I would like to offer further areas for investigating C-MOC through Medium Studies. A recommendation here is to use medium theory to further study the effects of C-MOC on student writers’ attitudes toward oral composing.
Exploring C-MOC more closely through two of Meyrowitz’s metaphors—medium-as-language and medium-as-environment—will help us further attend to aspects of C-MOC’s manipulation of oral text. C-MOC involves more than a set of headphones or desktop microphone and a human voice. Understanding C-MOC-as-language allows us to investigate variables related to style, such as grammatical choices and the range of “expressive potential” (“Understandings” 46) inherent in C-MOC. Selected questions derived from Meyrowitz’s discussion of the metaphor of medium-as-environment that need further investigation for students’ work with C-MOC are:
•How easy/difficult is it for students to learn to use the medium?
•Is the communication between writer and C-MOC program bi-directional, unidirectional, or multidirectional?
•What are the physical requirements for using the medium?
•How immediate is the communication? (“Understandings” 47)
What these metaphors do is help composition instructors expand the notion of “task environment” to better understand C-MOC as a multidimensional composing space. My areas of investigation in the ethnography were partially derived from these areas. Medium Studies offers opportunities for research questions based on the interaction between writers and evolving C-MOC programs.
