Results tagged “cccc-09”

• Kristen Seas, "Ripple Effect: A New Perspective on Rhetorical Agency"
• Lars Soderlund, "Kairos and Emergence"
• Marc Santos, "Social Bookmarking as Distributed Research"
• Jeremy Tirrell, "Decorum and Emergent Ethics"

I was particularly interested in this panel, in part because I taught the session chair in a few technical writing / new media classes when she was an undergraduate, but also because the Emerging Social Software SIG on the previous night had done a lot of thinking about social bookmarking, so I was also looking forward to the talk by Santos.  I'm not a rhetorician, so I learned quite a bit from these panelists.

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited.  My own comments are in square brackets.

[I came in about 10 minutes late so I didn't catch the beginning. These are my rough notes, lightly edited.]

Applause for Eric Glicker, who got the ball rolling on an annotated bibliography of social software. Many plans, some commiseration, a few very pleasant surprises. Matthew S. S. Johnson reported that his mid-tenure review committee agreed to accept my blog entry on one of his previous CCCC presentation as a citation. I asked him if his committee could send me a letter for my own tenure review, since I'd like my tenure committee to know that my blog is being used as part of someone else's tenure package.

At the meeting, Charlie Lowe presented Bradley Dilger's suggstion that we disband the SIG, since we can do more good splitting up and talking about open source issues in different groups, rather than getting together and preaching to the choir. Bradley was taking notes (on his cell phone no less... boy do I feel inadequate, with my PDA fold-out keyboard attachment). I'll post a link to his notes when I get them.

3500 attendees, successful innovations in on-site childcare and poster-paper sessions. Finances are good, considering the recession. There will be a slow increase in internet technology; 2 years ago there were 3 dedicated "internet rooms," this year there were 6, and next year there will be 9. I should check the WPA-L archives for explanation of internet issues.... I understand there was a lively discussion there regarding the lack of internet access rooms. Not everyone who asked for an internet room got one; not everyone who asked for a digital projector got one; it was a common occurrence for presenters this year to apologize for not being able to show the YouTube links they wanted to show. Michael Day says NCTE has WiFi equipment that the Hilton forbids them from bringing; we need to join with other professional organizations to negotiate as a block. Several resolutions passed without any real comment, though there was some dissent when a CCCC member proposed expanding the minorities scholarship to include LBGTQ minorities.

Four brief case studies, representing new and changing populations on campus. The group has left lots of time at the end for discussion. "We don't have any easy answers."

• Kari Warren, " 'Did My Mom call you yet?" Teaching Millenial Students (And Their Helicopter Parents)"
• Heidi Hanrahan, "'I've got to pay the rent': Teaching the Working Class Student"
• Elizabeth Vogel, "'What does analysis mean?': Teaching the mainstreamed ESL student."
• Bethany Perkins, "'You just don't understand': Teaching the Asperger's Student"

Overall, but not universally or uniformly, a theme of working against the institutional expectations for the benefit of the students.  I was a little surprised at this, I suppose because I feel great confidence in my own institution's ability to support the students it admits; I've served on the admissions committee, and our discussions often hinged on whether we have the resources to provide the level of support that a student needs.

As it happens, each of the four female speakers chose a male student for the case study. (I asked them whether that was intentional, and the panelists looked fairly shocked and told me they hadn't even noticed.)

These are my rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments inserted in square brackets.

• Nate Krueter, "High Stakes Style"
• Star Medzerian, "Rereading the Past: Style's Place in Our Disciplinary Memory"
• Mike Duncan, "Destroying the Topic Sentence"
• William Fitzgerald, "Dressing Up in Style: The Return of the Figurative in Composition Pedagogy"

This was one of the most enjoyable 4Cs panels I've attended, mostly because it reminded me that I got into this major because I love words.

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments in square brackets.

• Katie Retzinger, "Immediacy, Desire, and the Other: MMORPGS and Constructions of Identity"
• Mathew S.S. Johnson "The World is Subject: Gamers as Potential for Change"
• Phill Alexander: "Running with the Bulls: The Race Rhetoric of the Tauren in World of Warcraft"

The study of games and composition have long overlapped in the areas of popular culture and identity studies have long been areas of overlap.  I didn't detect a shred of defensiveness in the approach these scholars took, which has not always been the case at games-related CCCC events.  The idea of presenting games as an avenue for social change sounds like another potential growth area, in which the study of composition can turn games into a tool of inquiry and challenge, in much the same way that composition teachers often posit their role as preparing future citizens of a literate society.  I wanted just a bit more of the "How my thesis applies to college composition and communication" bullet point, simply because one expects that in a talk at this venue, but all three held up as explorations of issues relevant to both games studies and identity politics.

What follows are my own rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments inserted in square brackets.

• Pamela Gay, "The Blogitorial: An Alternative ? Genre for Writing"
• Derek Boczkowski, "When Writing (and Teaching) Goes Public: Blogging and the Wall-less Classroom"
• Michael J. Faris, "What's in a 'Zine? A Public Ancestry of Blogs"

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited.  I've inserted my own thoughts in square brackets.

