C&W 2016 Sessions
Half-day Morning Workshops
Composing and Publishing Digital Scholarship
Editors from Kairos, Enculturation, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Computers & Composition Online discuss digital publication authoring processes from the beginning of research projects to the publication stage and provide feedback and workshop opportunities to participants.
This half-day workshop will guide and encourage authors interested in composing digital scholarship for online journals and presses. Editors from Kairos, Enculturation, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Computers & Composition Online will discuss authoring processes from the beginning of research projects to the publication stage, including visualizing, storyboarding/prototyping, creating sustainable and accessible designs, querying editors, finding local resources, submitting webtexts, and revising in-progress work. Authors interested in starting (or finishing) any kind of digital scholarly project will benefit from this workshop.
Schedule of Activities:
9:00 - 9:30 Introductions and overview of the journals represented at the Workshops
9:30 - 10:30 Interactive Q&A with all editors -- topics include
(a) reading the journal's website for info
(b) queries to the editor (how much info to include & which section/editor, if pertinent, to consider)
(c) generalities of peer-review process
(d) rhetorical design tips / best practices
(e) accessibility, usability, code-level best practices
10:30 - 11:30 Small group work focused on participant needs (feedback on specific projects or how-to-get-started for participants who don't yet have a project in mind)
11:30 - 12:00 Wrap-up conversation; encourage participants to submit.
Integrating Talks on Surveillance and Privacy in Writing Classrooms: Lesson Planning and Resource Sharing
The conversations and deliverables of the discussion and workshop will focus around digital tools that aid digital citizenship,
- Privacy as protecting visible and invisible digital identities
- Facilitators will open discussion on how educators may use free Internet tools to assess visible and invisible identities, with ways to opt-out of data tracking
- Photograph and meta-data scrubbing
- Facilitators will lead participants through resources to scrub meta-data from images in preparation for circulation in online spaces
- Encrypted chat and email
- Facilitators will instruct participants on how to engage with others through encrypted channels
- Safer social media
Facilitators will incorporate the above practices to show participants how they can build these tools into classroom assignments to keep students safer as they write online
For the half-day workshop, the timeline for the half-day workshop will follow:
First hour: Opening remarks, introductions of participants, open discussion about surveillance and privacy concerns
Second hour: Demonstration of tools that aid in digital citizenship
Third hour: Lesson planning (mini-lesson, 1 week, 2 week and/or 4 week) for integrating tools and talks about surveillance and privacy into existing curricula in small groups
Closing hour: Open sharing of lesson planning with all participants and open discussion of session with closing remarks.
Full-Day Workshops
Computational Rhetorics: Crossing Computer Assistive Analysis and Computers and Writing Research
In this workshop, we will introduce participants to methods for using network graph analysis and machine-learning algorithms to assist in large-scale and rapid analysis of a large text corpus for scholarly research and/or service-oriented websites. The workshop will be framed by questions and issues of interest to computers and writing and writing studies scholars such as:
What rhetorical moves are important to the formation and/or stabilization of a given genre?
What kinds of rhetorical features might we expect to see from experienced or skilled rhetors vs. novices or learners?
How do the prevalence, co-occurrence, or interrelationships among text features influence their uptake or reception?
Programmatically, this workshop in seeks to guide participants through the process of applying machine learning and other automated analytics to research projects undertaken in the fields of computers and writing and rhetoric. These methods are hewn from computer science and the digital humanities, but also from the workshop leaders' own work developing web apps founded upon machine learning techniques and existing software libraries. Over the last three years, the workshop leaders have developed rhetorical analysis techniques and software both to assist ongoing research efforts at WIDE and to explore new areas of rhetorical scholarship. The leaders have presented this work at Computers & Writing (2013), DH 2013, and ATTW (2014), and have several articles currently under review by Enculturation: Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Culture and the Journal of Writing Research. They have recently delivered 2 computational rhetoric-themed workshops at ATTW 2015 and the RSA 2015 Summer Institute. They have also recently released the first publicly available application based on this work in conjunction with an Institute for Museum and Library Services grant to support online facilitation of informal science learning by museum staff.
Participants will learn how to:
frame appropriate questions for computer assisted analysis
identify and prepare a text corpus
set up and configure a testing environment on their own computers using free, open source analysis tools
develop coding criteria and a test corpus of human-scored items for validation
run and interpret analyses results
Writing Choice-based Webtexts with Twine
The recent success of popular text-based indie games such as "80 Days" and "The Choice of the Dragon" has brought new attention branching tree fiction. These choice-based interactive stories use the familiar interface of hyperlinks between nodes, but under the hood the "stories" can keep track of resources, inventory, and details about the player's previous choices, all of which an be used to control the paths that are open to the player at any given time. Designer "Depression Quest" Twine (the tool in which Zoë Quinn's "Depression Quest" was created) is "an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories." It is free, available for multiple platforms, and outputs standard HTML, so that Twine stories are playable on any standard web browser. Twine syntax lets beginners start writing right away, typing text into a "Story Map" that visually represents hyperlinks between "Passages". Each passage has a unique name, and authors create hyperlinks by putting square brackets around words. Authors who wish to track statistics (such as whether a player has already visited a particular passage, or what choice a player made in a previous passage) can borrow code from sample games; authors with programming knowledge can take full advantage of the capabilities of modern web browsers.
The workshop will guide participants through the process of writing a basic Twine story, as well as demonstrating some of Twine's intermediate and advanced coding capabilities. Participants will then develop an individual project, and the workshop will conclude with a discussion of applications and potential "next steps."
Half-day Afternoon Workshops
Crossing the ON-Line: Achieving Online Writing Instruction Goals
While a writing instructor's face-to-face pedagogy is grounded in experience, a teacher new to online writing instruction (OWI) may struggle to reach across boundaries to achieve their online pedagogical goals. Beth Hewett, in The Online Writing Conference, states, "...each instructor must find his or her own effective voice and approach. In fact, a genuine instructional voice increases the likelihood that the communications will positively intervene with students and their writing where needed" (10). Developing one's voice and approach takes effort and is usually done through trial and error due to the many elements that make up effective OWI. The workshop will focus on three areas of OWI: course design, instruction, and feedback. As a framework for the workshop discussion, the presenters will share and introduce:
OWI Principle 7: "Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) for OWI programs and their online writing teachers should receive appropriate OWI-focused training, professional development, and assessment for evaluation and promotion purposes."
OWI Principle 10: "Students should be prepared by the institution and their teachers for the unique technological and pedagogical components of OWI".
Participants will engage in lively discussion about the conditions they were, or not, prepared to teach online, the various contexts they currently teach writing, and their experiences in the online environment. In addition, participants will explore examples of approaches to: developing/designing/working from pre-designed online writing courses, communicating with students, and creating community within the online environment.
Digital Writing Futures: Technofeminist Mentorship Models for Engagement Sustainability
In this workshop we explore ways to help participants to identify and build the infrastructure necessary to engage students and the community in digital writing projects. Identifying a literacy need in your community, designing an intervention or outreach program, lining up partners on and off campus, and designing a network that will support your project long-term are all daunting steps in getting a digital writing in/for the community project underway.
Phase 1: Theoretical Frameworks
In the first 45 minutes, participants will introduce themselves and briefly explain their interest in digital writing outreach. Our workshop will first offer context for digital composition camps for tweens and will then review outreach models forwarded by those in our field (Getto, Cushman, Gosh, 2011; Grabill, 2003, Wajcman, 2004) and finally will explore feminist mentorship as a model for sustainable community engagement.
Phase 2: Participants' Needs Assessment
The second 45-minute segment will ask participants to work in small groups using guiding questions to discuss local projects or initiatives they are interested in developing or to identify community needs. Next, participants will work to identify local assets for their projects both in their department and in the community and will share their ideas – and discover new ones – with other participants.
Phase 3: Mentorship Building
This 30-minute phase will invite participants to brainstorm mentorship trees/structures in their local context, at the conference, and in the field that may help to jump-start and sustain engagement work of interest to them personally. We hope this sort of brainstorming and sharing might allow participants to identify resources and partners at local schools - and perhaps even in the workshop itself - that might forward their work.
Phase 4: Community Resource Sharing
Participants will then spend another 30 minutes in small group sessions designed to allow them a space to ask questions, seek feedback, and share with the workshop leaders and other participants.
Phase 5: Wrap-up
The final 30 minutes will be reserved for large group discussion and final questions as well as a tour of a resources archive created by the presenters. Artifacts and resources - based on the presenters' camp experiences - will be available to participants via cloud-based sharing. These resources include templates for attracting volunteers, honoring local sponsors, organizing the project, creating and maintaining budgets, and other logistical matters.
