Digital Writing and Research Lab

Director of the DWRL, Diane Davis, with guest speaker Gregory Ulmer

DWRL staffers experiment with lights, cameras, and backdrops for a video series on writing processes

The Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL) is an interdisciplinary research lab at The University of Texas at Austin dedicated practically, pedagogically, and theoretically to the identification and promotion of twenty-first-century literacies. These literacies range from navigating online newsfeeds and participating in social networking sites to composing multimedia texts that require producing, sampling, and/or remixing media content.

The lab is staffed by graduate student researchers and instructors at The University of Texas at Austin who participate in research groups, teach in computer classrooms, and hold workshops on digital pedagogy. "Staff work involves both routine classroom support and participation in on-going Lab projects such as the development of computer-based instructional materials (courseware) and documentation, as well as identification and documentation of successful pedagogical practices and research into other pedagogical applications of computer technology."^[1]

Established in 1985 as the Computer Research Lab (CRL), the lab was known as the Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL) from the 1990s to 2010, when it became the Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL).

Mission

Positioned at the intersection of rhetoric, writing and technology, the DWRL launches yearly initiatives aimed at offering instructors tools to teach key communicative competencies in an increasingly technologized, global environment. These competencies include: proficiency in current software packages and technological devices; the ability to collaborate, synchronously and asynchronously, across special barriers; confidence in producing, analyzing and sharing information in various digital formats; and skills to efficiently manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information.

History

Origins

The DWRL began in 1985 with the acquisition of twelve IBM microcomputers as a result of a Project QUEST grant to the University of Texas at Austin. English department faculty member Jerome Bump and his graduate students later arranged for the machines to be moved from the University Writing Center (housed in the English department) to vacant space in the basement of the Undergraduate Library. This space was deemed the Computer Research Lab (CRL) and marked the beginning of the research into computer-based writing at The University of Texas at Austin.

In fall 1986 Bump offered a graduate seminar on rhetoric and computers, which he co-taught with Lt. Col. Hugh Burn. Burns, who worked in the Intelligent Systems Division at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, had written the first dissertation in what became the academic field of Computers and Writing. Graduate students in this seminar sought to advance Burns’s efforts to explore how the computer could serve less as a “teaching machine” and more as a constructive partner in dialogue with student-writers.^[2] Theoretically, this work aligned well with the emerging “process” model of writing instruction, and Burns’s presence lent national credibility to the group. Burns coined the name of the new Computer Research Lab.

Participants in the newly established lab dedicated their efforts to finding alternative models for the writing classroom. The lab’s first local area network (LAN) represented a major triumph, allowing for computers in the lab to be linked to one another, as well as to machines in an adjacent instructional room. This arrangement eventually enabled colleagues from the English department to teach first-year English courses in the CRL’s first "computational classroom" as Bump and his graduate students called it. But the limitations of word-processing programs at the time, coupled with resistance from wary students and suspicious scholars, blunted the initial impact of these classroom resources. To address at least the practical problems, the lab team decided to undertake its own programming, with the products designed to support specific aspects of the writing process.

Early Products

Graduate student Fred Kemp’s software Idealog focused on invention or pre-writing, while his colleague Paul Taylor’s Descant assisted revision. Other students, moving away from the “process” instructional model that underpinned these two, developed programs of their own that prioritized social interaction. These included Locke Carter’s In-Class Mail and Paul Taylor’s Forum5. Even though the different programs emerged from different theoretical assumptions, they could be used together in a coherent way.^[3]

They also supplied the foundation for the most notable achievement of the lab’s formative years, the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (DIWE), a suite of applications meant to integrate different elements of the writing process. DIWE included four major modules: Invent, Respond, Mail (an asynchronous, internal messaging system), and InterChange (a conferencing system that allowed for synchronous—real-time—interaction among students and instructors). Several scholars went on to praise InterChange, in particular, for its capacity to transform the dynamics of a writing classroom.^[4]

Focus on Digital Pedagogy

In January 1989, under the new leadership of director John Slatin, the lab’s staff began to assemble an extensive archive of pedagogical texts—materials associated with the lab’s attempts to conduct writing instruction in computer classrooms—and co-hosted the sixth Conference on Computers and Writing. Slatin also tended to the further entrenchment of the CRL within the infrastructure and culture at UT-Austin. He wrote a major funding proposal that increased the university-wide visibility of the CRL, eventually establishing computer labs and networks and disseminating new DIWE software across numerous departments on UT-Austin’s campus. Funding for additional labs and multimedia hardware also tightened the ties between the CRL and the English department and, later, the new Division of Rhetoric and Composition (which, upon its creation in 1993, assumed administrative oversight of the CRL).^[5]

The lab’s institutional growth continued with the hiring in 1994 of faculty member Margaret Syverson, trained in Computers and Writing, and the recruitment of additional graduate students. Syverson directed the rechristened Computer Writing and Research Lab from 1994 to 2004.

From 2004 to 2008 Clay Spinuzzi directed the CWRL, addressing accessibility and content management issues with the lab's website as well as staff engagement. In 2004 the CWRL hired current systems administrator D. Hampton Finger, who facilitated the lab's switch to Drupal for its web content management. This shift allowed for greater accessibility and made personal Drupal installations available for instructors. As a result of a university pilot program using WebXM to ensure web accessibility, in October 2006 the CWRL lowered its webpage's structural accessibility violations from 3100 pages to zero. During 2004-2005, the CWRL also created a workgroup model in which workgroup leaders assemble small teams to work on particular projects, allowing for greater continuity from year to year. From 2006 to 2008, the CWRL pursued outside partnerships and more coherent research and development focuses. The lab redeveloped and rationalized archives of English and rhetoric exercises in a system called eFiles, and developed viz., a blog about visual rhetoric.

