CCCC 2008

Some 3,400 attendees came to New Orleans. In the past I have brought my laptop, taken furious notes all day long, and blogged them at night.  I didn't do that this time, in part because I was lazy and I didn't want to carry my laptop on the one-mile walk from my hotel (on the site of an old opera house, in Bourbon Street, in the heart of the French Quarter).  Also, the battery on my laptop is dying, so that I'm getting less than an hour from each chge, and I didn't want to have to be sitting in the back near where the plugs are.

This year, there were not as many panels on weblogs, and more on video games and 3D shared spaces such as Second Life.  As much as I love games and 3D spaces, I've yet to find a good articulation of why and/or how games can make students write better paragraphs.  Yes, students can write paragraphs about games, or they can use games as inspirations to write traditional genres such as character studies or travel literature, and yes games can be useful to simulate experiences such as conflicts or emergencies that students might write about.  I use games to introduce English majors to programming (in two different courses, one at a very basic and another at a more advanced level), and the different audiences for a new media artifact (that is, they must write text and design an interface for the end user; code for the computer; and comments for other programmers). 

There were many panels on new media, or multimedia, or multimodality (all of which mean pretty much the same thing, and I won't bore you with the shades of meaning).

I've got stacks of papers to mark and there is usually a huge pile of dishes for me to wash when I get home. (I've been married 14 years and my wife does not know how to use the dishwasher... I'm actually kind of proud of that.) So I'm not sure how many panels I'll actually write about.

But I will note that the town meeting (at 8 this morning) was very enjoyable.  The very small number of members (as I understand it, out of the 3400 at the conference, 75 is considered a quorum at the business meeting) immediately passed a resolution in favor of supporting open-source software. (Charlie Lowe, who was a driving force behind that resolution, already had reason to feel happy because he spent $5 at a casino and ended up winning $1200.)

Then we did small group discussions, choosing one of five questions.  I picked a question about how the 4Cs experience might change in the next 5 or 15 years, given changes in the students we teach and the technology we use. The first comments at my table were about the digital divide; while most of us seemed to feel the divide was getting less serious, others reminded us that they teach in schools where they still can't expect students to have access to computers, and where the schools don't provide enough computer lab spaces.

In way, most of the 4Cs members got a taste of the digital divide, since the Hilton does not offer free Wi-Fi.  Some individuals sprang for something like $15 for wireless access, but I went to numerous sessions where presenters just assumed they'd be able to show websites or YouTube clips during their presentations.  It was extremely frustrating to be cut off from or students while we were at the conference, but even more frustrating to me was the fact that we were cut off from each other.

I asked why the 4Cs wasn't encouraging liveblogging. We have some featured sessions with hundreds of attendees. If we webcasted at least the featured presentations, and encouraged liveblogging by setting up WiFi hotspots, and set up a system to encourage individual panels to upload audio from their sessions, just think of all the peer-to-peer knowledge we could be constructing, all the feedback we could be providing to presenters, and all the information we could be communicating to our colleagues who could not attend, and to teachers of English around the world.

Janice Walker and Michael Day were the executive committee members who were doing the note-taking. They were both all for WiFi. Janice said the contracts with the hotels are negotiated years in advance, but that the Hilton contract would be up for re-negotiation soon. Let's keep our fingers crossed.  I said I'd be willing to check a box to pay a little extra money to have WiFi access throughout the conference. So let's keep our fingers crossed.

As I was walking around the French Quarter and the Riverwalk, I suddenly had a vision of a log-in screen that would deliver a stream of updates from those who are blogging (or Twittering) the conference. 

What if we set up a system where bloggers could claim various sessions, and register their blogs with a central RSS feed.  The bloggers would tag their blog entries with the session ID (D16 or L24 or whatever) and each time CCCC members log into the CCCC-provided WiFi account, they see a welcome screen that says what session is currently under way, and an aggregator showing who is blogging about the current session. Each session could have its own bulletin board, so that if you realize you're in one of those depressing sessions where the speakers fill up the entire time so that there's no time left over for questions, the audience members can still have their say.  After the session, presenters could post links to their slideshows, websites, or the text of their papers.

It's not at all uncommon for the best things to come out of a conference to be the "aha!" moments that happen in the hallways, between sessions, when we discuss with our colleagues what we've just seen.  As a profession, we're aware that our teaching methods need to change in order to account for the hypercognition that characterizes the way our students experience the world -- through social networking, digital multitasking, and and endless process of self-creation through remixing.  We can learn about their world by experiencing it for ourselves.