Tammy Winner, Ph.D.

Computers and new media writing taking on the form of multimodality create a greater opportunity for my students and I to communicate with one another in and outside of the online writing classroom. Thus I use technology as a communicative writing tool and I encourage my students to do the same. Like many, I argue that writing is a collaborative process that exists in intertextual forms. In hypermedia writing environments, according to Landow (1992) a new model of collaboration exists, one that marries both the assembly-line collaborative model, a system where writers work together to build a text in pieces that each contribute, and versioning, where one writer produces a draft on their own and then passes it on to another writer who rewrites or adds to it at another time (p. 89). In combining the two, I encourage students to add "chunks" of multiple authors to their own writing to add strength to their arguments, and at the same time, consult multiple readers about the development of their work. By encouraging students to communicate and consult with each other using various on-line mediums, I am asking them to write for an audience much greater than the traditional model of teacher feedback or peer response. In addition, I am asking them to write together and for the new media driven world we live in.