Jenae Cohn, writing in the December Computers and Composition, provides case studies of student digital literacy narratives to study how the “addiction trope” influences student views of their social-media use.
Category: Online writing
LATEST AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY: Fanfiction as a “Gift Economy.”
In the June 2016 Computers and Composition, Brittany Kelley analyzes the Ashwinder archive in the Sycophant Hex Harry Potter fanfiction site to posit that such sites function as “gift economies” rather than as “commodity cultures.”
THIS WEEK AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY:
Ryan P. Shepherd argues in Computers and Composition that composition hasn’t paid enough attention to the ways gender works when Web 2.0 sites like Facebook are used in writing classrooms.
THIS WEEK AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKKLY:
Lisa Dush, in College Composition and Communication, on what happens to writing and writers when writing becomes “content.” Provocative must read for writing teachers!
THIS WEEK AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY!
Lisa A. Costello in Teaching English in the Two-Year College: Turning a research paper into a blog post in first-year writing!
THIS WEEK AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY! Instructional Assistants in FYW.
In the Fall 2015 issue of Computers and Composition, Tiffany Bourelle, Andrew Bourelle, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson discuss a pilot program at Arizona State University that incorporates undergraduate instructional assistants into online “mega-sections” of first-year writing in order to decrease costs without diminishing student learning or increasing faculty workload. http://tinyurl.com/pqtv4k2
NEW AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY: ONLINE INTERFACE AS EXORDIUM
New at College Composition Weekly: In the September College English, Rebecca Tarsa proposes strategies for creating an effective “exordium” for writing classrooms by examining how the digital interface works as an exordium in online participatory sites in which students voluntarily contribute writing. She draws on Teena Carnegie’s work to argue that the interface of an online site meets Cicero’s definition of the exordium as an appeal designed to “make the listener ‘well-disposed, attentive, and receptive’ to the ensuring speech.” In the case of an online site, the interface as exordium accomplishes this goal by “project[ing] to users the potential for interactivity within the site that matches their desired engagement while also supporting the ends of the site itself.” Adopting some features of online interfaces can trigger more voluntary and spontaneous writing in composition classes.

NEW AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY: ENGAGING STUDENTS WITH ARCHIVES
VanHaitsma, Pamela. “New Pedagogical Engagements with Archives: Student Inquiry and Composing in Digital Spaces.” College English 78.1 (2015): 34-55. Web. 2 Sept. 2015.
Pamela VanHaitsma discusses an approach to involving students in archival research that she developed in first-year-writing classes at the University of Pittsburgh. Maintaining that students explore as well as create archives throughout their activities both in and outside of class, VanHaitsma hopes to connect the kinds of inquiry that archives make possible with the focus on student interest and lives that informs writing pedagogy. She also investigates how digital collection and dissemination options affect the process of using and building an archive. wp.me/p5NPq1-37 .
NEW THIS WEEK ON COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY! Pamela Takayoshi on “Short-Form” Writing for the Internet
Writing in the July issue of Computers and Composition, Takayoshi argues that composition studies has paid too little attention to increasingly common and prominent forms of communication like the Facebook postings and chats she analyzes. Such writing, she says, deserves empirical study, especially with regard to “what writers do” as they compose. She urges supplementing what she sees as composition’s longstanding “social turn” with fine-grained examination of actual writers’ processes working with current technologies in order to better understand how these processes relate to the composing processes taught in college writing classrooms. The two case studies she presents illustrate the complexity and rhetorical awareness underlying these short forms. http://wp.me/p5NPq1-2O