How to Write a Great Blog Comment

I don’t know any bloggers who don’t crave comments, but there are many more places than blogs that you can leave comments these days: on news articles, photos, videos, comment walls, and more. Comment writing is something of a new art form, and as many people who get comments will tell you, some are great…

Making Waves Within Webs: Rhetorical Agency in a Complex World — CCCC 2009 – Session O.11

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…

Web 2.0 Wavelengths: Examining Spaces Created Within Electronic Discourse – CCCC 2009 – N13

[I came in about 10 minutes late so I didn’t catch the beginning. These are my rough notes, lightly edited.] Similar:My Father's Day adventure included replacing the family gaming computer (a 2011 Mac Mini…..One of the benefits of working at Seton …AcademiaRequiem for the NewsroomWhen I worked at a radio news station in…CultureDespite its impressive…

Business Meeting — CCCC 09

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…

Amusing satire on Twitter

Short animated video Similar:Pop Culture Showdown with My Retro DaughterThe girl tried to weird me out with a vi…AestheticsEmily Dickinson’s Singular Scrap PoetryThere’s never enough time to cover Emily…CultureCopy Of The Scarlet Letter Can't Believe The Notes High Schooler Writing In MarginsBaffled that the young reader for some r…AmusingSave The WordsIn honor of the cold…

A Loose Canon No More: Style's Relevance to Writing Instruction – CCCC 2009 – Session I36

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…

Digital Gaming: MMORPGS and Player Identity — CCCC 2009 — Session F25

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…

Blogs: Understanding the Potential and Challenges – CCCC 2009 – Session E15

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. Similar:Katie Couric Gun Documentary…

From Validity to Validation: How to Use Validation for Better Writing Assessment — CCCC 2009 — Session D09

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…

Mike Rose, "Writing for the Public" — CCCC 2009 — Session C

[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…

(Re)Mediating Social Technologies — CCCC 2009 — Session B21

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…