Some of the most notable examples of C-MOC researchers and their respective areas of expertise are the following: Sheryl Lee Day (education); Michael Chamberlain (education); John Reece and Geoff Cumming (composition); Carl Berieter and Marlene Scardamalia (education); Beatrice Bourdin and Michel Fayol (psychology); Susan De La Paz and Steve Graham (education and learning disabilities); and Maamoun Al-Aynati and Katherine Chorneyko (medicine). Tara Rosenberger-Shankar, who completed her Ph.D. in Media Arts and Science at MIT’s Media Lab, created a new software tool for editing speech for textual production. Projects such as Shankar’s deal directly with the connections between oral literacy and text.
Computer-mediated oral composition has great potential as a composing practice. Several scholars working with young writers, such as De La Paz and Graham (1999), and Eamonn O’Hare, and Michael McTear (1997), have noted this potential. Long-term educational projects on VRT use, such as those carried out by “Speaking to Write” researchers in America, the Communication Aids for Language and Learning Centre in Scotland, and the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, have also looked closely at VRT’s benefits for young writers with disabilities. The compositionists who have taken notice of computer-mediated oral composing hone in on VRT’s universal design and potential appeal for all users. For example, research by Charles Lowe, Lee Honeycutt, and Stan Harrison discusses potential benefits of including VRT writing tasks in college composition courses, particularly when students engage their topics during the invention stages.