Initiatives

Each year, the DWRL designs and implements several research projects. These year-long initiatives enhance graduate instructors' professional and teaching portfolios as well respond to established and emerging digital literacy issues. The research produced results in publications, white papers, conference presentations, and regular updates to DWRL blogs, viz. and Blogging Pedagogy. Project leaders, members and lab specialists also offer workshops throughout the year which share tools for pedagogical innovation. The results of the research conducted in the project groups is presented every year at the DWRL Final Showcase as well as archived online.

Current Initiatives

• The Immersive Environments Project - The Immersive Environments group encompasses a continuum of structures and technologies, from console and computer games, to SecondLife, to alternate reality games, and geospatial applications. Extending the DWRL's pedagogical uses of SecondLife and other immersive environments like formal gaming structures, group members network with local gaming entities (clubs, companies, campus groups), especially those who look at games from a fresh, novel, or historically under-represented perspective.

• The Engaged Networking Project - The Engaged Networking Project works to form sustainable and reciprocal relationships between the DWRL and others using multiple media channels. They sustain the social media presence of the DWRL and by develop collaborative relationships with partners on and off the UT campus. They involve the DWRL in projects that promote the kind of active citizenship that is intrinsic to participatory cultures; and from that experience to generalize a set of principles that will enable others to undertake similar, engaged networking adventures in teaching and research.

• The Currents in Electronic Literacy Project - Members of this group collectively solicit, edit, and publish the Spring 2011 issue of the DWRL’s e-journal Currents in Electronic Literacy. Currents in Electronic Literacy is a respected journal indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and EBSCO (ISSN 1524-6493); it is internally peer reviewed by a cohort of graduate students and faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. Recent issues have featured original articles and interviews by leaders in the fields of literacy, literature, technology, and rhetoric including Lawrence Lessig, Bret Benjamin, Stuart Selber, Robert Scholes, Alan Liu, and Avital Ronell among others.

• The Visual Rhetoric Project - Members of this group manage and write for the DWRL’s award-winning visual rhetoric blog, viz. This distinguished blog ranks among the most widely-read of all publications produced at UT; During the 2008 - 2009 year, the site averaged some 4,600 unique visitors per month. Viz also produces static content in arenas such as multi-form interviews, assignments, theory pages, and teaching guides. In partnership with the Blanton Museum of Art, this group develops and implements pedagogical lesson plans and activities as well as contributes to the development of the "Steve in Action" project, a collaborative venture of the international New Media Consortium.

Products of Past Initiatives

• Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment - a suite of collaborative tools designed to run on a local area network, helps students develop their skills in writing and critical thinking.
• The Learning Record Online - a portfolio-based method for accounting for learning in complex systems.
• Rhetorical Peaks - an interactive video game for rhetoric and writing instruction.

Speaker Series

Since 2007 the DWRL has held a speaker series, bringing some of the foremost thinkers in digital literacy and learning technologies to the University of Texas at Austin. Past speakers include:

• Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, "Sound Unbound" (2010)
• David Parry, "Burn the Boats/Books" (2010)
• Cynthia Selfe, "Stories That Speak to Us: The Intellectual and Social Work of Literacy Narratives and Digital Archives" (2009)
• Michael Joyce, "Touching Upon the Truth" (2009)
• Gregory Ulmer, "ELECTRACY: Writing to Avatar" (2008)
• Lisa Maruca, "Eighteenth-Century Cyborg Writing: An Unnatural History of Literacy" (2008)
• Cynthia Haynes, "Avatar Nation Secedes, Cites Moral Panic as Grounds for Political Divorce" (2007)
• Victor Vitanza, "Dasein as Design: Scar..." (2007)

Courses and Classrooms

"Since 1986, the CWRL has fostered ongoing inquiry, experiment, development, and practice that explores the uses of technology to support teaching and learning in a broad range of undergraduate and graduate courses."^[6] Largely, the courses taught throughout the DWRL are courses are Rhetoric and English classes which benefit from a computer-learning environment. Computer classrooms allow students have access to a wide range of learning technologies including their own Mac desktop computer. Instructors control a teacher station through which they are able to project images, websites and video. All students enrolled in courses conducted in computer classrooms have access to a computer lab with printing privileges.

Staff

• Director - Diane Davis
• Assistant Directors - Sean McCarthy, Justin Tremel, Lauren Nahas, Will Burdette
• Program Coordinator - Stephanie Stickney
• Systems Administrator - D. Hampton Finger

Alumni

Jenny Edbauer Rice, Fred Kemp, Jim Brown, Olin Bjork, Albert Rouzie, Bill Wolff, John Jones

References

1. ^ Slatin, John. "The Computer Writing and Research Lab: A Brief Institutional History" Language Learning Online. Austin, TX: Deadalus Group Inc, 1998. pp. 26-27.
2. ^ Slatin, John. "The Computer Writing and Research Lab: A Brief Institutional History" Language Learning Online. Austin, TX: Deadalus Group Inc, 1998. p. 22.
3. ^ Slatin, John. "The Computer Writing and Research Lab: A Brief Institutional History" Language Learning Online. Austin, TX: Deadalus Group Inc, 1998. p. 23.
4. ^ Slatin, John. "The Computer Writing and Research Lab: A Brief Institutional History" Language Learning Online. Austin, TX: Deadalus Group Inc, 1998.p. 24.
5. ^ Slatin, John. "The Computer Writing and Research Lab: A Brief Institutional History" Language Learning Online. Austin, TX: Deadalus Group Inc, 1998. pp. 30-32.
6. ^ Syverson, Peg. "The CWRL Colloquium: A Window into the World of Computer-enhanced Teaching and Learning" Currents in Electronic Literacy. Spring 2002 (6).

External links

• Official Website of the DWRL