Town Hall 1
Recovering Pasts for the Future
In the last few years, we have begun to see some of the field's founding scholars retire, which has put us in a bit of a reflective mood. Such reflection prompts this Town Hall that -- in the spirit of Bruce McComisky's recent collection on the *Microhistories of Rhetoric and Composition* — aims to recollect brief moments in the history of computers and composition by the people who initiated this field. These moments have been crucial to the formation of the discipline, either by scholarly means, community building, or through lore. We invite the audience to listent to these brief stories during the Town Hall and to participate with their own memories of important field micro-histories either during the Q&A or during the conference itself. Our goal is to collect these narratives and publish them as a reference for the field, ensuring a remembrance and honoring of our historical roots for future generations of C&W scholars.
Town Hall organizers:
Cheryl Ball
Kristin Arola
Scott DeWitt
Jason Palmeri
David Martins
Tim Lockridge
Concurrent Session A
A1: [Dis]Embodied Kairotic Composing: Snapchat, Indigenous Networks, and Queer Digital Migratory Analysis
This panel proceeds with the underlying premise that no matter what boundaries we cross, we are always our bodies. The speakers explore issues of race, queerness, and embodiment so as to explore how users inscribe and contest affect and agency in digital spaces.
Speaker One discusses the role the body plays in how users choose to represent identities within the kairotic composing space of Snapchat. Because compositions within Snapchat are time sensitive and interactive, users employ rhetorical agency in not only how they choose to represent their bodies, but also how they wish to manipulate, reinscribe, and contest the body's presence within the material they generate in the platform.
Speaker Two explores the intersections of racial performativity, interface design, and social media. First, she describes what happened when a group of college-aged American Indians were asked the question, "What would Facebook look like were it designed by and for American Indians?"
Speaker Three explores the survivance of queer bodies through migratory, performative disembodiment in online spaces. Migratory performativity on or through multiple interfaces suggests queer digital rhetorical practice as an ongoing becoming.
A2: Colonial Nomoi, Decolonial Activist Pedagogy, & Digital Places
This interactive session offers five lighting talks to foreground how various digital communities—the "comments section" of Jezebel, the Hip Hop Nation of Genius, StoryMaps' map makers, YouTube's beauty community, and Instagram's International surfing community—leverage the social web to resist and expose Western colonial nomoi which exoticizes, fetishizes, and/or appropriates the ways these communities enact identity, embodiment, and place.
Public Intellectualism & The Pedagogy of Not Being a Troll
Speaker 1 discusses public intellectualism as a strategy for decolonizing pedagogy. She shares her experience of being published in a Jezebel article about body positivity that received over 900 comments.
"I'm from the Hood Stupid, What Types of Facts Are Those?"
The Hip-Hop Nation (HHN) has international reach with a fluid ability to cross borders. Thus, the production of knowledge that occurs within this community understands that knowledge will change depending on who is involved and where (Alim & Pennycook, 2009). Speaker 2 discusses how the popular open-source site Genius applies HHN approaches to language practices in collecting and "decoding" rap lyrics.
StoryMaps: Narratives, Cartography, & Histories
Using Esri's StoryMaps as a site for inquiry, an app that facilitates user-developed maps, Speaker 3 examines digital story maps to question how the digital augmentation of information available via maps disrupts or reifies colonial understandings of place.
Reimagining Feminist Nomoi Across Digital Communities
This speaker examines how YouTube's beauty community uses digital tools to enact rhetorical moves that at once dismantle and reinforce female gender roles in corporate-mediated online spaces.
Racist surf website banned from Hawaiian paradise
Speaker 5 explores how digital geotagging in Instagram disrupts local rules governing the disclosure and naming of places within the International surfing community. Whereas Instagram understands places as discoverable, local nomoi question who is authorized to know and reveal places. Asking what these responses might mean for a decolonial pedagogy, Speaker 5 shares examples of surfers' responses to unsanctioned, digital disclosure of place knowledge.
A3: More Stories on the Perils of Not Paying Attention, or, If You Don't Know Where You're Going, You'll Probably End up Somewhere Else.
Cynthia Selfe's 1998 CCCC address argued that not paying critical attention to technology is "dangerously short-sighted." Selfe demonstrated that technological literacy plays a role in maintaining cultural violence and inequality because new technologies are often distributed unevenly across familiar cultural lines such as race, gender, and class. This address reminds us that technologies can become profoundly dangerous when they disappear into social doxa. Nearly 20 years later, this panel reconsiders her warning. This panel examines the implications of not paying attention to current technological practices such as hashtag activism, gamification, and Twitter dissent.
Speaker 1 considers the racial logics of gamification—the use of game-like forms and mechanics to engage and motivate people—and questions how they might be exclusionary.
Speaker 2 argues that analyzing Twitter dissent through the lens of emergent participatory economy provides much needed interrogation of Twitter's affordances. The emergent participatory economy represents densely imbricated exigencies, exchanges and contexts both embodied and virtual.
Speaker 3 traces how Twitter users modified #BlackLivesMatter to their own agendas, attempting to undercut its message, in cases like #BlueLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter.
A4: Beyond a Single Language/Single Modality: Crossing Multimodal/Translingual Pedagogies
In this roundtable, presenters who push the boundaries between multimodality and translingualism in their teaching and scholarship share pedagogical models that blend multimodal and translingual conceptions of writing. These pedagogies are used to design classroom spaces which build on students' modes of communication. Attendees at this roundtable will be encouraged to share teaching challenges and practices, and will leave with concrete ideas for pedagogies that encourage students to compose across languages and media.
A5: The Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative as an Instructional Tool: Cross-Community Connections and Collaborations
In this mini-workshop, participants will learn how to use the resources created by the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative in their writing classrooms. The DRC site offers scholars and teachers multimodal content about the history and future of scholarship about computers and writing as well as tool reviews, lesson plans and much more.
First, we will showcase how instructors have used the DRC in their classrooms by using the resources of the site and inviting their students to be contributors. Next, we will provide a framework and resources for participants for using the DRC. Finally, we will facilitate collaborative development of lesson plans using the DRC. We will invite workshop participants to share the results of their lessons as a feature on the DRC blog during the 2016-2017 academic year.
A6: Producing Civic Action and Public Discourse from Online Communities
This panel explores digital citizens' civic engagements and public discourse in online communities. From discussions of the material and social implications of commenting systems, to examining how digital literacy encourages social change, to locating online communities as sites of public writing, these panelists demonstrate the range of insights for composition, rhetoric, and computers and writing specialists that can be gathered from such spaces.
Shared Passions, Shared Compositions: Online Fandom Communities as Sites for Public Writing Pedagogy
This presentation argues online fandom communities and affinity groups can become sites for public writing pedagogy, extending recent public writing scholarship (Rivers & Weber; Sheridan, Ridolfo, & Michel). I suggest engaging these communities enables students to locate new publics and spaces to affect change and compose for audiences who share group identities.
Community-Based Digital Literacies for Civic Action
Speaker 2 will articulate the value of community-based digital literacies, illustrate how they work in an online natural birthing community, and show how an increased awareness of community-based digital literacies can help academic institutions connect with local and global communities online. The presenter will provide a theoretical framework for how and why community-based digital literacies function as well as practical ideas for putting that framework to use in classrooms, communities, and civic spaces.
Don't Read the Comments: Preparing Digital Citizens for Online Public Discourse
This presentation examines how the interfaces of online comment systems (including social media and web articles) encourage a new form of public engagement that deviates from previous understandings of online public discourse (Grabill and Pigg, 2012). Based on this analysis, Speaker 3 offers insight into how computers and writing specialists can prepare students to engage in public discourse within the shifting landscape of online interfaces and spaces.
A7: Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries: Implementing Digital Storytelling Across the Curriculum at a Small Liberal Arts College
This presentation outlines initiatives to support faculty in utilizing digital, multimodal pedagogies in courses across the disciplines at our small liberal arts college. Panelists will discuss the grant funding and institutional climate that enabled these initiatives, technological support and resources, resultant assignments and student-produced work, and faculty attitudes about teaching digital storytelling and multimodal composing projects.
A8: Pedagogy Beyond Bodies and Boundaries
This panel builds from ethical to pragmatic considerations of bodies of work including the artifacts themselves and their curation in the classroom. Presenters offers tools to address challenges within communal student bodies and finds potential solutions through video production.
