Dr. Kemp is currently a member of the NCTE Instructional Technology Committee and is a past chair and a current member of the CCCC Computers in Composition Committee. He is co-director of the Alliance for Computers and Writing, for whom he manages a set of World Wide Web Pages. He is also founder and the current president of The Daedalus Group, Inc., a company prominent in the development of educational software, and is co-author of DIWE, the "Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment" (1990 EDUCOM/NCRIP TAL award winner for best writing software). The Internet email discussion lists he has founded include Megabyte University (MBU-L), ACW-L, and WCENTER. He has written and presented extensively about computer-based writing pedagogies.
A Description of Keynote Address:
The computer revolution is in full swing, and with the recent, astonishing expansion of the Internet and the World Wide Web, few can presume that education and especially writing instruction will remain unaffected by it. As we gain experience with compu ter-mediated communication and networks, we begin to realize that old fears of the technology dehumanizing or depersonalizing instruction were ungrounded, that to the contrary the sheer power of person-to-person interconnectivity provided by computer netw orks makes possible a highly personal and yet collaborative form of instruction, one that may prove far more effective than anything that preceded it. I hope to use my ten years of experience teaching or supervising hundreds of sections of networked comp uter-based writing courses to describe what teachers will need to know and the kinds of instructional, interactive environments they must learn to manage if they are to come to grips with the new technology.
Teaching itself does not become obsolete or "digitalized" by networks, but the role of the teacher changes in ways that, by most accounts, create greater challenges and promise greater personal and professional rewards. The problem, experienced by most people in this society as it undergoes considerable cultural and technological change, lies in misplaced expectations, both optimistic and pessimistic, and the "myth of the machine" as inherently restrictive and reductive. In the case of computer network s, when students write intensively to other students and receive great amounts of feedback--under the guidance of teachers who understand the social dynamics of writing--the process of learning to write assumes a less coercive and more organic nature, and the students' commitment to their own writing increases dramatically. We are, through the Internet, expanding this dynamic from the local-area network and fixed classroom to the greatly less restrictive and much more problematic environs of cyberspace i tself.
Email: ykfok@ttacs.ttu.edu