Joy W. Whitenack

Audience Awareness in a Technology-Rich Elementary Classroom.

We examined audience awareness in a 5-month naturalistic study of a fourth-grade classroom infused with technology. All students had a computer on their desks, and five multimedia workstations with Web access were available in the classroom. We found that this technology-rich classroom, which also valued collaboration and inquiry, offered such pervasive opportunities for interaction between authors and classmates that it was difficult to distinguish between author and audience. We propose interactive audience as an expanded conception of audience awareness, and we examine the impact that interactive audience had on authors and their composition.