My
Apologia
A
few words about who I am and where I am coming from may contribute to your
perspective on my paper. My name is
Lennie Irvin, and I teach at San Antonio College in San Antonio, Texas. I have been teaching community college
English for ten years, seven of which at least have been spent teaching in the
computer classroom.
I
received my Masters in English from The University of Texas at Austin in 1988
where I worked as a T.A. in the Computers
and Writing Research Lab with Fred Kemp, Locke Carter, Paul Taylor, Valerie
Ballester, and Wayne Butler. You
probably recognize these people as the founders of the Daedalus Group, and
because of them I have been a heavy Daedalus user since that time. The
Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment is the interface I have used, and
represents my positionality when I talk about student-to-student
communication. Despite my limitations in
my software use, my awareness of other interfaces such as MOOs, Newsgroups,
threaded messaging, and listservs leads me to believe that commonalities exist
between asynchronous and synchronous modes of communicating.
In
addition to being a heavy Daedalus user, I have been a heavy adopter of Fred Kemp’s notions of how to use the computer classroom
to promote collaborative learning and the social construction of
knowledge. I have taken to heart and
practice his and others translations of Kenneth Bruffee’s notions of
collaborative learning into the computer classroom.
Two
other things you should know about me:
First, because I am a community college
teacher with a heavy teaching load (and two kids), I have not read and
researched as much on computers and writing as many of you have. I just don’t have time. I definitely have read some, and I have been
a member of various listservs for years that have been their own form of research
and reading (namely, TEACH the Daedalus listserv and ACW-L the Alliance for
Computers and Writing listserv). I
certainly have theories, but I have been more engaged in practice and
pedagogy. Hence, if my paper does not
appear to have the scholarly references it perhaps should, maybe you can help
me by sending along the article or book you think I should read to be more
informed on what I am talking about.
Second, I have been creating web
documents for two to three years now, but I have never been one who composed in
HTML code. The advent of Microsoft Word
and its easy SAVE AS HTML was my entrance into web writing. These pages you are reading have been
composed with Word and Front Page. I
know many of you may be HTML purist, so I ask that you forgive me and never,
never, never look at what the code looks like.