Over a period of two years we have pursued an experiment that has produced both student success and a set of observations that we believe will apply wherever courses make use of computer-mediated writing.
Electronic media can serve some contemporary ideas about writing instruction quite well.
And our experiences with new writing media, such as e-mail and Web publishing, had convinced us that the technology would encourage the future development of collaborative writing processes. We designed our courses as thoughtful and rigorous preparations for these new writing challenges. Electronic media also tend to reconfigure authority relationships in the classroom, moving toward an active student-centered course where the teacher serves as an expert guide rather than dominant instructor. Over the course of two years, we met on a weekly basis and discussed how our original ideas were or were not working in practice. Though we experienced difficulties, we found, to our delight, that students were developing into much better and more flexible writers, and this has encouraged us to continue using computers in our writing instruction.