer science, speech communication, and rhetoric. It also includes relevant sources from the popular press.

By examining the cultural assumptions about what makes an effective team member, this essay argues that we typically design collaborative projects and evaluate student participants by using a Western model of how people should behave in groups. In order to enhance cross‐cultural understanding in collaboration, instructors can help students focus on cultural differences in group emphasis, achievement, decision‐making, and communication styles.

Although collaboration in technical communication is not a recent phenomenon, the attention it is receiving is new. This recent attention has generated an increasing number of well‐designed and provocative studies that are concerned with collaboration in technical communication contexts as well as with the processes of collaboratively conceptualizing, creating, and producing technical texts. Much of this research, which is forcing a reexamination of theories that affect the pedagogy and practice of collaboration, draws on a broad interdisciplinary foundation and utilizes an array of multi‐methodological approaches, both quantitative and qualitative.

This essay reports on the relationship between persuasion techniques used by collaborators and possible gender influences. To examine this relationship, the authors observed four proposal developers (two males and two females) as they collaborated with several groups at Southwestern Bell Telephone company. The authors examined preconceptions about three factors: effective and ineffective collaboration, gender's effect on collaboration, and gender's effect on persuasion. They also examined persuasion techniques used by the proposal developers.

Imitation has long been a method and theoretical basis for rhetorical instruction. It has also enjoyed a complex, if not always glorious, history-a lineage which extends from the apprenticeship of sophists in Plato's Greece to the moral education of orators in Quintilian's Rome; from the nurturing of abundant expression in a Renaissance text by Erasmus to the cultivation of taste in an Enlightenment text by Hugh Blair. In the last few decades, however, we have witnessed dramatic changes in how we look upon imitation-changes largely influenced, we think, by the process movement, with its various emphases on invention and revision, expression and discovery, cognition and collaboration. In the wake of shifting so much of our attention to writing processes, we might well expect imitation to have been pronounced as dead as Nietzche's God was a century ago. But if the literature reviewed here is any indication, rumors of imitation's death have been greatly exaggerated. Most of the studies in our survey are favorablyand surprisingly-disposed to imitation's continued practice. Such studies typically call for a revised understanding of imitation, a novel approach which reveals the proponent's understanding of the need to somehow demonstrate imitation's acceptability to a community which presumably resists its use. Why? Most likely because imitation turns on assumptions about writing and learning which many find discomforting, if not altogether objectionable. There are, of course, fairly complex historical, cultural, and theoretical reasons for our current aversion to imitation, many of which we explore later in our review. But the important point for us is that those who argue for imitation-however much they may differ in their various arguments-share an awareness that its use must be justified in answer to, and anticipation of, its critical refusal by the community at large. What we infer from this awareness is the community's largely tacit rejection of imitation. That's not to say, of course, that explicit criticism of imitation is wholly absent from the literature.' But in a context where many readily assent to the idea that almost any form of direct imitation leads to a distortion of the writing process, there is little urgency to speak against its use in the writing classroom (Judy and Judy 127). Indeed, only those who desire a reevaluation of imitation need

Recent scholarship wrestles with the issue of creating a setting within centers that encourages genuine collaboration between those who seek advice (or input) and those who give it. Some scholarship suggests that too often the people who fund, administer, and use centers see the facilities as primarily remedial. Among problems, this attitude promotes the us-and-them mentality that Richard Leahy cautions against (45) • Lex Runciman, too, blames misconceptions about the meaning of tutor and tutoring for assumptions made by students, administrators, and tutors themselves that writing centers serve only bad (Defining 28) and are little more than emergency rooms for critically ill grammar. Both scholars urge us to create an environment which everyone is free to develop his or her own best processes (Leahy 45), where good writers go order to make enlightened decisions about context, organization, idea development, tone, and the (Runciman, Defining 33). To create such a place, Leahy urges us to foster a community of people who love and like to share their with each other (45). As a logical first step, Runciman suggests we abandon terms that carry remedial connotations (e.g. tutor a.nd tutoring and adopt terms that more accurately describe who we are and what we do. Although I agree that we need to encourage an enlightened, collaborative environment in centers, I believe we can achieve this goal (whether or not we rename ourselves and our work) through the intelligent and humane use of humor.