Blurred But(t) Not Enough: What Title IX Doesn't Cover - Mari Ramler
Speaker One considers the blurry ethical landscape of students' creative work within a classroom. Pedagogical philosophies and Title IX training are inadequate for writing and rhetoric teachers in regards to complex considerations of grading and mediating students' original work which crosses boundaries.
Cross-Disciplinary & Multi-Modal Mayhem: Navigating Pedagogical and Administrative Narratives beyond Departmental Boundaries. - John Jacobs
What happens when a business class project becomes a controversial art installation? How do we manage the internal and external brand-image of our institution as our classrooms extend beyond the traditional (safe?) physical and academic walls? Speaker Two discusses his approach to addressing these challenges, offering examples of successes and failures.
Resistant Students and Identity Studies: How Electracy Saved My Classroom - April O'Brien
The speaker discovered that Gregory Ulmer's notion of electracy as a "visual apparatus" unlocked students' creativity and helped them grapple with material that challenged their ideology. By expanding their understanding of "writing" to include video production and photography—as well as writing a script to accompany their videos—the speaker's students created arguments and addressed issues that they would normally resist.
A9: Online Affinities and Digital Boundaries
These presentations call attention to how digital technologies are used to complement writing instruction, fuel user-generated content collaborations and ways writing can insight glocal conversations.
Digital Affinity Genres as Compositional Third Spaces - Holly Shelton
This presentation demonstrates how genres are spaces and how digital genres in particular can be specifically occupied and transformed as transcultural third spaces.
Literacy Boundaries: Avatar as Composition - Jeaneen Canfield
Most of our students are fairly comfortable with digital spaces in the form of either gaming or social interaction. However, it has been my experience that students often resist interacting in the digital space for academic purposes. Through an assignment I designed that was grounded in Ulmer's "avatar" and Fleckenstein's "embodied literacies," I had students create a self-representation of their identity as a researcher. In this presentation, I explore the assignment that empowered my students to thoughtfully engage within the digital academic space.
User-Generated Content as Collaboration in Gaming Support Sites - Erica Ellingson Baumie
Examples of UGC, gaming support sites are particularly suited for digital humanities research because of the highly technical and professional information products community members produce. These community spaces are sites of collaboration filled with communication products. This collaboration allows members to play more effectively, efficiently, and with more enjoyment as it builds community, encouraging members to seek help or to contribute, to have a voice.
Institutional Effectiveness through QEPs as Glocal Thinking Boundary Breaking - Rich Rice
This presentation details recent QEP approaches across the U.S. which attempt to emphasize writing, focusing on the common theme "Communicating in a Global Society," calling attention to what writing is and does and how it can insight global conversations through technology to break boundaries.
Keynote 1 and Lunch
After a Decade of Social Media: The Landscape of Social Media in Writing Instruction Today - Stephanie Vie
In this talk, Dr. Stephanie Vie discusses one particularly revolutionary technology that has impacted our ways of communicating with each other. It's changing how we perform mundane tasks as well as world-changing events. It's affecting our understandings of ethical behavior, interactions with friends and family, the ways we conduct research. In short, social media is changing everything, and it's difficult to not feel its impact on our lives. Audience members will hear how social media has shaped the various options available to individuals to use as they communicate with others personally, professionally, and pedagogically—and what the implications of those options might be. This presentation will draw on some of the rich data Vie has gathered from over 750 faculty members nationwide regarding their personal, professional, and pedagogical uses of social media to illustrate why now, after a decade of use of some of the more ubiquitous social media technologies, our field should continue to turn its attention to both the potentials and the challenges of these communication tools.
Stephanie Vie is Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and the Director of Undergraduate Programs at the University of Central Florida. She researches social media and video gaming, paying particular attention to the intersection of the two and the critical literacies necessary to understand and respond to privacy policies, terms of service, data mining, and surveillance in these spaces. She is currently conducting several grant-funded national surveys of faculty members' and students' attitudes toward and experiences with social media, portions of which will appear in her book project Literate Acts in Social Media.
Concurrent Session B
B1: Archiving Social Media, Video Games, and Electracy: bridging disciplines and promoting literacies in first-year composition
In this panel, FYC instructors will discuss their use of new media technologies (video game design, social media, and blogging softwares) in diverse institutional settings to accomplish traditional composition outcomes while broadening ideas of literacy to include non-text based composition and research skills. The panel will emphasize how each new media technology pushes the boundaries of pedagogical practices to transcend common limitations in writing courses and institutional environments.
Archiving Social Media, Video Games, and Electracy: bridging disciplines and promoting literacies in first-year composition
Research I + HBCU = Using social media and open-source tools for composition and community
Composing with(in) Electracy: Writing with engagement, authority, and empowerment
B2: Arguing in Type: On the Rhetoricity of Letterforms
Although always part of any text's argument, the choice of typeface is an under-articulated and understudied aspect of textual production. Today, even as there are thousands of digital font face options available to writers, composers, and designers, the power of letterforms are still often taken for granted. Drawing from scholarship on the materiality of text in rhetoric and writing studies and from graphic design theory (e.g., Bernhardt, Bromberger, Sirc, Trimbur; Heller, Lupton), the speakers on this panel will explore the ways in which the visual and tactile shapes of letters convey persuasive information to audiences.
B3: The Ethics and Archives of Doing Social Media Research
Building on work in the fields of internet studies, fan studies, and communication, this panel expands on work in our field to reconsider the importance of reflection during research activities, the ethics of social media work, and the evolving archiving tools that afford data analysis and visualizations.
The Ethics and Archives of Doing Social Media Research -
Subscribe, Follow, Share: Research Methods and Digital Activism -
On the Decisions, Methods, and Visualizations of Social Media Archives -
B4: Seriously: Catching the Second Wave in Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy
This panel will explore the new media and digital technologies that scholars can use to expand their geographic reach through remote presenting and their theoretical reach through transnational communication, to expand their virtual presence within the online and media assisted classes and writing centers, and to draw students into multi-modal expressions.
Anonymity and Identity in Online Academic Support - Molly Starkweather
Transnational Communication Model in the Digital Era - Belle Xiaobo Wang
Lights, Camera, Action: Expanding Beyond Remediated Text in Online Learning - Marcia Bost
B5: Outside the Boundaries of Academic Expectation: Digital Voices as Catalysts for Change
This panel considers the importance of digital access to voices who operate outside the boundaries of academic expectation. Each presenter offers ways in which studying these digital voices can contribute to new or important knowledge for not only teachers of writing, but also academic and public communities. Scholars often function as the boundary between primary voices and communities. From museum curators to rhetoricians to linguists, a figure in power decides not only what is worthy of academic study, but also how to categorize, arrange, and disseminate such information.
Rhetoric of Revival: Reimagining Museum Spaces Through Digital Media -
Using the work of Carolyn Handa, Jeffrey Grabill, and André Malraux, this project examines the ways in which new digital archiving technologies allow the communities in which museums are situated to reclaim lost narratives often stifled by museum curators.
Blurring the Boundaries of Academic Discourse: Digital Access to Japanese American Narratives -
This presenter argues for a multivocal approach in the writing classroom, and an embracing of non-traditional voices, not merely those who operate within the boundaries of academic discourse. These non-traditional voices are capable of contributing important and meaningful perspectives that may be otherwise overlooked in a limited form such as academic discourse, such as the oral histories of Japanese American incarceration available through the open access archive Densho.
Coding the Syllabary: Cherokee Writing as a Proto-Digital Narrative -
In Ellen Cushman's 2013 The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People's Perseverance, the Cherokee syllabary is defined as a purely symbolic "writing system," placing it squarely in the realm of language events rather than the techno-semiotic advancements that surrounded it in the 19th century. More recent theorists like Andrea Haas have paid close attention to the kinds of digital making that Native Americans do with new media and online spaces. Despite hashtag campaigns like #NDN and #NotYourMascot, Native people are historically grounded by an outsider narrative that casts them as the "natural-born savage" of years past, entirely separate from digital composing. This presenter argues that by reimagining Native ways of communicating such as the syllabary as techne rather than episteme, scholars can cross over the very limited boundary of America Indigenous studies and begin to understand contemporary Native communication as a natural extension of the digital.
