A native Texan, I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, where I graduated from Texas Tech University. I received the MA from The University of Texas at Austin, and the PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I've taught at UT, Texas Tech, Miami, the University of Alabama and Birmingham-Southern College. In 1990 I joined the English Department at Creighton University as Director of the Composition Program. I served as Chair of the English Department from 1999-2001, and as holder of the A.F. Jacobson Enndowed Chair in Communication from 2001-2008. I’m currently serving a second term as Chair of the English department. In March 2009, I was promoted to Professor of English (effective Fall 2009).
At Creighton, I founded and directed the Composition program, the Writing Center, as well as the English Computer Lab. I served on the all-University Instructional Computing Committee, including two terms as Chair, on the Distance Learning Task Force, and chaired the IT Competence Task Force. I was one of the inaugural USWest Academic Technology and Development Fellows (now the eFellows program), and have received the Outstanding Advisor award from the College of Arts and Sciences.
I've taught onsite and online versions of first-year and advanced composition; technical and professional writing; a senior seminar in the essay; a senior capstone course in literacy and technology; introduction to English Studies; and world literature, and graduate courses in classical rhetoric, the history of writing instruction, the teaching of writing, and culture, literacy, and technology. I've also taught seminars in workplace and managerial writing for a variety of professional audiences, including St. Joseph's Hospital, Boys Town, MBA/MCSM students, the Junior League, and the Omaha Police Department. Other teaching forays have been summer courses in writing for the World-Wide Web in the Ad Astra program to 12-14-year-olds, and in the Arete program to high school students on the essayist's craft.
I currently serve on the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication (more colloquially known as the 7Cs Task Force), and am a member of the editorial board of Kairos.
I've written or edited articles, reviews, book chapters, and conference papers on the challenges of multimedia composing, computer, Web, and Internet use in teaching writing, prediction and progress in technologized rhetoric, the development of instructional computing culture, the challenges of teaching with technology in Christian higher education, technology in national teaching standards, the Web and writing theory, the Jesuit tradition in writing instruction, classical rhetoric, Socratic dialectic, composition teaching methods, writing centers, the development of a new multimediated writing process model, and popular literature (Larry McMurtry, W.E.B. Griffin, Colleen McCullough, William Least Heat-Moon, Nevil Shute, and Robert A. Heinlein). My book on Socratic method in writing instruction was published in 1997; my book on American author John P. Marquand was published in 2004. Work just published includes a definition of the multimediated writing process and a discussion of the challenges of teaching writing with wikis; forthcoming work includes an autoethnographic discussion of the composition of multimediated scholarship, and a book chapter on the history and dynamic of the <blink> and <marquee> HTML markup tags.
I'm married to Susan E. Reaves, and we have four cats.