In her essay "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center," Andrea Lunsford offers a much-needed critique of the traditional "garret" and "storehouse" models for writing-center instruction, and she argues for a collaborative model in which students work together in groups to discuss, question, write, and revise. In contrast to the storehouse and garret models that reinscribe rigidly authoritarian or naively libertarian beliefs about language use, this collaborative model dramatizes the "triangulation" or "dialogism" that theorists such as Donald Davidson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ann Berthoff place at the heart of composing: as students seek to join in a conversation that precedes and takes place around them, as they seek to understand, complicate, and communicate their perceptions with and through others. In the collaborative writing center, Lunsford writes, students learn how knowledge and reality are "mediated by or constructed through language in social use . . . the product of collaboration" (4). Through collaboration, Kenneth Bruffee writes, students come to internalize those social conversations; they develop "reflective thought" and learn to play "silently, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation" as they write and reflect (5).

Talk is central to what we do as writers and as humans. It is the collaborative activity that underlies most, if not all, individual acts of composing. Because of this, the work tutors do every day-talking about writing with writers-is valuable in uncountable ways. Writers compose through inner speech while walking, by speaking aloud at the word processor, when discussing a work-in-progress and drinking coffee with friends, or as they share ideas during conferences in writing centers and classrooms. But this talk is often suppressed, forgotten, or left out of the dominant story of learning. I plan to offer a

This article describes a dual grading process, initiated to expose students to collaborative evaluation and to verify instructor evaluation. Each group was assigned a case, with directions to print five copies of its response. I evaluated one copy, then distributed four blank copies to another group for evaluation. The group reviewed the paper and assigned a grade. I collected the graded responses, attached my graded copy, and returned the two graded copies to the composing group. Receiving feedback from both teacher and students reinforced the students' confidence in the evaluation process while teaching them important lessons on audience expectations.

Muriel Harris, Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Oct., 1992), pp. 369-383

When we design a course in writing, we join that debate over whether we should see individual cognition or social and cultural context as motive force in literate (Flower 282). To remind us of this debate, Linda Flower recently asked, Can we... reconcile a commitment to nurturing a personal voice, individual purpose, or an inner, self-directed process of making meaning, with rhetoric's traditional assumption that both inquiry and purpose are responses to rhetorical situations, or with more recent assertions that inquiry in writing must start with social, cultural, or political awareness? (282). Those three commitments are not really incongruous. All three can be found reconciled in advanced composition course described below. As a course built by students around individualized projects, it encourages students to apply general principles to specialized tasks. Good writers, according to Richard M. Coe, know how to apply general principles of composition to particular writing tasks and contexts (412). With so many different projects resulting from this approach, students' divergent interests must be shared in an atmosphere of collaboration. John Trimbur has stated that one of goals of collaborative learning is to replace traditional hierarchical relations of teaching and learning with practices of participatory democracy (6.11). Yet even collaborative models need to leave instructor with a certain authority. For example, James A. Reither and Douglas Vipond, whose teaching model is based on collaboration, suggest that the most powerful way to arrange this kind of situation is to organize a course so students collaboratively investigate a more or less original scholarly question or field. The teacher sets a research project or question for class, casting students as members of a research group (863). The final exam in my course acts as that long-range research project. This assignment, which is submitted to students on first day of class, summarizes

When I talk to graduate students and colleagues about their use of collaborative learning, I often hear stories about when it doesn't work. No one's version of collaborative pedagogy is universally rewarding, of course, but I have found some approaches consistently more successful than others. Often, peer criticism consists of oral or hastily written comments by students in a classroom group; sometimes students fill out a checklist or a form that resembles a short-answer test (for example Huff and Kline 122-23). In these cases, neither teacher nor student is taking peer criticism seriously as a writing exercise. Furthermore, much oral or checklist peer criticism is limited to students' evaluations of their peers' writing techniques, thus neglecting discussion of the substantive issues in the paper. Finally, much peer criticism focuses either on the subjective experience of the critic, such as Peter Elbow's movies of people's minds while they read your words (Writing without Teachers 77), or objectified standard criteria, such as his criterion-based feedback (Writing with Power 240-45). I would like to propose a melding of exercises from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's book Sharing and Responding with the series of written peer critiques Kenneth Bruffee describes in his text A Short Course in Writing. These two kinds of peer criticism work best in tandem in the collaborative classroom because together they capture the struggle between individual expression and social constraint that most of us experience as writers. Sharing and Responding can function on its own or as a companion piece to Elbow and Belanoff's A Community of Writers (second edition forthcoming), with which it was published. The exercises continue the tradition of readerbased responding that Elbow began in Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, but with a twist. The exercises in Sharing and Responding have a more developed social framework than their earlier manifestations. Although the emphasis is still on the writer's making individual choices, the structure of group interaction is more clearly developed than in Elbow's earlier work. For instance, each exercise has sample reader responses followed by a section called What a Writer Might Think about This Feedback. These exercises (as well as other subjective or comment-based-rather than essay-length-peer criticism)

