If they build it, they will come (panel): creating a virtual academic department in cyberspace—a presentation by the E-works collective of the University of Illinois at Chicago

The English Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago, like many humanities departments, is moving into an era when electronic textuality and pedagogy will be the norm. This is not an easy process. State universities everywhere are working hard to provide students and faculty with access to computers and Internet connections. At a few fortunate institutions, selected classrooms are quite high-tech, equipped with Interchange networks, video installations, projection displays, white boards, and other technologies that facilitate real-time networked discussion and distance learning. In the fields of English and Composition Studies, many scholars now use the Internet to conduct their investigations, rather than older, less thorough and reliable methods. As a result of this cyclone of change, writing, both as a practice and as an object of study, is being radically transformed as authors increasingly compose with computers and as scholars turn their attentions to the place of written texts in the new media ecology.