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Co-Creator of Computers and Composition Kate Kiefer, Colorado State University
I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank all the authors and Cindy for five years that were both exhausting and rewarding. Working with Cindy and all the teachers and researchers who submitted materials to Computers and Composition from 1983-1988 remains among my most cherished memories. I have learned so much from the process of working with authors and from reading the best of the work on computers and writing. I am deeply grateful to be a member of this intellectually engaging and engaged community. |
As
I discuss briefly in my portion of the Letter from the Editors in
the 20th-anniversary volume (1) of Computers and Composition,
I believe that the journal has made possible much of the rapid growth
of interest in and understanding of computers as tools for literacy,
for writing instruction, for shared discourses, and for investigation
of critical issues in our discipline. Granted, composition studies
generally were taking giant steps forward during the 1980s—defining
concerns and goals with greater maturity than ever before. But computers
could have been so easily dismissed as simply CAI tools early on—until
the blossoming of the Internet made ignoring computers impossible.
Our journal, I believe, helped us as scholars and teachers prepare
to take advantage of the Internet in ways that might otherwise have
been delayed into the mid-1990s. We began, through this journal, to
shape our own discourses about computers and writing (in all its forms)
so that we engaged with the Web on our own terms.