B6: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Introducing WOLFIE (Writers' Online Learning and Information literacy Environment)
WOLFIE is an interactive digital community to enhance multiple writing intensive courses and teach information literacy practices, and will support--at least initially--undergraduate students who take first-year writing courses that satisfy the University's writing requirement. cyn
B7: Embodiment, Extended Cognition, and Computing in Emerging Technologies: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Future Paradigms of Computing and Design
This panel will seek to flesh out how AR, VR, and other technologies impact, enhance, or disrupt embodiment in virtual and material spaces. Specifically, we will try to unearth ways these technologies can promote cyborgian kinship between people, technology, and environment without disembodying people/information or losing sight of ethical and intersectional responsibilities.
B8: Changing Landscapes: How agency and technology are changing communication
Against the Grind: How Grindr Shapes Identity - Caleb Pendygraft
This presentation focuses on the digital construction of identity using Grindr's interface as a beginning point to explore the claim that technology impacts how we talk about and live our sexuality, both in and outside the classroom.
Algorithmic Embodiment for Technical Writers - Emi Stuemke (Bunner)
My presentation will show examples and discuss strategies of how to move theories of embodied agency and self out of graduate level theory courses and into practical career training.
Biofeedback Wires in the Composition Classroom: Evaluating Potential Uses and Contributions - Erin Schaefer
Biofeedback technology is a tool for harnessing body and mind awareness, typically associated with the mental health and medical fields. This session will explore potential uses of biofeedback the composition classroom. Specifically, it will evaluate the narrative frameworks in biofeedback interfaces and ask how these might support embodied writing and certain socio-cognitive processes.
Composing with deliberate speed: writing humanity's future sensorium - Alexander Reid
The increasing capacity of digital technologies to sense and analyze data and then present human users with customized media experiences has significant implications for our conceptions of deliberation as a central feature of rhetorical action. This presentation takes a rhetorical, media ecological approach to this condition to examine how writing and composing may be reinvented in the context of the shifting possibilities of human sensation and cognition.
B9: Building and Designing Collaboration
Designing Stories that Scientists Tell: A New Collaboration with a Children's Science Museum - Karen Lunsford
This current study builds on her work by providing a rhetorical typography of and critical analysis of how multimodal museum texts represent the stories that scientists tell, and by analyzing how and why undergraduate students in our Writing minor engage with these emergent genres.
Selfie Esteem: Analyzing Selfies to Reshape the Body of FYC and Mind of Online Presence - Erica Lange
Providing both a site of analysis as well as a genre for composition, I argue that social media profile pictures, and/or selfies, offer students an ideal platform to understand and redefine their preconceived notions about writing within a supportive student composition course.
Social Media and Online Discussion Archiving: Subverting Barriers to Close Reading and Public Response - Jonathan Udelson, Franklin Winslow
This presentation revisits two years of student writing via Twitter collected in academic years 2012-14 for the purpose of showing how students across classrooms collaboratively explored Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and considered their roles as agents producing publically-shared knowledge.
I Can Has Yer Attenshun?: Mobile Devices as Student Engagement Tools - Allison Hutchinson
Building on Derek Mueller's notion of "digital underlife," this presentation considers the potential of mobile devices as pedagogical tools. This speaker suggests strategies for engaging students in face-to-face classrooms using Poll Everywhere, a free and intuitive web-based polling software. Attendees should bring their mobile device of choice to engage with the technologies highlighted in this interactive presentation.
B10: Video Composing Opportunities
affect and digital filmmaking: enacting "the entire vibratory event" - bonnie kyburz
Digital filmmaking is more than play. It is critical and creative rhetorical work that is especially productive when paired with studies in affect theory. A remix of the famous "melting snowman" film featured in Massumi's work will enact the argument.
Composing the Video Essay - Collin Bjork
This presentation extends the investigation of digital writing to consider the video essay as a form of audio-visual composition. I argue that the visual aspects of the video essay challenge us to re-conceptualize and to foreground two sometimes trivialized aspects of undergraduate writing: mechanics and aesthetics.
Exploring Video Reflections: An Alternative to Print-Based Reflection Essays in FYC - Brandy Dieterle
This presentation discusses a video reflection assignment in FYC through analyzing video reflections and presenting student interview data.
Incorporating Videos with Dynamic Visual Text in the Composition Classroom - Janine Butler
I will share with composition instructors how we can use captioned videos to help students develop rhetorical skills for recognizing how to embody meaning in different modes.
Concurrent Session C
C1: Gaming Narratives: Bridging Literature, Rhetoric and Composition, and Second Language Writing
The presenters have come together to interrogate how the fragmented narratives of digital texts and games can bring innovative ways of reading, discussing, and interpreting texts into second language writing classrooms. Bringing game narratives, more specifically variations of hypertext stories, into the second language classroom allows students to observe how nonlinear narratives are constructed, encouraging students to explore identity, cultivate motivation, and work autonomously.
C2: Listening, Playing, and Making: Exploring (and Expanding) the Borders of the Composition Curriculum
In this panel, we explore pedagogical practices intended to foreground a wide variety of composing practices generally considered to be outside the norm, including the writing of culturally-specific songs, the crafting of objects, and the co-authoring of digital sandbox environments.
Crossing the Sea: What can a Puerto Rican Indie Rock Band Teach Us About Learning? - Karrieann Soto Vega
Based on interviews with musicians from a Puerto Rican indie rock band, the first speaker argues that there are similar learning processes that play into crafting written and/or musical texts.
Into the Digital Sandbox: Using SimCity as Composition in the Classroom - Brett Keegan
The second speaker considers the role of co-authorship and play in the composition process by examining "sandbox games" as compositions.
Wires in the Writing Classroom: New Media Composition as Academic Writing - Jason Markins
Speaker three asks what can we learn about writing through making and Makerspaces. In doing so, this presentation explores three central questions: What does it mean to open up our definition of writing to include the making of rhetorical arguments through crafting physical objects? How has the making of objects historically been a part of writing? Finally, what can we learn about writing in the humanities from these spaces?
C3: DESTROY NON-WEIRD SCHOLARSHIP: Crossing Rhet/Comp Scholarship with Weird Twitter
Social media has generated many things: memes, literacy practices, copyright issues. And rhetoric and composition scholars have, with good reason, studied these phenomena. But social media generates something else to which rhet/comp scholars have paid less attention: weirdness.
"'*Cop Starts Breakdancing*:' Joke Formats, Joke Theft, and Plagiarism in Weird Twitter"
Speaker 1 puts rhet/comp scholarship on plagiarism in conversation with issues of plagiarism on WT
"A Bellowing Lecture Followed by a Tense, Suspicious Silence: On Welcome to Night Vale and Academic Podcasting"
Speaker 2 argues for the scholarly potential of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale and its companion WT account, @NightValeRadio. Combining paranormal intrigue, existential humor, and non sequiturs, Welcome to Night Vale--whose creators are part of WT--extends the sensibility of WT to the realm of podcasts.
"'The sharpest part of my skeleton': Digital Surrealism, Weird Posthumanism, and Performing Theory"
Speaker 3 identifies a body of WT accounts that he labels "digital surrealism": projections of a dark free flow of the Freudian id from such accounts as Post-Culture Review, Village Fetish, and Ketamine Stalin.
C4: Material Digital Rhetoric: An Upcycling Tech Craft Workshops
This mini-workshop enacts an argument that multimodal composing uses both digital and traditional media. Participants will engage in remix, reuse, and re-appropriation as they re-purpose provided memory chips, hard drives, capacitors, ribbon cables, and more into assemblages of their determination. This mini-workshop engages in conversations around multimodal composing, environmental rhetoric, and pedagogical approaches to teaching multimodal and digital composing, including overcoming concerns about doing digital work "wrong." Supplies will be provided, although participants are also invited to bring their own unused technology.
C5: Short Circuiting Simplicity: Procedural, Material and Embodied Rhetorics in Communities of Practice
This panel aims to reconceptualize crossed wires and short circuits as generative kairotic moments where new rhetorical possibilities are emergent by bringing together scholarly currents from material rhetorics (Selzer and Crowley 1999), procedural rhetorics (Bogost 2013), and network rhetorics (Castells 2009; Jones 2015).
Speaker one calls for the empowerment of faculty through the decentralization of learning technologies. - Bryan Ollendyke
Following Bogost's (2012) call to "short circuit the simplicity" of complex processes and systems, Speaker two posits that opening gateways within closed IT systems can jumpstart student awareness of how concepts learned in classroom contexts are used in a variety of rhetorical situations outside of school. - Jen Ware
Speaker three responds to Selzer and Crowley's appeal for a "renewed investigation into the rhetoric of material practices themselves" by studying the "material situatedness of literate acts" in a local chapter of the national Girl Develop It (GDI) organization, a community of practice operating outside of institutional constraints and without institutional resources. - Ashley Hall
C6: Community Development: The Role of Technology in Creating Local, Campus, and Global Relationships
This panel of diverse presentations considers how technologically mediated structures can encourage or create points of contact and relationships with local and online communities. Presenters focus on aspects of service learning, best practices of multimodal composition, digital composing and queer representation, and developing communities of practice with English Language Learners, and all through a pedagogical lens (both for complete and developing conceptualizations of coursework).
