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September 28, 2005
getting in the game (collaborative writing 1.1/?)
Forman, Janis. "Computing and Collaborative Writing." Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1991. 65-83.
1 sentence summary Studies of the impact of collaboration-enabling computer technology and software advances are being conducted primarily by sociologists and computer scientists, whose interests and so whose studies' applicability differ, sometimes widely, from those of compositionists: because these technologies are being used by writers in ways that affect writing--both the act and the product--compositionists need to participate in these studies and advance questions relevant to their discipline.
keywords collaboration, groupware, technology
passages
65-6. people will work within what the technology allows; a technology offering a set of options constrains people to adapt their work-habits & impulses to fitting those options (& often we teach that way rather than bending the technology to fit the work-habits & impulses we want to encourage).
68. "misconceptions about technology and writing": rather than seeing "the computer as a machine that writers use," it's productive to look at "technology...as a set of options of tools that writing groups manage or mismanage"
71. asking how good technology is for "collaborative writing" means discriminating between definitions of "collaborative writing"--some technologies might be suitable for collaborative revision but not (are others?) for "collaborative invention, a central activity in the composition of multi-authored texts"
71. (defines "genre" as "type of document")
75. all research in comp & computers = interdisciplinary b/c "technology" is a distinct discipline in 1988?
Posted by ttobryan at September 28, 2005 10:15 AM