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The teaching of writing has historically been distorted by its very nature into the teaching of writing for teacher. We have taught students to express their own thoughts and feelings for an artificial audience. Much of value is lost in this effort, things like the ability to express clearly the thinking of others, the ability to create texts appropriate to their contexts, and the ability to evaluate one's own writing and writing process in terms of real readers.
The Computer-Integrated Courses Program (CIC) is one of several powerful tools that can help students move beyond writing for teacher and writing merely as personal encounter. Students in Cara Lane's CIC English 200 course built an electronic repository of materials--web entries, annotations, and short presentations that offered historical briefs, responses to critical articles, and analyses of editions. Students drew on each other's work as they created their final project: a web edition of two chapters from Pride and Prejudice and/or Great Expectations . George Dillon's students in his "Intermediate Expository Writing: Writing for the Web" course learned about textuality through the web and about textuality specific to the web.
Created in 1990, CIC was dedicated to the goal of developing innovative computer-integrated approaches to teaching college-level argumentative writing, critical thinking, and scholarly research skills. Today CIC preserves the pedagogical goals of all 100-level writing classes but also offers opportunities to explore student-centered, technology-integrated pedagogy on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and in a variety of liberal-arts-based or interdisciplinary writing contexts. Expository and interdisciplinary courses now comprise over half of all CIC courses. These writing contexts include rhetoric and applied linguistics, comparative literature, critical theory, geography, and cultural studies.
Although specialized CIC classrooms offer a variety of technical tools, the technology used is kept subordinate to the goals of any given course-it is the course content, not the technology, which counts most. Our CIC computer-integrated classrooms are arranged primarily in three person user-groups. This is a major difference from other computer-based classrooms. Clusters give students access both to their own computer terminals and to shared desk space. Students interact as a community with one another while working at their individual writing stations, freeing themselves from notions of writing as a solitary act. Through this interaction-online and off-students improve cognitive, rhetorical, literary, and collaborative skills. In turn, CIC provides TAs and faculty instructors with opportunities to develop alternative pedagogical techniques and scholarship in a variety of liberal arts disciplines.
Committed to the idea that the computer has become a 'natural' part of the writing, research, and critical thinking processes, the CIC program is dedicated to the goal of developing innovative computer-integrated approaches to teaching college-level argumentative writing, critical thinking, and scholarly research skills.
Since Fall 2002, the Computer-Integrated Courses Program (CIC) has housed approximately 80 courses per year. CIC course offerings bridge disciplinary borders within our department, with CIC faculty teaching introductory, interdisciplinary, and advanced writing courses, undergraduate literature courses, and graduate seminars.