C7: Crossing Classroom Boundaries, Linking Communities: The Cultural Work of Remix
Remixing digital media content is a powerful way to connect students with digital media artifacts and further develop their abilities to compose multimodal communication. Members of this panel explore the types of power students and other composers can harness through the practice of remix, attending to the complexities of displaying or drawing upon kinetic experiences of the body, crossing genre boundaries, adopting new critical perspectives, and subverting intellectual property norms.
Is this body yours or mine? - Speaker 1
This presentation examines the kinetic requirements and expressions of bodies in digital spaces and shows the kinds of pressure we put on our students when we ask them to participate in the surveillance of their own remixed embodiment.
From report to meme to brochure - Speaker 2
This presentation explores the affordances of meme-based multimodal projects for bridging written and visual communication in the FYC classroom. Internet memes are inherently multimodal, with many using photographs, gifs, videos, audio recordings, and other multimedia.
Remix as Feminist Critique: Writing With/in Video - Speaker 3
Drawing upon student projects submitted in response to assignment prompts adapted from Dubisar and Palmeri's approach, this presentation shows how remix video can be used in courses that make feminist interventions in technical communication and teach feminist rhetorical criticism of popular culture.
Remixing Intellectual Property: What Crafting Communities Can Teach Us About Authorship - Speaker 4
This presentation explores how composition studies might instead draw on another rich tradition of intellectual property that has always acknowledged itself as collaborative remix: knitting.
C8: Object-Oriented Research Methods and Methodologies for Open, Participatory Learning
As learning spaces continue to fold out of and into the internet, happening across distal configurations and various platforms, and involving a diversity of learners, writers, and makers, we need new research methodologies that help us understand the constellations and relationships that emerge among composing and composed bodies, objects, tools, and practices. This panel explores two such object-oriented research methodologies that both build on AND disrupt current understandings of network theory. Each group will discuss its methods and methodologies--flattening (DeLanda, 2002), unflattening (Sousanis, 2015), recombinant folding (Munster, 2011), object orientating (Ahmed, 2006), and carpentry (Bogost, 2012)-- and share its findings when using the respective methodologies to examine massive, open, online connectivist cMOOCs.
C9: Exploring reality: imagining identity in digital spaces
Digital Drawing to Learn Science - Les Loncharich
This project asks students to draw and write in digital journals, and through multimodal composing, learn anatomy and science. From this presentation, attendees will take away an awareness of the divide and connections, real and perceived, between drawing and writing as tools for making meaning and learning.
Video-enabled reflection in the writing classroom: Strengthening a sense of audience and self - Emma Rose, Alison Cardinal
In this presentation, we share results of an IRB approved research study that suggests supplementing written reflection with video provides unique affordances for students' development of self-awareness of their identities as writers and learners.
Writing Avatars: Visual Self-representations in the Writing Classroom - William Tunningley
The convergence of digital technologies and the classroom offers us the opportunity to consider how students and we also interact in physical and conceptual educational spaces through avatars. I will discuss three instances of visual embodiment of classroom avatars: logos for a collaborative project, profile pictures in a class twitter feed, and a visual representation of myself gone awry.
C10: Rhetorical Reconsiderations of Physical and Academic Boundaries
Cannonball Trail: the Material Realities of Creating a Public Location-based Application - Jamie Henthorn
This paper will address issues of labor in a cross-disciplinary digital humanities project that connects academia with civic initiatives. It looks at Cannonball Trail, a location-based augmented reality mobile app produced through Old Dominion's Gaming Hub. The presentation addresses some of the realities of working with a variety of students across disciplines in creative ways that can be challenging for both academic and civic structures.
Digital Environmental Engagement: Writing Eco Issues in Digital Spaces - Julie Bates
This presentation explores the affordances, limitations, and effects of writing students' multidisciplinary online projects designed to communicate the complexity of environmental issues and encourage specific publics to act. It also briefly explore other possibilities for digital environmental writing pedagogy.
Dream Dwelling: Augmenting our memories of place through mobile technology - Joseph Cirio
This presentation considers the ways short-form writing with mobile technologies prompts us to re-think how we imagine spaces in which we dwell. In particular, this presentation is designed to consider how mobile writing's relationship to physical place is particularly relevant to historically marginalized groups' relationship to physical place.
Rhetorical Reconsiderations: Navigating disciplinary boundaries through digital, genre-based activities - Lindsay Clark
This presentation discusses how technological activities as part of a genre-based curriculum in an Environmental Science graduate course affected students' ability to make decisions about writing in the field.
C11: Digital Tools, Access and Writing
Crossing Wires with Google Apps: Jumpstarting Collaborative Composing - Daniel Hocutt
Preliminary results of a multi-year study of using Google Apps for Education (GAFE) for collaborative composing in the first-year composition classroom across two different environments suggest that using GAFE remediates the classroom experience on multiple levels, enabling and encouraging glocal thinking, articulating assessment in terms of process rather than product, reframing instruction as collaboration, and making visible the inherently social aspects of composing.
The Medium Becomes the Message: Comparing Blogged and Word-Processed Writing in a First Year Seminar - Philip Kreniske
This presntation examines how the medium in which low-income freshmen wrote, on a blog or on a word processor, influenced the way they used diverse features of narrative to reflect on their transition to college.
Using Twine to Develop a Choice-based Journalism Simulation - Dennis Jerz
"Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready." In this talk, I plan to share my progress on a journalism simulation game (which currently has about 40 nodes and 60 paths).
What Your LMS Knows That You Don't: How Digital Tools Shape Student Access to Instructor Feedback - Angela Laflen, Michelle Smith
This paper reports on a study investigating the impact of LMS interfaces on how students access instructor feedback on their writing.
Concurrent Session D
D1: Gaming the Writing Space: Transforming the Classroom through Play
As teachers confront the question of how to modernize pedagogy for the digital generation, gaming and play--digital, mobile, or analog-- are becoming more and more ingrained into our culture. This panel will explore how play can be used in and beyond the writing/composition classroom to inspire academic work, allowing teachers to better reach a diverse student population with lessons that inspire creativity, collaboration, and deep engagement.
Gaming, Not Gamification: Using Role-Playing Games in the Writing Classroom - Speaker 1
Speaker 1 looks at the way that tabletop roleplaying games can be used to create a more engaging classroom experience. Drawing on such theorists as Jesper Juul and Miguel Sicart, Speaker 1 makes a case for creating a space in which students can engage with one another and with writing projects in a way that encourages experimentation and the opportunity for critical thought and understanding.
Collaborative Authorship through Gaming: Co-Writing in the Digital Space - Speaker 2
Speaker 2 will present an exploration of how games can inspire and create spaces for the generation of creative work. As artifacts which can affect high levels of passion and commitment, many games inspire prolific fan communities which produce art, video remixes, and creative writing. These works are made by and for the community and are subject to discussion, analysis, revision, and even further remixing by others in the community.
Modding as Art Brut: Subaltern Counter-Rhetorics in Digital Gaming - Speaker 3
Subversive modding includes content which corporations are unwilling to officially endorse and/or which directly conflict with a video game software/service's End User License Agreement; it is also that which defies accepted methods and values of design, especially created by those outside hegemonic power structures. Speaker 3 will discuss (with hands-on examples) what subversive mods are, what sites/spaces /communities facilitate their development, and how these things can inform rhetoric, composition, and design pedagogies.
D2: Boundary Work: Designing a Composition Archive for Research and Mentoring Across Disciplines
In this roundtable, our team of scholar-researchers describes our approach to building a web-based archive of student writing and associated teaching materials for corpus linguistics, writing research, and professional development. We highlight the principles which guide our approaches to usability, design, and infrastructure, then invite conversation.
To strengthen the links between rhet-comp and applied linguistics, and provide pedagogy and professional development for both, our team of scholar-researchers is developing an online platform, tentatively called "Understanding University Writing," to provide web-based archives which support the study of writing in broad ways. This multi-year project will provide sustainable methods for three related activities:
- Building a corpus of student writing for research in applied linguistics;
- Building a corpus of student writing, articulated with course materials, for research in rhetoric and composition;
- Providing instructors a platform to share course materials for professional development.