In a departure from the view that characterizes hypertext as a new writing paradigm based on old associationist ideas, Edward Barrett has proposed a model for hypertext that rejects cognitive and associationist language as both unnecessary and inaccurate. In this view, knowledge, reality, and even facts are community generated, “linguistic entities,” and hypertext supports the “social interface” rather than the “deep structure” of thought. This essay considers some of the premises of Barrett's proposal. A central issue is the rejection of the “authorial imperative” of structured information in favor of a view of writing as an open‐ended ever‐changing conversation in which readers and writers collaborate to discover—or generate—reality.

George A. Kennedy, trans. Aristotle: On Rhetoric (subtitled A Theory of Civic Discourse). Oxford University Press, 1991. 335 + xiii pages. The Importance of George A. Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric as a Pedagogical Tool Kennedy's Rhetoric as a Contribution to Rhetorical Theory Kennedy's Aristotle: on Rhetoric as a Work of Translation∗ James J. Murphy, ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth‐Century America. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1990. 241 + v pages. Teaching the History of Writing Instruction Thomas Miller. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 318 + viii pages. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb, eds. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in the Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. iv + 242 pages. Sandra Stotsky, ed. Connecting Civic Education and Language Education: The Contemporary Challenge. New York: Teachers College Press of Columbia University, 1991. Janis Forman, ed. New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1992. 200 pages. $23.50.

Previous research in computer-mediated communication in both the classroom and the workplace has found that patterns of interaction may differ between individuals communicating face-to-face versus communicating via a computer network. This present study, using a case study methodology, sought to analyze and compare the language of groups of business writing students as they communicated both face-to-face and on a real-time computer network. The study found that during network meetings, participation was more equal, responses tended to be more substantive and text specific, and students were more willing to offer direction than during face-to-face meetings. In addition, students reported a more positive evaluation of their network sessions.

Editing includes teaching authors how to write, but the traditional editor's task, like the teacher's, is complicated by the additional requirement of being a gatekeeper of an author's work. When teachers (like editors) see their primary task as judges or gatekeepers, they can become engaged in adversarial relationships that contradict their role as enablers/teachers. The author's editor, on the other hand, is an emerging model of the editor‐author relationship that focuses on helping authors meet the expectations of gatekeeping journal and book editors. Teachers can use the author's‐editor model in the professional writing classroom to minimize the current‐traditional emphasis on the product and emphasize the collaborative nature of the writing process.

This study evaluated a method for teaching writers to anticipate readers' comprehension needs. The method, called reader-protocol teaching, involves asking writers to predict readers' problems with a text and then providing them with detailed readers' responses (in the form of think-aloud protocol transcripts) to illustrate how readers construct an understanding of the text. Writers in five experimental classes critiqued a set of ten poorly written instructional texts and then analyzed the protocol transcripts of readers struggling to comprehend these texts. Writers in five control classes were taught to anticipate the reader's needs through a variety of audience-analysis heuristics and collaborative peer-response methods. Pretests and posttests were used to assess improvements in experimental and control writers' ability to anticipate and diagnose readers' comprehension problems. Pretest and posttest materials were expository science texts. Writers taught with the reader-protocol teaching method improved significantly more than did writers in control classes in the number of readers' problems they accurately predicted. In addition, in contrast to writers in control classes, writers taught with the reader-protocol method significantly increased in their ability to (a) diagnose readers' problems caused by textual omissions, (b) characterize problems from the reader's perspective, and (c) attend to global-text problems. Moreover, writers' knowledge of audience acquired in one domain (instructional text) transferred to another (expository science text).

Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. 285 pp. Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration. Michael Schrage. New York: Random House, 1990. 227pp. Collaborative Writing in Industry: Investigations in Theory and Practice. Ed. Mary M. Lay and William M. Karis. Amityville: Baywood, 1991. 284 pp. Cooperative Learning: Theory and Research. Ed. Shlomo Sharan. New York: Praeger, 1990. 314 pp. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current‐Traditional Rhetoric, Sharon Crowley. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. 169 pp. Balancing Acts: Essays on the Teaching of Writing in Honor of William F. Irmscher. Ed. Virginia A. Chappell, Mary Louise Buley‐Meissner, and Chris Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 199 pp. Reclaiming Pedagogy: The Rhetoric of the Classroom. Ed. Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. 179 pp. Editing: The Design of Rhetoric, Sam Dragga and Gwendolyn Gong. Amityville: Baywood, 1989. 232 pp. Technical Editing, Carolyn D. Rude. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1991. 430 pp. Interviewing Practices for Technical Writers. Earl E. McDowell. Amityville: Baywood, 1991. 251pp. Internships in Technical Communication: A Guide for Students, Faculty Supervisors, and Internship Sponsors. Ed. Bege K. Bowers and Chuck Nelson. Washington, DC: Society for Technical Communication, 1991. 85 pp.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes First, we owe much to Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan for motivating us to write this paper. They may never fully realize how much they did. Second, we are grateful for the assistance of all the people—both living and dead—whom we list in the references. Third, we owe much to Jim Corder, who helped us to see that academic papers and personal essays are more alike than we know. Fourth, we thank all of the colleagues who have collaborated with us on books and articles: Gene L. Piche, Mike Graves, Wayne Slater, Ann Duin, Donna Johnson, Maureen Roen (two children, their journals, and a literary map), Patricia Hazeltine, Nicholas Karolides, Deborah Grunloh, Stuart Brown, Bob Mittan, Margaret Fleming, R. J. Willey, Kate Mangelsdorf, Vicki Taylor, Zita Ingham, Mike Rogers, Gesa Kirsch, Diane Clymer, Jan Swearingen, Marvin Diogenes, Clyde Moneyhun, Vicki Small, and Jim Nesci. Finally, we thank Theresa Enos and two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

As more business writing instructors begin implementing collaborative writing and learning in their classrooms, few descriptions exist that show how collaboration might work in the context of an entire course. This article describes a course that integrates individual and collaborative group assignments while requiring students to work through multiple drafting processes involving teacher and peer intervention. The course was designed to encourage students to become self-reflective, flexible writers who can make themselves aware of their writing processes and then adapt them to both individual and collaborative writing tasks. Along with outlining specific assignments and the rationales behind them, we address issues such as establishing collaborative groups, analyzing group dynamics and writing processes, and the roles teachers might play in a collaborative classroom.

Writing instructors often assign collaborative writing activities as a way to foster reflective thinking; many assume that the very act of explaining and defending ideas in the presence of a responsive audience actually forces writers to take critical positions on their own ideas. This article questions this assumption by examining the role of critical reflection in one particular writing context—that of collaborative planning. The authors' observations address three questions: (a) When students collaborate on plans for a paper do they necessarily reflect critically on their own ideas and processes, as many advocates of collaboration might expect? (b) If and when students engage in reflection, does it make a qualitative difference in their writing plans? And finally, (c) how do student writers engage in and use reflection as they develop plans? Twenty-two college freshmen audio-taped themselves as they planned course papers with a peer. Transcripts were coded for reflective comments and were holistically rated for quality. The analysis revealed a significant correlation between amount of reflective conversation and the quality of students' plans. Students used reflection to identify problems, to search for and evaluate alternative plans, and to elaborate ideas through the process of justification. This problem solving was most effective when reflection was sustained over many conversational turns. Collaboration did not guarantee reflection, however. Some sessions contained no reflective comments and some students used collaboration in a way that undermined reflective thinking. This study suggests that how students represented collaboration and the writing assignment itself determined whether and how they reflected on their own ideas.

