Random notes and ideas from day one at Computers and Writing 2011:
Opening Town Hall
- Susan Antlitz — how and why do we want interactive spaces for teaching?
- Sharon Cogdill — how do technologies control us?
- Bradley Dilger — reading and writing code, using small amounts of code to attain big results
- Patricia Freitag Ericsson — break the silence and talk about what we do in our jobs: “Recuse yourself from knowing everything about everything.”
- Dickie Selfe — encouraging us to think about the waste we create in techno rhetoric (literally, the garbage that our practices create and how toxic waste is affecting other countries and people)
- Jeremy Tirrell — great data visualization using Google Earth to talk about geographic implications of our work; helping to construct multiple narratives about work in computers and composition
- Janice Walker — are we still on the “lunatic fringe” of composition studies? Are we a field, discipline, or sub-discipline?
- Q/A:
- Gail Hawisher — maybe we should still be called computers and writing
- Dickie Selfe — we need to move outside of our discipline to work with others outside, too
Session A: Student Production of Digital Media
- Michael Neal, Florida State University Rory Lee, Florida State University Natalie Szymanski, Florida State University Matt Davis, Florida State University
- Presentation Website and Description of the Major
- Thoughtful assignments and annotated examples of student work
- Notes from the conversation
- Second year of the major and there are over 650 students
- Support from Writing Center and Digital Studio
- Students make choices about the technologies that they use to present different projects; can’t use the same digital platform more than once
- What responsibility do we have to teach hardware/software in class? What should students do on their own or with other support?
Session B: Making Writing Socially Engaging: Asking Why New MediaDraws Us In
- Presenters:
- Eric A Glicker, Rancho Santiago Community College — blogging as a recursive process that moves students beyond the classroom
- Gian S. Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and David Schaafsma, University of Illinois at Chicago — baseball poetry for a literacy project that is not academic
- Dennis G. Jerz, Seton Hill University — are we in a post-blogging era now that Facebook is ubiquitous; is blogging becoming the new 5-paragraph essay?
- Daisy Pignetti, University of Wisconsin-Stout — thinking about Twitter and active reading
- Guiding questions:
- How does social media create opportunities for writers?
- Why is it that people find social networking pales as an engaging place to write?
- How does social media invite peer-response and interaction?
Session C: Dynamic assessment practices for media and technology classes
- Presenters:
- Dickie Selfe, Ohio State University — wiki as a tool for intentional adaptive communities; determining how length and content of oral “nuggets” of one-hour interviews contributed to an overall effect in multimodal composition; assessment was modified based on experiences with audiences
- Tim Jensen, Ohio State University — experimental assessment using digital media; students developing the rubric from the bottom up; discussing the assessment criteria that they developed helped describe group effort
- Kathryn Comer, Ohio State University — intro to digital media with a project proposal, informal studio discussion and formal workshops, and analytic reflection; could students make an argument for the composing choices that they made in their project?
- Scott Lloyd DeWitt, Ohio State University — accounting for production by focusing on the final product (project title, genre description/rhetorical moves, technologies used, and materials/references) with students developing assessment criteria concurrently
- Chris Manion, Ohio State University — how can we frame multimedia composition through a heuristic “habits of thought”?
- Notes
- Question in dynamic assessment processes: Do students actually participate in a democratic design, or do a few students dominate?
- Do we only focus on the product? Is the writer her/himself the product? — Helping students focus on the process of assessment as a part of the instruction.
- Improving student work not only over one term but, as instructors, improving our assignments and modeling excellent student work over time
Session D: Schools: Where the public and private collide
- Presenters: Ann D. David, University of Texas at Austin Amy E. Burke, University of Texas at Austin Audra Roach, University of Texas at Austin
- Notes
- If teachers use smart phones themselves, and most students have access via phone, what is it that keeps us from using them in class?
- Audience inquiry in social networks: search for patterns, examine self-representation, weigh affordances, author study
- Writing in motion:
- Writing in short bursts, different tempos
- Moving between pieces of writing
- Frequent peer response
- “Revision forward”
- Time and space to move
The luncheon keynote was Tim Wu, talking about his book, The Master Switch. The dinner keynote was Gail Hawisher, who gave a look back and forward on the field of computers and composition.
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