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…
Short animated video
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…
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…
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…
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…
[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…
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…
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…
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,…
A brief overview of a handful of tools that help the game-creation process. if you’ve got a brilliant idea and don’t have the capital to build it yourself – or the inclination to pimp it to your local Big Name Publisher, create a proof of concept with these recommended game engine kits and let us…
If I were a children’s author, I would write the story of Reba the Rebarbative Rhubarb. Of course, at the end, she’d be Reba the Redeemed Rhubarb.
Powerful journalistic storytelling. There’s no way to tell this story without being disturbing. And then there’s the big twist that comes in from left field at the end… stunning. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer…
If the newspapers do not survive, then what takes on the crucial social and economic roles they have performed over the past century and more? That is unknowable. Failing some inventive institutional spark, some vital functions might simply go unperformed. The Internet is creating a “tragedy of the commons” situation for news, and no one…
Does Adobe Shockwave fit your definition of malware? I train my kids not to click on random boxes that pop up, and I don’t want any boxes popping up on computers my kids use. So I was very annoyed the other day when I first saw this box — intrusive auto-update window that shows only…
I smell trouble. Via Trekmovie.com: Genki’s “Red Shirt” cologne (whose tag line “Because Tomorrow May Never Come” is priceless) celebrates the sacrifices of those often nameless crew of the USS Enterprise. Described appropriately as a cologne for those with a “devotion to living each day as it could be your last” the cologne has top…
On the first day of classes, I make sure that everyone knows that cell phone use during class is NOT going to be allowed. Not a text, not a tune, nothing. On day two, I backtrack just a bit and introduce them to the county’s disaster alert program that residents and students can sign up…
Repeat after me. Newspaper ≠ journalism. Journalism ⊃ newspaper. Why a once-profitable industry suddenly seems as outmoded as America’s automakers is a tale that involves arrogance, mistakes, eroding trust and the rise of a digital world in which newspapers feel compelled to give away their content. “Most of the wounds are self-inflicted,” says Phil Bronstein,…