D3: The "How" and the "What": Finding Methodological Alliances across Rhetorical History, Technical Communication and Digital Rhetoric
This panel presents research on the use of corpus methods for the study of genre in histories of rhetoric, technical communication, and digital rhetoric. Across our presentations, we argue for the benefits of corpus analysis as a versatile method for measuring rhetorical stability and situational flux. We will focus on the methods of constructing and manipulating corpora and what kinds of data they yield to further knowledge on these respective topics: rhetorical dimensions of genre evolution; content framework development in technical writing; and gender performance in social media.
Beyond Formalism: Using Genre Studies to Re-Situate Historical, Time-Tagged Corpora into Rhetorical Context. - Speaker 1
Speaker 1 presents results from a corpus analysis of two historical text types: all State of the Union addresses between George Washington and Barack Obama (246 texts) and the titles of ~1,000 rhetorical treatises from 1300 – 1900. With these examples, Speaker 1 demonstrates how rhetorical genre studies (RGS) (Bawarshi 2003) (Campbell and Jamieson 2008) enables a discussion not only of textual variation but of genre stability, genre breakdown, and the impact of medium on rhetorical purpose.
Technical Communicators as Content Framework Creators: Distant Viewing and Database Architecture Design - Speaker 2
Speaker 2 follows recent calls (Salvo 2004; Hart-Davidson 2009; Andersen 2014) to expand technical communication to include content framework design by considering how and why technical writers should get involved in the planning and creation of database architectures. Proposing a novel process for database architecture concept modeling, Speaker 2 demonstrates a distant viewing methodology (Moretti 2005; Mueller 2012; 2015) rooted in Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) and corpus analysis.
"This Product Did Not Take Me To Valhalla": Performing Gender through Online Parody - Speaker 3
Speaker 3 presents new data from an ongoing corpus study of Amazon parody reviews that have stylized gender in order to contest cultural norms, drawing on linguistic stereotypes as resources (Bakhtin 1984, Coupland 2007, Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2014). For instance, users have employed lexical items, hedges, super-polite forms, intensifiers, and hyperbolic adjectives (Sclafani 2009) in the construction of hyper-feminine personas that satirically endorse gender roles.
D4: Rhetorical Carpentry: Reconstructing Video and Rescuing Critique
Through hands-on and performative demonstrations, the presenters will reveal how our current constructions of digital video often rely on associations with cinema. Deploying moving images through game- and maker-based activities and developing screen-based scholarship brings to light surprising material dimensions and possibilities for further transformations of our compositional and scholarly approaches.
Presenters one and two will provide hands-on demonstration of videos developed through gaming and physical computing including games deployed in first-year writing courses and a "Sensible Phenaktistoscope" to reveal alternatives to our contemporary understanding of soundtracked film/video as the primary model of audio-visual experience.
Presenters three and four will discuss and demonstrate a series of digital videos developed to extend conventional critical approaches. As Clifford Clark notes, traditional scholarship is characterized by an objective, aggressive desire to study texts and arguments by analyzing them: to critique usually means to break apart.
D5: Notice What You Notice: Eye Tracking and Critical Literacy
Real-time video capturing of the micro and complex choices occurring when a student composes a digital text have been argued as full of potential for future research directions in writing studies (Anson and Schwegler; Franklin and Hermsen). Eye tracking technology "crosses many disciplines" (Anson and Schwegler, 155) and may also "allow a unique view into the student state of mind while writing is occurring" (Franklin and Hermsen, 2). In this panel presentation, we explore a cross-disciplinary approach as eye tracking technology enables a kind of "third space" for undergraduate students enrolled in "Teaching Composition in the Schools," and who will go on to become literacy educators in the state of Alaska. In a place where students and teachers are often worlds apart, both physically and culturally, teaching writing in Alaska is unlike teaching writing anywhere else in the United States. Our presenters recognize this truth from different perspectives and acknowledge responsibilities for enacting what Debra Mayes Pane refers to as Third Space praxis (2009).
D6: Crip Virtualities, Queer Subjectivities, and Disabled Embodiment
This panel explores how disabled and queer subjectivities impact the multiple ways that students physically navigate and understand university campuses, engage in the writing classroom, and compose within and beyond educational spaces.
Applied Queerness; Crip Polytechnic - Speaker 1
This presentation will discuss concepts of "the workplace" and how they are used to justify inclusion and exclusion in polytechnic education, and will use queer and disability theory to call for an expanded notion of applied disciplines and possible meanings of "vocational education."
Wayfinding: Inclusive Design and the Campus Map - Speaker 2
Speaker 2 will discuss a study where content and rhetorical analysis was performed on a sample corpus of campus maps, using WCAG 2.0's levels of conformance as an initial lens. By evaluating interactive illustrations which are typically deemed legally accessible, this analysis provides an entry point into a broader discussion regarding retrofit, maps as ideological and cultural product, inclusive design, and to examine intersections between accessibility, humanistic illustrations, and the naturalization of bodies, minds, and spaces.
"That Looks Like a Crazy Person Made It": Embodying Madness through Multimodality - Speaker 3
In this presentation, Speaker 3 raises questions about multimodality as an opportunity to include and respect the value of non-normative forms of thinking and composing. Mental and psychiatric disabilities are understood as stripping people of their rhetorical ability (Prendergast, Price, Pryal), which is concerning when students are assessed for rational, logical arguments within a normative framework. Speaker 3 reflects on the impact of incorporating multimodal research projects into her disability-themed writing courses as a way to value madness through the juxtaposition of various technologies and media.
Disability Tagging Metadata as Trigger Warnings in Online Fanfiction - Speaker 4
Speaker 4 will present an analysis of how disability is indexed in online fan communities, drawing from fanfiction posted to the Archive of Our Own (AO3) fanfiction repository.
D7: Rhetoric of Makerspaces
Making Connections: The Maker Space as a Site of Multiliteracies - Rick Wysocki
In this presentation, I continue the work of scholars such as James Paul Gee who have drawn attention to maker culture at Computers and Writing by analyzing the how the space of one maker space—LVL1 in Louisville, Kentucky—can deepen our understanding of computing and composing processes.
Rhetoric and Learning in the Making: Composing Practices in a Makerspace - Ann Shivers-McNair
This presentation will offer, through an expanded notion of mediation techniques, a framework for analyzing and participating in the entangled production of communication, objects, and bodies. The speaker will also share a writing course curriculum designed to demonstrate the pedagogical affordances of this framework.
Makerspaces and a Maker Mentality Toward Writing - David Sheridan
This presentation argues that our field can benefit by adopting a "maker mentality" toward writing. I will focus specifically on a set of compositions that integrate traditional alphabetic text into fabricated, three-dimensional compositions. For instance, one maker translated a goal statement into an acrylic octahedron. How does the material form of this composition shape the way we interact with it? The way it circulates? Its rhetorical impact? What processes of rhetorical invention would lead composers to consider an acrylic octahedron over of more traditional forms? Is this an outlier of rhetorical practice that we can safely ignore? Or does it point to basic considerations that factor into all written compositions?
D8: Considering interfaces and personas
A Tale of Two Technology Paradigms: Using Genre Studies to Understand Students' Approaches to Interacting with User-Interfaces - Alison Witte
This presentation applies the theories of genre studies (Miller, 1984; Devitt, 2004) to user interfaces to describe how students learn to negotiate and use new programs by reporting the results of a three-year study that collected data from students about their technology and software usage, as well as their experiences with course management software (CMS).
Architecting Composition: Design Thinking as Process, Genre, and Action - Jack Hennes
As students continue to utilize a range of digital tools to facilitate everyday literate practices, the Speaker argues that design thinking can work as a meaningful process paradigm to facilitate action-oriented pedagogies. The Speaker then critically reflects on a thematic FYC course that employed students in the topic of user-centered design.
Multimodal Readers and Monomodal Measures: A Rhetorical Analysis of 'Brain Prefers Paper' Studies - Thomas Hothem
Studies that describe the brain's apparent preference for paper often trade in underexamined generalizations about what it means to read and write. This presentation will rhetorically analyze a selection of studies that promote the brain's supposed preference for paper, particularly by attending to the contexts for and implications of their methods, results, and conclusions. It will suggest that such claims often neglect relative degrees of abstraction inherent in the technology of language and reify the culture of standardized testing.
Writing for Jane Doe: Persona Profiling as a method for Composition Students to Envision Audiences - Shreelina Ghosh
I will discuss the method of employing user-centered design technology and persona profiling in Professional Writing and Composition courses and will demonstrate the exercise of exploring typical user characteristics, user behavior, stereotyping and visualization.
