5th C SIG Report

Date: Mon, 03 Apr 1995 02:28:08 -0500
From: wleric@showme.missouri.edu (Eric Crump) Subject: CCCC 5th C SIG report

This note is going to everyone (we hope) who attended the 5thC SIG at CCCC and to the members of the Computers in Composition and Communication committee. Below are notes from the discussion. They were compiled by Traci Gardner. The only reason *I'm* passing them along is I wanted to seize another opportunity to invite you all to subscribe to SEVENC-L, the list we're using to discuss committee business and related issues.

The ideas you all generated at the meeting are things the committee plans to address, and you all are invited to participate in that process to whatever extent you like. One point of having committees, I figure, is to use them as conduits between an organization's leadership and its membership. You all should use the committee for that purpose, as a way to suggest directions you think the organization should take on important issues pertaining in some way to the way computer technology informs our work and our students'.

If you'd like to join sevenc-l in order to continue the conversations you began at the meeting, send email to listproc@lists.missouri.edu, leave the subject line blank, and in the first line put: subscribe sevenc-l yourfirstname yourlastname

--Eric Crump
committee chair
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All the responses from folks at the 5th C SIG meeting are organized into the representative categories which those at the meeting identified. It seemed more useful to include all comments about each category together, so I've integrated the lists. I've not repeated any comments which were phrased identically, or nearly so. I had to use some personal judgement on a few responses in order to decide which category the ideas fit best. Once which seemed to be unique are in the miscellaneous category at the bottom. While I'm sure I've manipulated the info somewhat (and I admit that I added a word some place), I think the majority of info here fairly reproduces the information collected at the meeting.

The line in ALL CAPS indicates the category name; the following parenthetical number indicates the number of groups which dealt with the issue.

traci gardner
traci@daedalus.com
------------------



COMPENSATION...RESPECT & CREDIT (4)
-- Professional recognition and compensation for our roles as
computer-oriented scholars, including publications about computers and publication in e-journals.
-- Pedagogical validation
-- Language credit for computer languages/environments -- Time commitments
-- Get it established as a way of gaining national respect, i.e., scholarship -- List of electronic sources
-- Rel. of 5th C and 7Cs -- advocacy?
-- Employment -- tenure and long-term employment -- Faculty development
-- Overload, burnout, early retirement

ACCESS...AUTHORITY (5)
-- E-mail for all profs and grad students -- E-mail for all students
-- Universal access for post-secondary students to Internet -- Directories of resources to accompany e-mail access -- Community colleges --> student access to material and lines & cultural
connections, universities' access)
-- Students need to have access; empower but don't mandate -- Have/Have Not; students getting on computers, control of labs, etc. -- Have/Have Not -- exclusion of economically disadvantaged from cybercommunity -- Electronic literacy
-- Who controls the tools?
-- Oversight -- keep red tape out of our business. Don't limit access to
MOO or listservs
-- Censorship -- when, how, do we?
-- Minority access -- certain environments used more often by minorities --
also the same groups that access is limited to -- Hardware, materials, lines, gigabytes, processor speed -- Hardware --> availability, poor quality, funding, finding ways to
replace and supplement existing equipment

INTERNET POLICY (3)
[This category probably overlaps in content and focus with Access/Authority] -- Future of WWW: implications
-- WWW
-- Classroom
-- Corporate
-- Budget
-- Creating web servers
-- Censorship of WWW -- Policy needs to be stated; religious advocates want
to restrict access [censorship is also listed with access above] -- On-line writing support through netscape -- Counteract move toward charging for Internet access

TRAINING & PEDAGOGY (3)
-- Professional training, pedagogical training to include computer component -- How teachers get trained -- survival

DEFINITIONS (3)
-- Computers in English Departments _aren't_ computer science but the
current, relevant tools of language transmission and production, and therefore well within our domain and duty -- Definition of "work"
-- Definition of "learning"
-- Definition of "computer literacy" and "electronic literacy" -- Computer literacy (ESL+)

POLITICAL ACTION (3)
-- Health
-- Radiation Health
-- Realities
-- Outreach to K-12
-- CCCC Policy recommendations/standards for computer literacy -- CCCC Articulate a position on legal liability of users/instructors/providers

MISCELLANEOUS (1)
-- Ownership -- of your own writing even when published on the net.
University shouldn't own student/professor's writing/code. -- Information Overload -- "da firehose" -- we need new tools; intelligent tools -- Communities in Cyberspace --Is what they are doing authentic "work"? -- Software -- Depart from skill/drill