Gail Hawisher and Charles Morton, "Electronic
Mail and the Writing Instructor," College English
55.6 (1993): 627-43.
1. Key Terms:
"a rhetoric of email" (p. 629): a "rhetoric" is a how-to manual,
telling people how to arouse certain emotions in readers or
achieve certain effects, all in language. So a "rhetoric of
email" must be about how to use the medium of email to achieve
particular effects: it will make us aware of various features
of the medium and how to use them.
"flaming" (p. 631): "outrageous and often hurtful language transmitted
as a part of the email message."
2. Main ideas:
There is bad news about teaching with email, and good news.
First, the bad news: The authors describe how email writing
works: it is on a continuum between spoken and written language
(630); it is usually not subjected to "reflective scrutiny"
(people whip it out, 630); people writing on the computer "lose
the constraints and inhibitions that the imagined audience provides"
(631) — they say things Online that they wouldn't say
in person. Because email is so easy to generate, students and
teachers participating in an email discussion group may be overwhelmed
by the amount of writing they have to read (638). Now, the good
news: The authors say that "flaming" is absent when a group
must complete a project together using email (633). The authors
day that gender, class, and race distinctions, as well as people's
sense of their position or place within a group, disappear.
3. Questions:
Can professors do things to alter these conditions, to discourage
flaming, for example? Do distinctions really disappear, or are
there simply new criteria for distinguishing among people who
meet Online?
Silva S. Karayan and Judith A. Crowe, "Student
Perceptions of Electronic Discussion
Groups," T.H.E. Journal 24.9 (1997): 69-71.
1. Key Terms:
"Electronic Discussion Group": electronic news groups and/ or
email discussion groups (69).
2. Main ideas:
While class discussions suit those students who are impulsive
learners, email discussion groups cater to all students, encouraging
those who are impulsive to take time to reflect and insuring
that the ideas of reflective students (who take longer to respond)
are not lost (69). Email discussion groups foster a greater
sense of community. Students participating in email discussion
groups learn to write coherently. The authors post the results
of a survey given to students who participated in email discussion
groups: using email made students more likely to answer a question
asked by a teacher or peer, to learn class content, to develop
a positive relationship with the professor and peers, to participate
more outside the normal class time, and to think more before
answering questions. Using email did not make students more
likely to be motivated to work hard or to attend class.
3. Questions:
Does more writing in itself teach students to write coherently,
or do teachers need to offer writing instruction to those using
email?
David C. Lewis, Janine
A. Treves, and Andrew B. Shaindlin. "Making Sense of Academic
Cyberspace: Case Study of an Electronic Classroom," College
Teaching 45.3 (1997): 96-100.
1. Key Terms:
"lurkers": those members of email discussion groups who only
read incoming mail and never post their own ideas (98).
2. Main ideas:
In teaching an online course, the instructors found that, as
in class discussions, the same students participate while many
others silently look on. While they found that "visual anonymity
of the medium" promoted "lack of prejudice" on their students'
part (97), they also found it difficult to keep discussion coherent:
"e-mail discussion is multilayered and seemingly disparate,
flowing at many different levels simultaneously" (97). Their
students recommended that the professors send out a single question
to all list participants before and after posting their lectures
(99). They also recommended that professors "make time to achieve
course consensus" on definitions and other matters. When the
professors asked students to express their opinions on the subject
matter (drugs in America), the list fell silent until someone
wrote to say that students were reluctant to disagree with the
professors' point of view (98).
3. Questions:
How can professors cultivate an atmosphere in class and Online
that encourages students to disagree with them?
Laura Mandell, "Virtual
Encounters: Using an Electronic Mailing List in the Literature
Classroom," Profession 97: 126-132.
1. Key Terms:
word bodies (127): students appear in email as words, whereas
they appear in class as bodies, clothes, hairstyles, etc.
