This article describes the importance of annotation to reading and writing practices and reviews new technologies that complicate the ways annotation can be used to support and enhance traditional reading, writing, and collaboration processes. Important directions for future research are discussed, with emphasis on studying how professionals read and annotate, how readers might use annotations that have been produced by others, and how the interface of an annotation program affects collaboration and communication on revision. In each area, the authors emphasize issues and methods that will be productive for enhancing theories of workplace and classroom communication as well as implications for the optimal design of annotation technologies.

Literacy and Technology, Myron C. Tuman. Part 1 Computers and New Forms of Texts: Literature in the Electronic Writing Space, Jay David Bolter Opening Hypertext - A Memoir, Ted Nelson. Part 2 Computers and New Forms of Teaching English: Hypertext, Metatext, and the Electronic Canon, George Landow Dominion Everywhere - Computers as Cultural Artifacts, Helen Schwartz. Part 3 Computers and New Forms of Critical Thought: Looking Out - The Impact of Computers on the Lives of Professionals, Stanley Aronowitz Grammatology (in the Stacks) of Hypermedia - A Simulation, Greg Ulmer. Part 4 Computers and New Forms of Administrative Control: The Electronic Panopticon - Censorship, Control, and Indoctrination in a Post-Typographic Culture, Eugene Provenzo Naturalizing the Computer - English Online, Victor Raskin. Part 5 Computers and New Forms of Knowledge: Digital Rhetoric - Theory, Practice, and Property, Richard Lanham How We Knew, How We Know, How We Will Know, Pamela McCorduck. Final Thoughts, Myron C. Tuman.

This study examined the effects of computer network technologies on teacher-student and student-student interactions in a writing course emphasizing multiple drafts and collaboration. Two sections used traditional modes of communication (face-to-face, paper, and phone); two other sections, in addition to using traditional modes, used electronic modes (electronic mail, bulletin boards, and so on). Patterns of social interaction were measured at two times: 6 weeks into the semester and at the end of the semester. Results indicate that teachers in the networked sections interacted more with their students than did teachers in the regular sections. In addition, it was found that teachers communicated more electronically with less able students than with more able students and that less able students communicated more electronically with other students.