Results tagged “cw09”

At the recent Computers & Writing conference, I found myself, in the Q & A during several sessions, strongly advocating coding skills as a 21st-century core literacy.   (See Ian Bogost, Procedural Literacy. In the following reflection, I talk mostly about my use of Inform 7, but I also touch on Scratch.)

Here at Seton Hill, all students must fulfill a computer science requirement, but it's really set up as a "how to use Microsoft Office" course.  Students who can already use a spreadsheet or make a slideshow can pay to test out of the course, but I've heard from many students who don't want to pay for the test, preferring instead to take the course and get an easy A by being "taught" how to do stuff they already know.  (One faculty member has a special section of that course in which students learn how to program little table-top robots, but they still have to work in all the Office applications along the way.)

But even after students have taken this course, I regularly see evidence they have no idea what's happening when they click an icon or connect to a network drive.  They regularly lose files, saving their website projects onto thumb drives with pointers like "file://c:/Documents and Settings/My Documents/myphoto.png". They're mystified when I ask them to rename a text file with an ".htm" extension, because most have never even *seen* a file extension.

While it's good that the graphical user interface has brought the power of computing to the masses, at the same time, hiding all the working parts behind a streamlined interface turns coders into a priesthood of the elite, and that's not good for culture at large.

I'll have to leave this panel before the end in order to catch a ride back to the airport. I'm going to try at least to summarize what each speaker says at the beginning, which will no doubt leave the impression that this was a one-way event. (I'll also miss the digital arts display this evening, which is too bad.)

Jeff Grabill, Michigan State University

Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University
Virginia Kuhn, University of Southern California
Charlie Lowe, Grand Valley State University
Dan Melzer, Sacramento State University
Cynthia Selfe, Ohio State University
Kathleen Yancey, Florida State University

Begins with a pitch for CW 2010 in Purdue next year. (I'd love to go.)

Roundtable
Chair. Charlie Lowe, Grand Valley State University

Scott Banville, University of Nevada, Reno
David Blakesley, Purdue University

How can open source software, open access publishing, and commons-based peer production (CBPP) principles help us to create a sustainable university?

How can they positively impact the social and economic development of the university and expand the resources available that sustain university culture?

What is the role of the university in the larger community in fostering such sustainable practices?

I arrived late and completely missed the first talk, so I'll start with the three I did see.

Surveillance of Power and the Power of Surveillance
Mike Edwards, United States Military Academy at West Point

Hansel and Gretel in Cyberspace: Following Breadcrumbs in a Forest of Hypertext
Mary Karcher

The Digital Emergence of the Public/Private Authority
Casey McArdle
Ball State University

Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Began by noting the strangeness of talking to an audience about social media, while also seeing faces lit by computer screens suggesting multi-tasking. Referenced new translation of Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility" (note the shift in the more familiar title). His talk will explore the peculiar affordances of the digital.

Today, at the Computers and Writing conference, the Kairos editors presented Jerz's Literacy Weblog with the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award. (I knew about it in advance, and was able to get funding to attend thanks to the CIT department at Seton HIll.)  Lovas was a dedicated teacher, an accomplished administrator, and a patient mentor. I'm honored to be associated with his tremendous achievements.

From an announcement on the Kairos Facebook page:

Jerz's Weblog by Dennis Jerz of Seton Hill University

The John Lovas Weblog recognized this year has been a resource for writing teachers for most of this decade.  This blog offers a glimpse into the formative history of blogging in writing.  It bridges new media journalism, rhetoric, and composition studies in productive and insightful ways. 

It's author was one of the first professors to use blogging in teaching, coining the term "forced blogging" and problematizing its practice.  The weblog reflects lively intertextual exchanges with other blogs about gaming, interactive fiction, and digital pedagogy that have large readerships and show how much his bibliographical work is respected.

The blog, Jerz's Literacy Weblog, by Dennis Jerz of Seton Hill University, addresses a range of issues of relevance to our field from recounting panels at the recent 4C's conference to discussions of video games in education and the decline of newspapers.

Jerz shows continuing leadership in addressing the potential role of emerging technologies and new media in the teaching of writing and this is regularly reflected in his blog, making his site an excellent resource for those who wish to engage in such challenges.

