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Section I, "Writing Technologies for Composition Pedagogies," begins with a nice opening piece to this collection, viz. Dickie Selfe's "Techno-Pedagogical Explorations: Toward Sustainable Technology-Rich Instruction." In this piece, Selfe explicates a series of "reminders of great use" for faculty, staff, and graduate students who teach in computer-rich environments. Among these reminders, he includes:
  • Develop locally sustainable teaching practices.
  • Don't let the technologies themselves drive your pedagogy.
  • Get to know your students, their technological attitudes and abilities, and their expectations for technology-rich instruction.
  • Assess what you do as you go along.
  • Network (in the interpersonal sense) with those around you.
  • Help develop a culture of support for TWT (teaching with technology).

This list is merely an abbreviated version of Selfe's more exhaustive list of reminders, reminders he systematically approaches and explains throughout the remainder of his piece.

Extending the theme of this opening section, readers find chapters from Janet Carey Eldred and Lisa Toner, i.e., "Technology as Teacher: Augmenting (Transforming) Writing Instruction," and Christine Tulley and Kristine Blair. Tulley and Blair's piece, "Ewriting Spaces as Safe, Gender-Fair Havens: Aligning Political and Pedagogical Possibilities," warns us against "prevailing cultural stereotypes" and the "male image of computers" (from Gerrard, 1999) as these authors articulate a clear focus: "Although there are web sites and video games specifically designed for females to create emotionally safe and intellectually supportive spaces for women and girls (Kaplan and Farrell, 1994; Takayoshi, Huot, and Huot, 1999), these espaces continue to be the exception rather than the rule." They add, "The extent to which safe espaces exist for women and girls outside the electronic writing classroom impacts the extent to which safe spaces can exist inside the electronic writing classroom." Such safe spaces - for both male and female students, Tulley and Blair emphasize - provide "an opportunity to develop a technological literacy that extends beyond mere technical skill to higher-level thinking capacities, including a more critical understanding of how the visual, verbal, and aural features of eliteracy can be used to sometimes reinforce, and sometimes transform, cultural norms" (64).

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