During the 1993 Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Diego, Fred Kemp and I were invited to participate in a publisher's focus group meeting in one of the conference hotels. At the meeting, after an hour or more of talk, we took a break and stepped out onto the balcony overlooking San Diego Bay. The focus group had got each of us thinking about the professional status of the computers-and-writing community. The publisher's concern for the future made us wonder whether our own profession was doing enough to prepare.
It seemed to us, on that sunny balcony, that maybe we were not. We thought maybe the computers-and-writing community needed its own professional association. After all, we reminded ourselves, we have a well-attended annual conference and some smaller ones as well, a scholarly journal and some newsletters, listserv conferences, several annual training workshops, a recognizeable group of leaders, a distinct set of shared values and beliefs, a growing body of oft-cited research, and a community history. Many of us have known each other for a decade or more, and during that thime have consulted and collaborated with each other on numerous occasions. A few graduate students are working on degrees in our field and graduate courses proliferate; scholarly books in our field continue to appear. In short, we have all the trappings of a growing and dynamic research community, but, as of last March [1993], we had no professional association.
As Fred and I talked on that balcony, and, later with colleagues, we realized that whatever organization we might develop, it would need to be in keeping with the values of our community. That is to say, a highly-centralized, hierarchical organization would be distinctly inappropriate, even alien. Thus, we moved toward the notion of a loosely-affiliated group of regional alliances (we'll have at least eighteen, and probably more, eventually) where most of the action and initiatives would take place. Fred and I also made sure to include on our Board of Directors a number of current stakeholders in our profession. A month or so later, we invited John O'Connor, Director of the Instructional Development Office and Associate Professor of English at George Mason University, to become the second co-director (Fred is the first). We also asked Cindy Self and Gail Hawisher to co-chair our Board of Directors, which they agreed to do.
The Board of Directors. . .includes both well-known computers-and-writing community people and industry representatives: the Alliance is not only a professional association but also a consortium of academia and industry (the industries being publishing and computing). The Alliance is also supposed to combine K-12 and college, but, at this early stage in the development of the Alliance, it is embarrassingly short on K-16 leaders, both at the national regional levels. We will remedy that shortage this year, we hope....
The main goal of the Alliance is to advance the use of computers to teach writing. Generally, this means, for now, helping faculty explore the use of computers in their teaching by making available more training and consulting opportunities, adding information resources that are readily available to our field (and are up-tp-date and pertinent), and by helping to create more institutional support and recognition for work with computers. How this is interpreted into action will differ from region to region, as most of this work will be carried out at the regional level by the regional organizations.
The national ACW will provide a number of services, including this newsletter, various network services for communication and information retrieval, support for train-the-trainer workshops, support for the annual Computers and Writing Conference, overall financial and database management, coordination among the regionals, national advocacy, and many other initiatives that the directors and the Board believe will move us toward our goals. There is lots to be done at all levels....
Varied approaches to using computers to teach writing have been proven over time, including, among others, the use of various hypertext tools, multi-media programs, word-processing programs, heuristic tools, distance education, and other individual writers' tools. As a matter of policy (and practice), the Alliance does not officially or unofficially advocate any one approach to teaching writing with computers. Naturally, we hope to support approaches that prove valuable and productive, but which approaches these are is not pre-determined.
--Trent Batson
April, 1994