Anne Balsamo
Joel Benjamin
Norman Coombs
Gail Hawisher and Cindy Selfe
Scott Rettberg
N. Katherine Hayles

This presentation describes the recent work of a seven-person research group at Xerox PARC on a museum exhibition focusing on the future of reading. The group is called "RED: Research in Experimental Documents," and this talk will include a video that describes the work of the group, the museum exhibition, and the cultural implications of some of the new reading technologies the group has developed.

Anne Balsamo is currently affiliated with the Programs in Feminist Studies and Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. She is also a member of RED (Research on Experimental Documents), a research-design group (formerly at Xerox PARC) that conducts collaborative research on experimental documents and new media genres. She served as project manager and new media designer for the development of RED's touring museum exhibit, “XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading.” Prior to joining the RED group in 1999, Balsamo was an associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she taught courses in communication and culture, and science, technology and gender. She was also the Director of LCC's Graduate Program in "Information Design and Technology." Her first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke, 1996) investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent bio-technologies. She is currently working on a new book titled, Designing Culture: A Work of the Technological Imagination that examines the relationship between cultural theory and the design of new media.

This presentation will describe Mr. Benjamin’s experiences working as the chess consultant to IBM's Deep Blue chess playing computer. He will relate how he joined the project as a technical outsider, and over time learned enough about the techniques of programming Deep Blue to enable his colleagues to infuse Deep Blue with chess knowledge in unprecedented detail. Ultimately the group was able to defeat the best chess player in the world, Garry Kasparov. 

Joel Benjamin, Grandmaster,* is a 38-year-old New York native, who graduated with BA in History from Yale 1985. He is a three-time U.S. Chess Champion and was awarded grandmaster* title in 1980. He has been a member of many U.S. National teams and is currently ranked among top 100 players in the world. In 1987, he was awarded the Samford Fellowship for chess study and training, and he appeared in the 1993 film, "Searching for Bobby Fischer." In 1995, New York Magazine named him as one of the "100 Smartest New Yorkers." He served as a chess consultant IBM's Deep Blue project from 1995 to 1997. 

This presentation will explore the effects of the rapid proliferation of E-learning, both as totally online courses and as online components to classroom presentations. In the rush to get a foothold in e-learning, many details are being neglected. What modifications must be made to courseware to make it readily useable by students and professors with disabilities, and, similarly, how does course content need to be designed to meet these needs? Besides doing this to provide an education, there are several laws mandating all education be made accessible. The good news is that, in overcoming any communication barriers in reaching these special students, the communication will be clearer for everyone. Better communication means better teaching.

Norman Coombs, Ph.D. is the CEO of EASI (Equal Access to Software and Information) as well as professor emeritus from the Rochester Institute of Technology where he taught history for 36 years. He pioneered RIT's distance learning program and was given Zenith's "Master of Innovation" award for his uses of distance learning to mainstream students with disabilities and also was chosen as New York State CASE, (Council for the Advancement and Support of Education), "Teacher of the Year" award in 1990 for  using computers in teaching. In 1998, he was selected Man of the Year Award by AHEAD, in 1999, he received the Strache National Leadership Award from the CSUN Center on Disabilities, and, in 2000, he was the recipient of the Francis Joseph Campbell Award of the American Library Association for work in helping libraries to meet the needs of customers with disabilities. Coombs has lectured on distance learning and on making information systems accessible to students with disabilities across the US as well as in Canada, England, Switzerland and Turkey. He has consulted on both distance learning and on adaptive computer technology for several colleges and universities including the University of Toronto, Western Governors' University, San Diego State University, Ohio State University, the OhioLINK academic library system, the Chicago suburban Library System, the Rochester Regional Library Coalition and Oakland Community College. He co-authored and co-teaches with Richard Banks online workshops for EASI on adaptive technology, Universal Web Design and on providing access to science and math for disabled students. Coombs' most recent publication is Information Access and Adaptive Technology, which he co-authored with Carmela Cunningham and which was published in 1997 by Oryx Press.

