Response, Replies, and Commentary

Jennifer Bowie, Response Editor

Kairos Meet The Authors

KMTA is an interactive series featuring the authors of Kairos webtexts hosted and coordinated in association with the journal's electronic partner, LinguaMOO.

Byron Hawk joins us to discuss his article "Structuring Destructions: (the) Will to Order the Computer Classroom" (Kairos 3.2). The discussion begins with teaching in computer classrooms and  explores several questions pertaining to defining and questioning hypertext.

Myka Vielstimmig, the "embodiment" of the electronic writing partnership of Kathleen Blake Yancey and Michael Spooner, speaks through their diverging and converging voices during a discussion on "Not a Cosmic Convergence: Rhetoric, Poetics, Performance, and the Web" (Kairos 3.2). The discussion includes visual discourse in academia; critiques; the multiple voice of Myka and the electronic partnership of the authors; the performance of their piece; design; text "expectations"; and much more. 

Dawn Rodrigues, Kairos staff, and readers converse on Rodrigues' article "Models of Distance Education for Composition" (Kairos 3.2). The conversation focuses on the classroom and ranges from routines, class material, community, distance, the faces behind the class, video, and much more.  A pre-chat also occurred between hosting editor Claudine Keenan, the author, and others.

Anne Frances Wysocki, author of "Monitoring Order: Visual Desire, the Organization of Web Pages, and Teaching the Rules of Design," joins us for a discussion covering rhetoric of visual work, online self presentation, teaching strategies, multilinear reading  of hypertext, the author's place in hypertext, good design tenets, and more.

Diane Howard is the author/professor of a two part Classroom Spotlight Series. In this issue, she presents the first part: The Dynamics of Constructing and Reconstructing On-line Identities. She explores the virtual places and relationships of her first year composition students as a part of the move from the physical space of classroom walls and buildings to the electronic pedagogues of bytes and bits. She studies these relationships through the construction and reconstruction of web pages as online identities. Howard discusses the forming of the class virtual community as influenced by each other, outsiders, and changing selves.This illustrates the fluidity and socially constructed nature of these communities and identities.

In Barbara Monroe's class, Composing on the Web, students and the teacher explored the poetics, politics, pedagogy, and  perspectives of hypertext rhetoric. The Spotlight,  "Compromising" on the Web: Evolving Standards and Pedagogy for an Evolving Rhetoric, offers the students' view and the facilitator's view on the "compromise" of composing, teaching, and evaluating hypertextual argument to "arrive at new standards for understanding this (com)promising new medium for academic writing and public discourse."