D9: Global Rhetorics and Community Engagement
Global Conversations in Online Communities of Prospective Immigrants to the US - Layli Miron
How do prospective legal immigrants to the United States perform their identities while seeking knowledge and power about the immigration process in online forums? My presentation will respond to that question through a rhetorical study based primarily on textual analysis of posts on the website VisaJourney, which had approximately 171,120 members from around the world as of October 2015.
Mobile Composition, Community Engagement, and the HBCU - James Daniel
Mobile composition has recently emerged as a useful tool for teaching composition and technological literacy in areas with negligible technological access. As many Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) lag behind majority white institutions in implementing technology, I will argue that mobile composition represents a valuable yet underutilized resource.
The Diversity of Everyday Lived Experiences: Using "Humans of New York"-esque Projects in the First-Year Writing Classroom to Support Students' Transition from High School to College - Genesea Carter
In this presentation, I suggest how to guide first-year writing students' awareness of and reflection upon the diversity of their everyday lived experiences through two assignments: a "Humans of ---" Facebook page project, modeled on Brandon Stanton's widely popular "Humans of New York" Facebook page, and a profile of the "Humans of ---" Facebook page. In both of these assignments, students act as conduits, telling the stories of students, faculty, and staff they meet on campus to a wider audience.
D10: Video Games and Gameplay
Contextualizing Toxic Talk in Games - Joy Robinson, Halcyon Lawrence
This presentation examines conversations in gaming and other online spaces for both the frequency and types of incivility.
Our Own Metacritics: What Composition Can Learn from Video Game Industry Struggles with Machine Readers - Kevin Rutherford
I argue that through recognizing the similarities between the problematic deployment of Metacritic and machine scorers alike, we can develop a productive conversation between compositionists and participants in the video game industry, allied in our reservations about machine readers.
Building Community Through Online (Intellectual) Play - Jaclyn Fiscus
This presentation will discuss students' use of online tools like Google Docs, Slack, and Trello as online meeting spaces that promote team building.
Keynote 2 and Dinner
Do We Learn (writing) Best Together or Alone? Your Life with Robots - Jeff Grabil
Computers and networks have transformed writing, making publication and distribution easy and instant and creating a culture in which we write more now than at any point in human history. Technologies are changing the teaching of writing as well. Some enhance learning and professionalize teacher work. Others automate. Robots are here.
In this talk, I will lay out an argument that we are at an important moment in the recent revolution in writing. As educators, we are provided with compelling opportunities to provide students with more personalized learning, better feedback, and improved outcomes. But the technologies that drive many of these opportunities—the Robots—are difficult to understand. Yet they must be understood as pedagogies, not precisely as technologies. Given that, what sorts of pedagogical choices are we making as educators? What sorts of choices should we make?
I will speak not as a luddite or as one naive about learning or technologies. I have practiced with technologies for writing for nearly as long as there have been computers and networks available for writing. My colleagues and I have also invented writing technologies and helped spin-out an educational technology company from my university. I am implicated in my own provocation. Given that, we have a set of pedagogical choices ahead of us and a set of choices related to how we understand teacher and student work—do we learn best together or alone?
A Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Writing, Grabil's research focuses on how digital writing is associated with citizenship and learning, and that work has been located in community contexts, in museums, and in classrooms at both the K-12 and university levels. He is a Senior Fellow with University Outreach & Engagement. At Michigan State, he helped develop and led a new major in Professional Writing, was a founder of the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center (now Writing, Information, and Digital Experience), and serves as Chair of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures. Dr. Grabill is also a co-founder of Drawbridge Incorporated, an educational technology company.
Concurrent Session E
E1: Approaches to Teaching Cultivated Community Spaces Surrounding Games
Our panel will offer two pedagogical approaches, both couched in higher education classrooms, that utilize the socialization of game spaces. In one approach, instructors teach nuances and intricacies of archival practice, cultivating rhetorical perspectives and technical writing skills for the students. In the second approach, role-playing simulations of professional/technical/sociological communities necessitate reflective writing opportunities and systematic rhetorical lenses.
Pressing the Pause Button: Metacognitive Moments in Classroom Simulations - Speaker 1
Within the writing pedagogy/objective miasma, our professional aims angle back to transfer—the possibility that students' knowledge, skills, and experiences cross from one discourse to the next. Writing Transfer scholars (Wardle, Russell) echo what Game Scholars (Consalvo, Gee) have championed: transfer is most successful when contexts are deconstructed for/by students so they can see the cultural, social, and technological components that form discourses.
Teaching the Game Experience: An Ecological Approach to Genres of Paratext - Speakers 2 and 3
The two presentations that make up this portion of the panel will discuss how the game's social space experience extends the rhetorical influence of the game far beyond its material and temporal limits. We propose that in constructing the game's paratextual environment, we not only account for this experience, but also the communities that, through these paratexts, preserve and cultivate the game within a phase of after-life (deWinter,2014; Galloway, 2004; Salen and Zimmerman, 2004;). It is through these paratextual ecologies that we can better discern the communities that have granted these texts such enormous cultural capital.
E2: Crossing Boundaries With Our Students: The Beginnings of Digital Student Publication at Emory
As part of the Domain of One's Own initiative, students enrolled in designated classes secure their own domain names and server space to explore the creation and development of their digital identities, first by publishing their coursework to the site and then by building a fuller site to represent themselves to public audiences. These three presentations are all grounded in instructor research conducted in Domain classrooms. They explore different ways we have been crossing boundaries with students: as assessment-creators, digital producers, and digital citizens.
Students Creating Assessment Models in the Digital Classroom - Speaker 1
I explore some of the ways that student ownership can be leveraged to encourage students to cross traditional boundaries, by taking an active role in assessment.
Helping Students Become Digital Knowledge Producers - Speaker 2
Using my own Domain of One's Own-designated course at Emory as an example, I argue that the digital editions of King Lear, which my students develop are original versions of the play. These student versions encode contemporary theories of authorship, source validity, and collaborative textual production.
Becoming Digital Citizens at Emory: So Far Just an Ideal? - Speaker 3
One central goal of the Domain initiative at Emory has been to foster digital citizenship among students. However, are students enrolled in Domain classes fulfilling that ideal? Are students maintaining their sites after the class is over? Initial data indicates that after two years, almost none of them are crossing over into self-initiated digital publication.
E3: Digital technologies and meaningful relationships: Connecting within and beyond the writing classroom
In this roundtable, five writing instructors share their experiences using digital technologies to build meaningful relationships. Specifically, five relationship types are explored: student-to-self, student-to-community, student-to-culture, instructor-to-student, and faculty-to-faculty. Each instructor offers tangible activities and approaches instructors can utilize in their own teaching practices.
Speaker 1 discusses student-to-self relationships, focusing on the ways in which the digital writing portfolio invites student to engage in regular self-reflection throughout the course of the semester.
Speaker 2 discusses student-to-community relationships, spotlighting a digital writing project involving his first-year writing students and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City.
Speaker 3 discusses student-to-culture relationships, focusing on the pedagogical use of social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
Speaker 4 discusses instructor-to-student relationships, highlighting the productive potential of digital course sites such as Blackboard within online and/or hybrid courses.
Speaker 5 discusses faculty-to-faculty relationships, focusing on the ways in which a writing program director can use digital technologies to build community within a writing program largely staffed by adjunct instructors.
E4: The logistics and politics of observing/evaluating online writing courses
In this panel, faculty from three institutions will focus on issues, challenges, and opportunities for observing/evaluating/assessing online writing courses (OWCs). We will introduce general frames and approaches to observation while also discussing concrete methods and approaches.
We aim to raise focused questions: Does a program/department need specific rubrics/criteria, and where do they emanate from? What is the administrative process of evaluation? Does QM account for OWC pedagogy, or does the field need something more specific?
E5: My Reviewers: Creating Partnerships across Programs, Universities, and Cultures (Document Critique, Collaboration, Team Projects and ePortfolios)
This panel will introduce My Reviewers, http://myreviewers.com, providing a history of its development, a discussion of its funding (1,000,000+), an overview of its features and workflows (e.g., Peer Review, ePortfolio, Team Projects, Revision Plan), a summary of published and on-going research related to its corpus (approximately 250,000 essays, millions of student and instructor comments/rubric scores).
Speaker #1 will lead a brief demo of the tool, showcasing, e.g., Revision Plan and Reporting Tools. Speaker #2 will talk about ways the project has involved faculty and research outside of FYC (e.g., PTC & general education courses) and USF. Speaker #3 will summarize existing and future research.