Chair. Gian Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Process-Blogging: A Sustainable Foray into Collaborative Writing
Sabatino Mangini, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Jessica Schreyer, University of Dubuque

Endings: The Problem of Sustained Blogging
Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University

Keeping a Blog as Chair: Sustaining Public Discourse in a Private Job
Gian Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

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

Chair. Bonnie Kyburz, Utah Valley State University

Planning for Sustainability in Multimodal First-Year Composition Programs
Michele Ninacs, Buffalo State College

Fast, Free, and On the 'Net: The Story of a Self-Published Textbook
Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University

How College Textbook Publishers Will Thrive in Ubiquity. Or Die Trying.
Nick Carbone, Bedford/St. Martin's

Chair Mikhail Gershovich, Barch College, CUNY

Hacking Spaces: Place as Interface

• Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University
• Douglass Walls, Michigan State University

• Scott Schopieray, Michigan State University

Writing-a-go-go: Ubiquitous Computing and the Thirdspace of Workplace Writing
Tina Bacci, University of Rhode Island

The Examined Life--Cyberspace Style: The Construction of Space in the #philosophy IRC Undernet Community
Kennie Rose, University of Louisville

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

Barbara Ganley, Centers for Community Digital Exploration

Barbara Ganley is Founder and Director of the new national organization, Centers for Community Digital Learning, Barbara Ganley has spent her career exploring integrated learning across formal and informal contexts. For nineteen years as a lecturer in the Writing Program and English Department at Middlebury College, and director of Middlebury's Project for Integrated Expression, Barbara taught innovative courses in creative writing, composition, arts writing, and Irish literature and film. An active implementer of new media and Web 2.0 practices within writing classrooms since 2001, her research interests include the multimedia essay as a means of academic and vernacular discourse and social software as a vehicle for personal expression, community-building, and connected learning. Since 2004 she has kept a professional blog to explore the pedagogical, philosophical and theoretical underpinnings to the emergent learning outcomes in her uses of digital and communication technologies in the classroom and out in the world. You can find her blogging at bgblogging.wordpress.com.

These are my lightly-edited liveblogging notes.

[Note... based on the content of the Twitter feed, I think there may be more to talk about with regard to this talk.  Lots of people thought the talk was aimed at the wrong audience. I'll need a while to think about that, since I wasn't part of the Twitter discussion, so for now, here are my notes.] 

Began by warning the audience that the presentation would be interactive, and asking everyone to move. I and Karl were tethered to our laptop cables, so we just swapped rows and stayed where we were.

Asked who was on twitter... a good show of hands. Asked people to contribute on Twitter

#cw09 Ecotone

Ecotones or crossroads.  [Literally, my experience with Colossal Cave, when I moved from understanding Colossal Cave only through the 1970s game, to understanding it as a real geographical location.]

These are my notes, lightly edited, from a panel at Computers & Writing 2009.

I only found a single plug in the meeting room, in the very back row. This is a small conference, so I probably appear fairly antisocial typing way in the back here.  (I'll move up when the panel actually starts in a few minutes, after my laptop has sucked in a bit of juice.) 

I had considered attending a simultaneous panel on blogging, but I'd already heard one of the presenters make a very similar talk, so this panel won out.

Chair. Andrea Murphy, Old Dominion University

• Technologizing Pedagogy: How FY Writing Curriculum is Created by Electrons
  Will Hochman, Southern Connecticut State University
• Computers, Tools, and Instruments: Academic Dependence on Machine Terminology and Its Effect on Student Perceptions of the Computer Classroom
  Sarah Spring, Texas A&M University
• Ubiquitous Computing and The Perils of Early Adoption
  Jim Kalmbach, Illinois State University

It's hot here in Sacramento.  I got lost wandering the UC-Davis campus looking for the Computers & Writing registration table. I discovered lots of bike paths -- several of them more than once.  I stumbled upon a building with people whom I recognize from various conferences.  There was a nice snack table.  I had helped myself and settled down with a plate before I realized I had walked into the tail end of a workshop session. What was I going to do, put the food back and leave?  That would have been rude.

I found these big metal things near the art building.  I don't know what they are, but I like them.