In our teaching and research in writing centers and classrooms, we need to identify and rhetorically analyze "collaboration" in its multiple forms. When we overuse this catch-all term to mean any kind of mutual help or working together, we not only demonstrate what Frederick Erickson calls our current "crush on collaboration" (43 1 ), but we also confuse people inside and outside the profession. When "collaboration" is bantered about in education, business, and politics, it is unabashedly unmodified, unclassified, demonstrating by its nakedness that it serves too many purposes and has too many referents, not to mention the historical ones such as Benedict Arnold and Vidkun Quisling who "collaborated" with the enemy. As Andrea Lunsford notes, ". . . collaboration is hardly a monolith. Instead, it comes in a dizzying variety of modes about which we know almost nothing" (7).

This naturalistic study, coauthored by a composition specialist and a philosopher, explores the learning experiences of college students in an Introduction to Philosophy course and the learning experiences of the research collaborators themselves. The researchers identify conflicting ways of knowing in class discussion, student writing, and within their own interdisciplinary collaboration. They then ask questions about how these ways of knowing interact and with what effects. In order to answer these questions the researchers drew upon student data they collected in two consecutive semesters as well as the close records they kept of their own collaborative work. Four research methods were used: observation, interviews, composing-aloud protocols, and text analysis. Conclusions are drawn from the data regarding the benefits for students and researchers of juxtaposing multiple epistemological perspectives. Also presented are conclusions about the learning contexts that promote epistemic growth. The textual form of this study is “heteroglossic,” that is, certain sections are written by the researchers, certain sections by the teacher-researcher, and others are coauthored by both.

Modes of collaboration are gendered in the sense that they define power relationships among members of a group. In this study, the authors define three collaborative modes: dialogic, asymmetrical, and hierarchical. Dialogic and asymmetrical modes are emancipating and characterized by flexibility, open-ended inquiry, and concern for the growth and development of the individuals involved. Hierarchical modes are oppressive and are characterized by rigidity and suppression of the voices of others in the group. Two collaborative writing groups in a chemical engineering design course exemplify these modes. The first, composed of two women and two men, was primarily dialogic, and the second, composed of two women and three men, exhibited characteristics of all three modes.

To study the possible impact of feminist theory on technical communication, this article discusses six common characteristics of feminist theory: (a) celebration of difference, (b) impact on social change, (c) acknowledgment of scholars' backgrounds and values, (d) inclusion of women's experience, (e) study of gaps and silences in traditional scholarship, and (f) new female sources of knowledge. Three debates within feminist theory spring out of these common characteristics: whether to stress similarity or difference between the sexes, whether differences come from biological or social forces, and whether feminist scholars can avoid reinforcing binary opposition. The article then traces the impact of these characteristics of feminist theory and debates within feminist theory on the redefinition of technical communication in terms of the myth of scientific objectivity, the new interest in ethnographic studies of workplace communication, and the recent focus on collaborative writing.

Although the number of comprehensive studies that outline methods for incorporating collaborative writing into the professional writing classroom has increased, most studies discuss only one or two assignments throughout the term. This article describes an entire course focused on shared-document writing. Over a four-year period, students indicated that they valued the time allowed to coordinate groups and to understand and complete assignments. Structuring such a course necessitates assigning work that is related to a single topic and providing students with choices, including a voice in group formation and evaluation.

It is pointed out that veteran technical writers and editors sometimes suspect that the professors who teach technical writing and editing are too deeply immersed in their academic culture to translate effectively into the classroom the world of work culture in which technical writing and editing are practised. It is argued, however, that the two cultures are remarkably alike, sharing the same goal-to improve communication. Differences arise primarily in the approaches taken to achieve that common goal. Drawing on 25 years of experience as a visiting professor in a university writing program, the author discusses the different approaches that industry and academia take to such topics as grammar, rhetoric, audience, editing, artwork, decision-making, and collaborative writing.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Recent research suggests that pragmatic emphasis on writing proficiency alone does not produce a good technical communicator. Attention must also be given to the technical communicator as liberally educated generalist who writes well and feels an affinity for science or technology. To this end, technical communication needs to be studied in the larger context of evolving science and technology, developing trends in technical education, and the oratorical tradition of broad learning applied to the active life. Recent studies of the collaborative culture of the workplace should be supplemented by increased attention to humanistic questions of what a person needs to be and know in order to cooperate effectively as a practicing technical communicator.