Introducing Wini Wood

I'm Wini Wood; I direct the Writing Program at Wellesley College. Ours is a first-year interdisciplinary writing program: our faculty come to us from departments across the college, and develop their introductory writing courses on topics specific to their fields (of interest, of expertise). My own course, for example, doubles as an introduction to cinema and media studies; it is WRIT 125/CAMS 120, Women in Film. I also regularly teach a course on the rhetoric of presidential elections and, recently, a new course that was rather grandly (and erroneously) entitled "A Brief History of Public Speechmaking." In these courses, in addition to assigning several large papers (all written in drafts), I assign about a dozen small write-to-learn assignments, most of them involving some use of our campus electronic system. I'll be sharing some of these assignments with you all this week.

I also do research on electronic discourse; I'm especially interested in the convergence of private and public language in online settings, in how students develop a political presence online, and in the relationship between individuals' online and offline identities and relationships. I've led a research and action project at Wellesley College for seven years, funded by the Mellon Foundation, with the goal of creating campus-wide initiatives to educate our students in how better to engage in online conflict (of which there is much at Wellesley). This summer, we hosted the E-SCAPE symposium, a gathering of faculty, students, information services officials, and deans of students from over 30 colleges to discuss the kinds of problems we all must confront online, and the varying perceptions each group has of a single type of problem. We have learned that each group manages and perceives online conflict quite differently, and that, as individuals working together in a campus setting, we need to be able to work together on common problems.

Wini