2. Main ideas:
Email privileges articulate students and thus makes the intellectuals
the class heroes (127). Grading email essays via email gives
students the chance to respond to your comments quickly and
easily, rather than by making an appointment, coming to your
office, etc. (128) Email makes teachers' and students' ideas
public in a way that increases the class sphere (129). Reading
responses to the reading before teaching a class can help a
teacher be more attuned to what students understand and what
they need to learn.
3. Questions:
Isn't this essay a little Utopian in its approach to email?
The author perhaps fails to take into account how alienating
it is to write to a computer screen rather than to talk to people
face-to-face.
Miika Marttunen, "Electronic Mail as a Pedagogical
Delivery System: An Analysis of the Learning
of Argumentation,"Research in Higher Education
38.3 (1997): 345-63.
1. Key Terms:
CMC = "Computer-mediated communication." "the seminar mode":
the tutor selects discussion topics from the course contents
and gives students content-related feedback "the discussion
mode": based on the students' self-direction: students select
discussion themes from the contents themselves (p. 348). "good
argumentation" = the writer presents standpoints with supporting
reasons which are relevant. "poor 1" = the writer does not present
a position but rather merely a list of facts. "poor 2" = the
writer does not support his or her standpoint. "good counterargumentation"
= "the counterclaim was supported by relevant and sufficient
reasons" (351).
2. Main argument:
Marttunen argues that students using an email discussion list
improve their argumentative skills more than do students in
a traditional classroom, and that the most improvement occurred
when students were allowed to comment on whatever topics they
wished, as opposed to answering questions posed by the teacher,
for the following reasons: first, there are more arguments in
counterargumentative messages ("[T]he level of argumentation
was higher in the counterargumentative messages compared to
those in which the writer had not attacked other people's standpoints,"
358) and, second, there is more interaction and therefore more
"counterargumentation" among students participating on email
in "the discussion mode."
3. Questions:
Marttunen gave students instruction on how to make arguments
once at the beginning of the semester. Mightn't their argumentative
skills have improved even more if instruction were given all
along, in responses to individual email postings? Marttunen
says that students argue better with less interference in forming
the topic from the professor. Couldn't that result have to with
the class size (31 students), their age (23 years or older)
and thus their relative motivation? Also, why is "the average
level of argumentation in the students' messages was . . . quite
poor" (359): why don't people construct better arguments?
Charles Moran, "We Write,
But Do We Read?" Computers and Composition 8.3
(1991): 51-61.
Moran argues that being connected by a network doesn't necessarily
encourage sociality: that is, we are all madly writing to each
other, but it's not clear who is reading all this writing (52).
Moran says that, if you read through exchanges on a list, it
very rarely looks as though people are responding to each other
rather than simply writing what they themselves think (53).
Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt, Building
Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for
the Online Classroom, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers,
1999).
1. Key Terms:
"the electronic personality" — people use CMC (Computer
Mediated Communication) "to invent new personae" and "to recreate
their own identities" (22). "conscious community" — the
community not based on place (21) "created electronically through
the initiation of and participation in discussion about goals,
ethics, liabilities, and communication styles" (23).
2. Main ideas:
Personality — "[T]he introvert may have less difficulty
entering the virtual community, whereas the extrovert, with
a need to establish a sense of social presence, may have more
trouble doing so" (22).
Community — There is a difference between establishing
a "social community" online and a "learning community": in the
former, "very little learning occurs." That's why it is important
for the instructor to "gently guide participants who stray"
away from "the learning goals that brought them together in
the first place" (32).
Instruction: Guide students gently: When teaching Online,
a teacher should post "goals, objectives, and expected outcomes";
he or she should give students "initial guidelines for participation,
thoughts and questions to kick off discussion, and assignments
to be completed collaboratively" (17).
Don't constrain students: "Imposed guidelines that are
too rigid will constrain discussion, causing participants to
worry about the nature of their posts rather than to simply
post" (18).
3. Questions:
If the atmosphere in a class email discussion list is too free,
doesn't it in fact mystify the actual power relations at work
in any classroom, where a teacher in fact has control over the
students' grades?