• Michael Williamson, "Validity and Bias in Writing Assessment"
• Les Perelman, "The Five Paragraph Essay Makes People Stupid and Machines Smart"
• Brian Huot: "How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 5-Paragraph Essay"
• Nancy Glaser, "One of Many Myths: Does the Five-Paragraph Essay Sink or Swim in Large-Scale Writing Assessments."
• Edward White, Respondent. (White recently published an amusing "satire" of a five-paragraph essay, which appeared in College Composition and Communication 59:3 (Feb 2008): 524-526

Another chapter in the love-hate relationship comp teachers have with formulaic assessments. (Mostly hate, with some codependency issues.)

[My own thoughts will appear in brackets. I regularly assign Rose's essay, "I Just Wanna be Average" to my freshman writing students. He considers the editorial a valuable form of public writing, and teaches graduate classes that ask students to use their specialized subject knowledge to produce editorials of value to the broader community.]

Bringing our knowledge into the public sphere. Disciplinary knowledge, teaching and classrooms, and personal knowledge.  As a group we are oriented toward practice. This talk is an opportunity to discuss going public with what we know.

[Rose's talk was very structured... so structured that I fear I may have missed labeling a section or two, either because I was inspired by something he had just said and was writing rather than listening, or because I was listening so closely that I forgot to take notes.]

• Dawn M. Armfield, "On the Go: Mobile Technologies and Literacy"
• Daisy Pignetti-Cochran, "What are you doing? Teaching with Twitter?"
• Kimberly A. Schulz, "Social Presence in the Online Writing Classroom: Community-building through Social Networking Technology" (with comments from Laura Gurak)
  

I do the "suck air in through my teeth" thing whenever I hear statements about how kids today "naturally" take to digital media.  If they hear that, they may get the idea that those of us who have acquired textual literacy just came to it naturally -- as if we didn't work hard to acquire that literacy. And students who are told that they are naturally good at digital literacy might get the idea that they're doing something wrong if it doesn't come to them effortlessly... people who are good at digital literacy have spent countless hours immersing themselves in the digital world -- doing things that mainstream society considers wasting time on Facebook, pouring inane thoughts into a Twitter stream, blogging endlessly about minutiae.  In a similar way, we developed our own textual literacy by spending countless hours staring at black marks on dead trees, looking at boring books without any pictures. Kids today are digitally literate because they see the immediate value of investing time in their product (whether they measure that value in terms of the number of Facebook friends they acquire, number of people following their Twitter streams, ratings and views in YouTube). 

Since I am not a heavy user of my phone (I use a Tracfone, the cheapest and simplest model I could find, I am conscious of conserving my calling time so that I don't have to buy extra minutes, and I wouldn't think it's worth it to get an unlimited calling plan, I found this panel very useful.  There's plenty of room for an analysis of the data -- I'd like to see some over-arching patterns that emerge, not from a single narrative about a single classroom experiment, or even a panel that combines several such narratives, but a survey that examines many such studies and categorizes them.  Such a study would take a lot of time, which is why I want to read someone else's study rather than write my own.

The following notes are a rough transcript, lightly edited. [Bracketed text reflects my own thoughts, responding to the speaker's presentation.]

• Bonnnie Kyburz [I arrived a few minutes late, so if she gave a specific paper title, I missed it.]
• Cheryl Ball, "B-Movie Virgin Sacrifice: Digital Scholarship in a Print-Tenure World"
• Michael Salvo "New Media Is/Are not Island(s) : Emplacing New Media in Communities for Use"

Take-away message for me: When I first began teaching HTML authoring, students were so proud that they got something online -- ANYTHING online -- that they weren't really ready for constructive criticism. I've tried to counter that by building more peer-critiquing into the course, with an early assignment that asks them to critique professional websites, and a cautionary reading that reminds students not to be dismissive or rude when they criticize the professionals, because adopting a sneering superiority is not the same thing as developing critical thinking skills.) So I should embrace the good learning that is taking place when students notice the gap between their tastes and their ability to produce. Can we afford to presume that our tenure and promotion committees will recognize this dynamic?

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments and reflections set off by square brackets.

Here are my rough notes, taken while the speaker was talking. (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2009.)

After thanking the audience for the "opportunity to serve in the cause of writing," Bazerman began with Mesopotamian farmer's clay pebbles used to keep track of flocks. What will the world be like 5000 yrs from now, or a century, or a decade? Our life projects develop with literacy; few in the developed world are farmers, but we participate in complex knowledge-based activities.

Farmer GPS Software slide: "Even farmers now grow crops by the book."

Writing has been considered sacred; it creates a space where we can be more thoughtful.

Writing facilitates building a parallel world of knowledge that allows us to monitor and influence the world we live in. As teachers of writing, we are bearers of this transformative technology, leading future generations in to more refined skills, deeper understanding, more complex cooperation, new adventures, greater communion.

The take-away message for me...

"The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the pen, like the sword, takes a deft hand, won through long years of training."

An emotional call for respect for the differences of composition, not by hoping for a world in which all English professors will be judged by their fruits, but rather a separatist rallying cry for the discipline of composition. It was well-received by the audience, though I find I rather like my own identity as an English generalist. (Bazerman invoked journalism several times in his talk. But that's one of the hats I wear, under the broad umbrella of English, that would not fit with the mission of the CCCC.)

More notes...