Christina Haas

1. Christina Haas • Literacy and Technology Presentation • Compiled by Patrick Connelly • Summer 2002 Session I

2. EDUCATION • Ph.D., Rhetoric, Carnegie Mellon University, 1987 • M. A., English, Washington State University, 1981 • B. A., English, The College of Idaho, 1978

3. ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE • 1996 - Associate Professor, English Dept. Kent State University • 1990-96 Assistant Professor, English Dept.Penn State University • 1988-90 Post-doctoral Fellow, English Dept. Carnegie Mellon University • 1983-90 Consultant for Interface Design, Carnegie Mellon University Information Technology Center • 1985-88 Research Associate, English Dept. Carnegie Mellon University • 1983-85 Teaching Assistant, English Dept. Carnegie Mellon University • 1982-83 Instructor, English Dept. The University of Wyoming • 1981-82 Instructor, English Dept. Central Wyoming College • 1979-81 Teaching Assistant, English Dept. Washington State University

4. Administrative Experience • Program Director, Writing Internship Program, English Department, Kent State, 1996-present. • Program Director, Writing Internship Program, English Department, Penn State, 1990-1996. • Project Director, Co-PI, Ohio Board of Regents Funded Challenge Grant, “E-Credibility Project (RAGS B-6254), Kent State University, 20001-2003.

5. Professional Honors and Awards • Society of Technical Communicators Distinguished Technical Communication Award, 1989 “Shared Information: Some Observations of Japanese Technical Communication.” • Braddock Award (for best article to appear in College Composition and Communication in 1988), 1989 “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning.” • Finalist, National Council of Teachers of English Most Promising Researcher Award, 1988

6. Book Publications • Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy. Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. 279 pages. • Educated in the USA: Readings on the problems and promise of education. Jennie Nelson, Christina Haas, Stuart Greene (Eds.), Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 1997. 341 pages.

7. Selected Refereed Journal Articles “On the relationship of old and new technologies.” Computers and Composition. 16.2 (August, 1999): 209-228. “’People do what they know’: Some Accounts of Participation in Project UNLOC.” Christina Haas and Kathryn Weiss. Works and Days 17/19 (1999-2000): 511-535. “IText: Future directions for research on the relationship between information technology and writing.” Cheryl Geisler, Chuck Bazerman, Stephen Doheny-Farina, Laura Gurak, Christina Haas, David Kaufer, Andrea, Lunsford, Carolyn Miller. Journal of Business and Technical Communications 15.3 (July, 2001),. “Writing as embodied practice: The case of engineering standards.” Christina Haas and Stephen Witte. Journal of Business and Technical Communications 15.4 (October, 2001), 413-457.

8. Potent Quotes From Writing Technology by Christina Haas “Literary scholars need to do more than merely observe as the discourses of our culture ‘make’ technology and as that technology, in turn, remakes discourse.”

9. Technology Studies? • “Teasing out when and how technology changes writing, when it does not, and the implications of both is one of the challenges of an enterprise I call Technology Studies: a concerted, focused attempt to examine technologies of writing-historically, theoretically, empirically, and practically.”

10. Focus • “Another tenet of the interdisciplinary enterprise of Technology Studies would be a continual focusing and refocusing on the technology, a looking at, rather than through technology.” • “Technology itself-rather than merely technology’s consequences-must become an object of inquiry.”

11. Critical Eye • “The naturalness of a well-designed computer interface may suggest an inevitability that masks the human decisions that have created the technological artifact.” • “Careful studies of technology development can get behind the mask of inevitability.”

12. Goal • “Ultimately, my goal in advocating that we historicize computer technology more completely and more complexly is to counter the dangerous assumption that technology is transparent--that it is not theoretical and that it is not laden with value.”

13. Annotated Bibliography • Writing Technology: Studies in the Materiality of Literacy by Christina Haas • Provides an excellent, concise, overview of language theory and its interaction with issues of technology and literacy. Contains several chapters devoted to practice and studies. Asserts the importance of “historicizing” technology as a way of maintaining a critical perspective on its development and place in our lives.

14. Annotated Bibliography Continued “’People do what they know’: Some Accounts of Participation in Project UNLOC.” Christina Haas and Kathryn Weiss. Works and Days 17/19 (1999-2000): 511-535. • An interesting observation of the conference UNLOC (Understanding Narratives, Literacy and Ourselves in Cyberspace). Haas critically responds to posts generated during the on-line conferencing. Her essay becomes more significant when it is looked at with the other articles in the journal.