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Though composition studies has long sought to leverage new technologies of literacy to help students go public, we remain anxious about our ability to do so, as students commonly enter our classrooms already composing for diverse public audiences in a variety of digital contexts. Yet students, too, are often anxious about these new modes of composition, which circulate in a destabilized rhetorical environment where traditional understandings of authority, argument, and audience no longer hold. This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape— presence , persistence , permeability , promiscuity, and power —describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help students negotiate emerging networked publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study explores the efficacy of online environments for the teaching and learning of multimodal literacies. In our research, we seek to explore student learning between two groups who had experienced similar first-year composition curricula, one online and one face-to-face (f2f). Through an assessment of a pilot online curriculum taught at the University of New Mexico, which we call eComp, we explore the affordances and constraints of online and f2f learning environments for the development of multimodal literacies in first-year composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]