I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Most of my teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels explores the connections between writing and technology. Some of my recent scholarship has appeared in the journals Computers and Composition, College Composition and Communication Online, and The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. I've also given presentations at many different conferences.

Brief biography
I was born in Wisconsin and I lived in several different places as a child, but I consider Cedar Falls, Iowa to be my home town. After high school, I attended the University of Iowa where I earned a BA in English. After my undergraduate degree, I entered the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and I earned a Master of Fine Arts degree. I continued to live in Richmond until 1993, working part-time as an adjunct instructor at Virginia Commonwealth and full-time in the marketing department of the Virginia Student Assistance Authority, a student loan agency. While my title there was "public relations representative," most of my work involved desktop publishing, document design, and technical writing.

I entered the PhD program in Rhetoric and Writing at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. My dissertation, which I have made available on the web, was called "The Immediacy of Rhetoric: Defintions, Illustrations, and Implications." In 1996, I began work as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon. In 1998, I joined the faculty at Eastern Michigan as an Assistant Professor, and in 2002, I was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.

Those interested in other aspects of my life can visit my personal web site.

About my teaching
Like most composition and rhetoric teachers/scholars, I want students to be actively involved in their own learning and I see my role as a “leader” and a “facilitator.” This is particularly true with students in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, though this is also the atmosphere I try to create in courses like first year writing and introduction to literature. I see writing as a process, though, like those scholars interested in what has been called “post-process pedagogy,” I don’t believe there is any definitive or correct writing process. Rather, the process of writing is always tied to purpose, audience, culture, and the like.

I have been heavily invested in the use of technologies like the Internet to facilitate my teaching since 1993 with the use email, newsgroups, web pages, and synchronous discussion forums. Technology can’t replace good teaching nor can it solve the problems of bad teaching. But I do think that instructional technology simultaneously facilitates and questions the student-centered classroom in interesting ways that has made me a better teacher.

To learn more about the courses I'm teaching now and the courses I've taught in the recent past, visit my teaching page.

About my scholarship
My scholarly energies are currently going in two general directions. First, I am interested in issues having to do with the work of scholars who fall into the loosely defined camp of "computers and writing." For example, I published an article in College Composition and Communication Online called "Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites" in which I discuss some of the challenges computers and writing scholars face in getting their web-based projects to "count" as scholarship in traditional tenure and promotion reviews. With Bill Hart-Davidson and nine other collaborators, I was one of the "Directors/Producers" of the essay "Re: The Future of Computers and Writing: A Multivocal Textumentary, ” which appeared in the second volume of the twentieth anniversary issue of the journal Computers and Composition. As the title suggests, this unusual essay is an interactive discussion and meditation on what it means now to say we are scholars in "computers and writing," and what it is likely to mean in the future. I anticipate I will continue to be involved in projects on this topic, possibly including an edited collection of essays.

Second, I am currently researching and writing about the uses of technology other than the computer in writing classes in order to better understand our uses and misuses of current and future technologies. To date, I've published an essay on the introduction of the chalkboard in nineteenth century schools, I have presented on the evolution of the pen (from quill to nib to fountain pen to ballpoint) and the implications this tool had on the ability to teach more complex writing skills, and on the impact of the introduction of inexpensive paper products. I believe this project has significant potential as a book-length manuscript, one that I think would build a bridge between the historical scholarship on writing instruction in America and contemporary computers and composition studies.

To learn more about my scholarly activities, visit my Web CV.