This presentation will follow-up on the work reported on at the 2001 Computers and Writing Conference. As the title of the presentation suggests, the discussion will explore how writing in the Information Age has addressed issues of race, class, and gender, particularly as the conditions of writing in a technologically rich environment have inflected the kinds of discourses that have been shared regarding these issues.

Gail E. Hawisher is Professor of English and founding Director of the Center for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She currently serves on the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Executive Committee. Recent projects are the co-authored "Women on the Networks: Searching for E-Spaces of Their Own" (with Pat Sullivan) and Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History (with LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe). Her latest work includes her and Selfe's Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies (1999) and Global Literacies and the World Wide Web (2000). The current project on which she and Selfe are working and from which their presentation is taken is titled Literate Lives in the Information Age: Stories from the United States (Erlbaum, forthcoming).

Cynthia L. Selfe is a professor of Humanities at Michigan Technological University and founder, with Kathleen Kiefer, of Computers and Composition, a journal she has co-edited with Gail Hawisher since 1988. In 1996, she was recognized as an EDUCOM Medal award winner for innovative computer use in higher education—the first woman and the first English instructor ever to receive this award. She has served as chair of both the Conference on College Composition and Communication and College Section of the National Council of Teachers of English. Selfe is the author of numerous articles and books on computers including Computer-Assisted Instruction in Composition: Create Your Own, and Creating a Computer-Supported Writing Facility. She has also co-edited several collections of essays on computers, including Literacy and Computers: Complicating Our Vision of Teaching and Learning with Technology (with Hilligoss), Evolving Perspectives on Computers in Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s (with Hawisher), Computers in English and Language Arts: The Challenge of Teacher Education (with Rodrigues and Oates), and Critical Perspectives on Computers and Composition Instruction (with Hawisher). Selfe and Hawisher are also the current editors of a new series from Hampton Press entitled New Dimensions in Computers and Composition Studies.

Electronic literature is an interdisciplinary, rapidly changing, international phenomena. This presentation will offer brief glimpses into some of the most innovative recent work, describing some of the evolving genres of literature designed specifically for the computer and global network. Rettberg will offer a snapshot of the present of electronic literature, and briefly explore current efforts to institutionalize (and deinstitutionalize) electronic literature within universities, publishing, NPOs and other parts of the cultural landscape.

Scott Rettberg is an assistant professor of New Media Studies in the Literature program at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Rettberg is the cofounder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. Rettberg is the co-author of The Unknown, a hypertext novel, co-winner of the 1999 trAce/AltX International Hypertext Competition and coauthor of the Unknown: An Anthology (2002). Rettberg's work in electronic literature has been cited in numerous national publications including The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Poets and Writers and PC Magazine.

As literary writing merges with visible language in electronic environments, it becomes increasingly important to create learning opportunities were text and image are both considered as signifying components. This presentation will describe an experimental graduate seminar taught at UCLA by Bill Seaman and Katherine Hayles exploring the interaction of word and image. The presentation will discuss the theoretical assumptions of the seminar, the the implications of treating word and image, along with other semiotic components, as "fields of meaning," and demonstrate three theoretically and technically sophisticated projects that emerged from it. 
 

N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of English and Design/Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her books include How We Became Posthuman, which won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99 and the Eaton Award for the Best Book in Science Fiction Criticism and Theory for 1998-99, and well as being named as one of the Twenty-Five Best Books of 1999 by the Village Voice. Her most recent book, Writing Machines, will appear in September 2002 from the Mediaworks Pamphlet series at MIT Press. Her work has been recognized by two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and a Presidential Research Fellowship from the University of California. 
 
 
 

Past Keynotes:
 

CW2001	http://www.bsu.edu/xtranet/cw2001/schedule.htm
CW2000	http://www.eaze.net/~jfbarber/cw2k/conf-keynotes.html
CW1999	http://cw99.sdsmt.edu/keynotes.html