Fisher, D., Russell, D., Williams, J., and Fisher, D. (2008). "Space, Time, and Transfer in Virtual Case Environments (VCEs)." Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy 12.2 (2008).

 Brief Description:  The design of many Internet-based courses continues to be informed by traditional notions of classroom instruction, in which course/content management systems (CMSs) like WebCT and Blackboard are used to simulate brick and mortar classrooms, thereby reproducing a classroom-like production and consumption of texts. In this webtext we argue that the way in which an educational CMS is configured and deployed can provide students with the sense that they are immersed in a different time-space (or chronotope), one characterized by social activity other than school-going, and therefore a set of motives for circulating texts unlike, though inextricably related to, the epistemic and sorting-and-ranking motives that Dias et al. (1999, p. 44) have argued characterize academic writing and make transfer of genre knowledge difficult or impossible.

Using the Virtual Case Environment (VCE) Lot49 Communications (first-year composition, marketing communication) as an exemplar and based on our experiences teaching with two other virtual cases— Omega Molecular and Agile Consulting (for both sites: username: guest, password: guest)—we show how we have constructed what we believe to be "transfer-enabling" virtual environments. We concentrate specifically on how affordances provided by these VCEs enable representations of space and time that our preliminary data suggest facilitate the development of "transfer-enabling" genre (or chronotopic) knowledge.