Stuart Selber Past Interviews

VOICES ON: Hypertext, Technical Writing, and the Rhetoric of Technology Stuart Selber is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University. He has published numerous articles and an edited collection that won an award from the National Council of Teachers of English (Computers and Technical Communication: Pedagogical and Programmatic Perspectives, Ablex [1997]). Selber received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University. How does Penn State rate as a "connected" campus? Our campus infrastructure is robust, so Penn State regularly rates toward the top of surveys of wired campuses. In the department of English, we enjoy the technological resources of a major public university which is at the forefront of information technology and distance learning. All students have easy access to email, interactive advising services, online phonebooks, library interfaces, FTP, telnet, Usenet news, and the World Wide Web. In addition, students are automatically given server space for personal Web pages. I should also mention two other endeavors related to access on our campus. First, the Penn State/Microsoft Program enables students to freely download Office, FrontPage, and Visual Studio. Second, the Student Computing Initiative encourages all students to own their own computer. Does this kind of technology really enter into the classroom setting? It does on many levels. Increasingly our teachers include online texts and conversations in their classes, and of course students are expected to produce papers on a computer, conduct research online, collaborate via email, and create Web pages. Multimedia technology classrooms with computers, VCRs, laserdisk players, audio systems, and CD-ROM players are available to support lecture-style teaching, but most of us reserve teaching labs that allow groups of students to work together, in a hands-on way, on their projects and papers. The department of English provides ongoing pedagogical support for computer-based instruction, but teachers at Penn State also rely on the Faculty Multimedia Center and the Web Instructional Services Headquarters. What are the teaching challenges particular to technology and technical writing? I see three challenges related to the service course. The first is to expand the curriculum to cover online composition and communication practices in a more adequate manner. The service course often focuses on genres, approaches, and design principles derived from print-based models of work, and it assumes a verbal and not visual communication environment. The curriculum should be expanded to include composing with word-processing programs; revising and editing online; building multimedia documents from databases; creating and manipulating electronic graphics; writing hypertext documents; working collaboratively over wide-area networks; creating, using, and evaluating Web pages; conducting research on the Internet; and understanding ethical, legal, international, social, and political issues. The second challenge is to integrate technology in a central way. The vast majority of technical writing courses still meet in traditional rooms and require print-based projects. But such a peripheral integration of technology does not provide students with the robust experiential learning opportunities they need in an information age. The third challenge is to provide better support for teachers. On their own, teachers may be reluctant to expand the curriculum or integrate technology because these two tasks require an enormous amount of instructional expertise. So we need to develop systems that capture and leverage knowledge in teaching communities. What are the research projects you have worked on? My research focuses on the social and pedagogical intersections of rhetoric and technology. The crosscurrents I have examined include the structures and processes used to self-regulate discourse in Internet discussion groups claiming to foster egalitarian exchanges; the popular models of text in computer science that have explanatory power computationally but fail to represent accurately or robustly the nature of human language and cognition; the metaphorical perspectives mapping hypertext in both productive and unproductive ways along disciplinary axes of interest; the organizational forces helping to protect the existing socioeconomic distribution in a culture by valuing automating uses of computers that actually hinder creativity and productivity; the interface perspectives in participatory design fields that frequently fail to represent social boundaries. What other courses do you teach in the program? I teach a wide range of courses in the department of English. In our graduate program, I routinely teach two courses. One course investigates the theoretical and practical implications of moving the work of the profession into virtual spaces. The other considers how the language used to represent technology helps map the complex and contradictory relations between technology, culture, and communication, with particular attention paid to the shifting signification of what it means to write and read in a post-industrial age. I also offer a pedagogy course for our instructors teaching technical writing for the first time. At the undergraduate level, I direct the program in technical writing, so I do a lot of teaching in that area. I teach the service course, but also advanced courses in software documentation, hypertext, multimedia design, rhetorics of the Internet, and cultures of computing. How do you see your role at the university? In a nutshell, I see myself as an advocate for humanistic approaches that are alert to the biases and implications of technology development and use in higher education. I try to remind my colleagues across campus to consider the following kinds of questions as they exploit the advantages of computers: What is lost as well as gained? Who profits? Who is left behind and for what reasons? What is privileged in terms of literacy and learning and cultural capital? Do you have any new projects? I'm writing a book about computer literacy. It's under contract with Southern Illinois University Press, in the Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series edited by Robert Brooke for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. In addition, I have been funded to develop a distance version of our technical writing service course.

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