Crank reports on a peer-response experiment that began when she converted her traditional composition classes to a hybrid of online and traditional models. She discovered that asynchronous electronic peer response helped students become better responders to each other's texts and created a "new kind of composing community" in her classes (147). Asynchronous peer response offered certain strengths lacking in synchronous electronic or traditional peer response. Students engaged with the texts as genuine readers, took more time and care in composing responses, responded with more specificity, wrote to one another rather than the instructor, and valued the flexibility they had when they responded in the asynchronous environment.
Grabill asserts that writing teachers commonly think of adapting curricula to meet the needs of students to effect change but that true change in curriculum, institutions, and students will not result until the institutional view of basic writing is altered radically. He demonstrates that the level of technology available for basic writers reveals the lowly position of basic writing in the institution. However, for basic writing to gain a more important position in academia, developmental writing students need meaningful access to technology, and their courses must be credit-bearing. Grabill used his institution's emphasis on access to technology for all students as an "institutional wedge" to attempt to improve the position of basic writing. The introduction of advanced technology into the basic writing courses changed the attitude of the instructors and the students: Both saw the class as an intellectually stimulating course that "counts." The university has yet to make the class credit-bearing, but some movement toward change has been possible because of technology.
Because Internet sources are easily accessible to students, basic writing instructors should consider the influence of the Web in the context of their pedagogical practices. The Internet enables basic writers to join the "conversation of ideas," therefore authorizing them as members of an academic community. Part of this authorization is based on writers' abilities to evaluate and question the credibility of Internet sources and their use of critical reading and thinking skills, even though the Internet "necessitates" a reexamination "of the relationship between authority, academic discourse, and basic writers" (77).
Kish uses her 1997–1998 computer-assisted "stretch" class at Arizona State University as a case study to explore connections between the difficulties of basic writers and the writing difficulty of writer's block. Connections between the two—problems with genre and problems with the linearity of texts—are identified. To help to alleviate the students' problems, exposure to hypertext and basic hypertext theory was introduced to the class, a method that proved to be useful in helping students with their writing difficulties.
Otte examines papers written by his basic writing students, who have failed the City University of New York Writing Assessment Test, for patterns of error and the students' ability to correct them. As a reader of the WAT, Otte knows that a high incidence of error causes students to fail. Using a computer program called Error Extractor, he developed a list of eighteen categories of errors he found in his students' papers. With the program, which coded errors in their papers, Otte had students go through their essays, editing errors they found. Their successes and failures to edit were then recorded by the program and could be tabulated both synchronically and diachronically throughout the term. Otte found that using handbooks or covering in class the general types of errors he saw in the students' papers did little to help students edit. Instead, individual conferences, during which he discussed a particular student's particular errors, aided his students in editing their papers. His statistics gathered over the term indicate that students did become better editors of their own writing through the conferencing method: When retested, 79 percent of his students passed the WAT.
In a two-part piece, Otte and Collins describe Web resources available for basic writing and English as a second language teachers. Otte offers a link and directions for using the Currtran Database, a collection of innovative teaching with technology practices and ideas for use in basic writing and other courses. Collins provides a collection of links to Web sites that offer ESL teachers grammar resources, e-journals, and reference works. As with any Web-based document, however, some of the links no longer function.
According to a survey of basic writing teachers across the country, a disparity exists in the use of technology in developmental programs. Reinforcing the claims of earlier empirical studies, Stan and Collins find that using computer technologies in developmental classrooms positively influences students' attitudes toward writing and improves both the appearance and quantity of student writing. However, numerous institutional issues effect successful computer use, such as differences in the levels of technology currently available, resistance among faculty and students, lack of infrastructure, uneven access to professional development among staff, and lack of visibility for successful efforts.