Alex has posted some thoughts on the recent Computers and Writing Conference and others have also offered some reflections, so I thought I’d toss two pennies of my own into the hat. The first coin represents what to me makes the conference and the community worthwhile. I don’t think it is just nostalgia—C&W was the first conference I attended as a graduate student some thirteen years ago. There really is a tighter-knit group and a different dynamic at C&W than I have found at other conferences. I think this may stem from the original outlaw ethos of the group. It’s hard to recognize, now that technology is so ubiquitous in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, but it used to be the case that the technologists in writing studies were the oddballs and outcasts. From the word processor to hypertext to electronic communities to online spaces the history of the group involves a lot of work on the margins that were opened up by the technologies of the day. The main point, though, is how this status created a sense of cohesion and shared purpose within the group: “I come to C&W because I don’t have to define my terms—everyone speaks my language.”

The nature of technology-related work has also shaped the community. There is a good deal of informal teaching, hand-holding, knowledge-sharing involved in learning to use technologies—witness the view/borrow source phenomenon of the early Web and of programming languages, FAQ collections, message forums. The knowledge-sharing/borrowing approach to tech learning, I think, carries over to the Computers and Writing conference. In some ways it colors the general attitudes of the participants; schooled in the technical training way, they bring these sensibilities to the conference. The conference also maintains a lot of the show-and-tell approach to scholarship that has been bled out of the more formalized and abstracted field of rhetoric and composition. People theorize, but they also share through example more frequently with less fear of being seen as un-intellectual.

There is also the wonderful fact that Computers and Writing is in many ways lead by its youth. From Daedalus to Kairos to today’s Web 2.0 many of the best developments in the field have been driven by junior faculty and especially by graduate students. Obviously these groups have been supported by more senior people and institutions, but there are (or have been) more opportunities for people new to the community to have a real shaping influence on the field. This dynamic is felt at the conference as well. When the community gets together it’s common to see a senior person under the tutelage of a young scholar who happens to know more about the subject than anyone else. And, conversely, lots of presentations feature young scholars showcasing their work and actually getting feedback from the field.

Alex asks what the conference might look like in twenty years and also reflects on the status of the field in the context of rhetoric and composition, so let me toss out my second penny as a partial response. I’m discouraged, honestly, by the way technology has been integrated into the larger field of rhetoric and composition. Some of this might just be a sense of loss that comes from no longer being as easily labeled as innovative or unique. I think, though, that this inability to be readily tagged reflects a larger trend that is disheartening. The trend is the professionalization (read academic gentrification and abstraction) of knowledge work. We’ve seen this in the larger field of rhetoric and composition as evidenced by publications in the major journals—see Fulkerson's and Trimbur’s ruminations on the field.

In rhetoric and composition things must be cited, lit-reviewed, and filtered through the usual venues to be given credence and welcomed into the field. My sense is that the computers and writing community used to be given more of a pass when it came to this requirement. In the early 90s as the Web was exploding, people would allow that the creation of a class Web site with student-generated online compositions was innovative. Again, the outlaw nature of computers and writing was helpful. The work was fringe enough that people outside of computers and writing might not bother to try to academicize it. They might not exactly embrace it, but they wouldn’t also try to add the controlling layer of intellectual abstraction that goes with traditional scholaship.

This may just be my own wishful thinking, but I believe there used to be more options for just concentrating on the learning and the teaching in computers and writing. Outlaw makers would make stuff. The rhetoric and composition community let the making happen, even acknowledged and valorized it in some ways by agreeing to leave it alone. Now I think it’s a lot harder to pitch the argument that one is doing quality work in computers and writing because one is making new things, creating heretofore unimagined opportunities for learning and writing. That is fine to do, still, but no longer enough to count as knowledge production in a field more tightly wound within the larger rhetoric and composition community.

Maybe the misty time I’m imagining when that kind of simple making did seem like legitimate work never really existed. I believe it may have, though, and I worry that it no longer does.

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