ABSTRACT
James Duderstadt, Daniel Atkins, and Douglas Van Houweling, 2002, p. 269
In the world of higher education, it can be difficult to keep up to date in one area of expertise much less in two or more areas, and yet the very nature of the current knowledge explosion requires us to do just that. Fortunately, as academics, we are well suited to make patterns out of chaos, to analyze trends and flows of information, to look at how one subject influences others, and to seek confluences of new and old ideas. In the arenas of distributed learning and the teaching of writing, such analysis and pattern making is especially valuable. How else is a biology teacher preparing a writing-intensive course to do her or his best in a hybrid delivery environment? How else is a writing instructor to facilitate learning in a televised class that includes a video-streaming component? The forces that influence such situations are multiple. So we begin this book by examining three components of the conundrum: the educational uses of new information technologies (ITs), the business side of education, and writing across the curriculum (WAC) as a model for transforming teaching and learning. Our intent is to explain the various influences that impinge on a writing or writing-intensive course taught from a distance and to fully explore the contexts in which such teaching happens. We seek a deeper understanding of how the components twine together to create powerful opportunities. To that end, we put WAC in conversation with distributed learning and the business of education and then analyze the patterns we discern.2