My Reviewers is: an e-learning environment; a system of document-markup tools and workflows that facilitate peer review and team projects; an eportfolio system; an assessment tool to expedite accreditation reports; a publication platform for etexts; a research project for universities to research student success, pedagogy, development and transfer of writing competencies, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and cognitive competencies, and usability design.
E6: Embodied literacies: identity and digital discourses (Miles)
Black Queer Literacies in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter: A Case Study from Columbus, OH - Gavin Johnson
Beyond identifying trends within literacy narratives, my presentation will reflect on the critical importance of using literacy narratives and digital activism to influence both public policy and writing classroom pedagogy. By reaching into this distinct community and preserving its literacies, I argue, we can better understand how individuals within that community compose themselves as Black Queer people.
Invisible Bodies: White Fragility in Online Writing Courses - Lydia Wilkes
Embodied differences, such as those of race and ethnicity, continue to vex online communication, especially when those embodied differences are not visible. While Lisa Nakamura and others have shed light on perceptions of race on the Internet, this scholarship's application to online writing instruction (OWI) has not yet been robustly developed. Adherence to the overarching principle of OWI, that it "should be universally inclusive and accessible," implies the inclusion of all kinds of bodies. However, when bodies are invisible by default, as they usually are in OWI, students tend to imagine their classmates as white, male, middle class, able, and heterosexual, an imaginary that makes discussing race and other embodied differences quite challenging. This presentation speaks to these issues by way of a teaching moment from a pilot section of an online first-year writing course I helped design for a large Midwestern research university.
Race, Resistance, and Writing in the Public Sphere - Regina Duthely
I argue that digital public discourse spaces like Twitter allow for Black voices to not just be inserted in the mainstream media, but to transform that media to focus on their needs from their perspective. These digital counterdiscourses challenge the traditional boundaries between the academy and the community, and invite students and scholars to consider the real world uses of writing and its ability to change the world.
The Queer Collaboration and Embodied Multimodal Composition of The Gender Project - Casey Miles
In this presentation, the speaker will expand on moments of queer decision-making that emerged in the collaborative making of two Gender Project documentaries, "Femme: Doing it Wrong" and "Shine Bright Butch Dyke." These documentaries demonstrate that difference is a space for making, and negotiating these differences is multimodal composition because participants are making rhetorical decisions situated in the context of a world hostile to bodies that are different.
E6: Embodied literacies: identity and digital discourses (Wilkes)
Black Queer Literacies in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter: A Case Study from Columbus, OH - Gavin Johnson
Beyond identifying trends within literacy narratives, my presentation will reflect on the critical importance of using literacy narratives and digital activism to influence both public policy and writing classroom pedagogy. By reaching into this distinct community and preserving its literacies, I argue, we can better understand how individuals within that community compose themselves as Black Queer people.
Invisible Bodies: White Fragility in Online Writing Courses - Lydia Wilkes
Embodied differences, such as those of race and ethnicity, continue to vex online communication, especially when those embodied differences are not visible. While Lisa Nakamura and others have shed light on perceptions of race on the Internet, this scholarship's application to online writing instruction (OWI) has not yet been robustly developed. Adherence to the overarching principle of OWI, that it "should be universally inclusive and accessible," implies the inclusion of all kinds of bodies. However, when bodies are invisible by default, as they usually are in OWI, students tend to imagine their classmates as white, male, middle class, able, and heterosexual, an imaginary that makes discussing race and other embodied differences quite challenging. This presentation speaks to these issues by way of a teaching moment from a pilot section of an online first-year writing course I helped design for a large Midwestern research university.
Race, Resistance, and Writing in the Public Sphere - Regina Duthely
I argue that digital public discourse spaces like Twitter allow for Black voices to not just be inserted in the mainstream media, but to transform that media to focus on their needs from their perspective. These digital counterdiscourses challenge the traditional boundaries between the academy and the community, and invite students and scholars to consider the real world uses of writing and its ability to change the world.
The Queer Collaboration and Embodied Multimodal Composition of The Gender Project - Casey Miles
In this presentation, the speaker will expand on moments of queer decision-making that emerged in the collaborative making of two Gender Project documentaries, "Femme: Doing it Wrong" and "Shine Bright Butch Dyke." These documentaries demonstrate that difference is a space for making, and negotiating these differences is multimodal composition because participants are making rhetorical decisions situated in the context of a world hostile to bodies that are different.
E7: Oral Histories: Knowing your neighbors through sound designs
(A)part of the Story: Audio Technology and Collaborative Memory-Making - Jonathan Isaac
In this presentation, I plan to look at the means by which technology serves both as a necessary product for collaborative memory-making between student and retiree and as an erasure of a student's presence in the project. The duality that technology plays in this community engagement project raises important questions about student-centric and community-centric models of service learning, a scholarly divide that hasn't yet accounted for technology's role in service.
(Casual) Writing Across Digital Borders - Rebecca Tarsa
The real-time and short-form writing casually done in digital spaces "bring[s] language back to its conversational, interactive foundations;" as a consequence, this new form of oral-literate hybridization necessarily involves its own set of rhetorical techniques. How do these new rhetorical practices assist student writers in crossing between classroom discourse and that of the digital communities they frequent on their own time - many of which have complex and specific discourse practices of their own? This presentation will draw from a study of casual online activity by undergraduate students to explore this question, with particular focus on the different ways students describe persuasive engagement within short- and long-form writing spaces.
Once We Hit Record: Lessons in Digital Composition from the Oral History Department - Nathan Roberts
This presentation explores the benefits of cross-campus connections between composition instructors and oral history departments. Extrapolating from my experience in Baylor University's Institute for Oral History, I'll consider how methodologies, principles, and tools of the oral historian transfer to the composition classroom. My discussion will include an overview of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (an open access digital tool released to the public in 2014) and how it can enhance access to and curation of the digital texts our students produce.
E8: Banding Together: The Rhetoric of Collaboration
_HitRECord_: Making Media for Collective Citizenship - Lisa Morres
By using TakePart's _HitRECord_ as a model for blurring the digital boundaries that divide us, this presentation seeks to explore a pedagogical framework of an open, collaborative, and digital writing classroom.
"Everybody had different parts that they brought to make the whole": The Rhetoric, Purpose, and Practice of Collaboration in Multimodal Composing Groups - Julia Voss
Beginning from the idea that most digital composers typically use cooperative, rather than dialogically collaborative, working models, I argue for the use of two sets of frameworks--one metacognitive, one critical--to structure student digital composing work in ways that encourage students to see task division as an opportunity to acquire valuable digital skills in a resource-rich learning environment.
"Here's My Jonah Eating Cheerios:" The Dominant Discourse of Mothers on Facebook - Meg McGuire
This presentation will analyze the discourse of mothers on Facebook and how Facebook has facilitated this dominant discourse for women. Through a technofeminist lens, how mothers use images, status updates and links to articles will be addressed in terms of sharing their experiences and indicate their role and identity as mother.
"We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Bloggers": Tumblr Writing Communities and Collaborative Learning - Caitlin Larracey
Online writing communities are sometimes free of hierarchy and often full of genuine interest. How can we form these communities in class? This presentation approaches this question through an examination of the Shakespeare fandom and writing community on tumblr, considering how these practices can inform FYC classrooms.
E9: Collaboration in the Cloud: Tracing Pedagogical Practices through Networked Infrastructure
Instructors use cloud storage to collect and share materials, but what is lost during this process? This panel offers ways to trace pedagogical practices through networked infrastructure by understanding the ways we teach and collaborate in technologically rich environs. The panel should be of interest to those who now (or in the future may) build pedagogical archives for mentoring or training new writing teachers to use technology in their classes, and writing program administrators who need to make visible to their institutions how technologically rich pedagogies operate.
Speaker 1 discusses the ways we adopt cloud computing into our classrooms and pedagogical practices by examining the metaphors we use that shape our understandings of this technology.
Speaker 2 focuses attention on technology-pedagogy encounters (both good and not so) that direct our gaze to the small, everyday practices that pedagogical knowledge is presumed to capture.
Speaker 3 examines the ways English program histories are collected in pieces and projects on university servers and the ways these institutionally sponsored pedagogical actions and results can be better collected, organized, and archived for future users.
Concurrent Session F
F1: Locating Game Design in the Studio and in the Classroom
The first part of our panel consists of four case studies of small to medium-sized game studios. We look at how games are designed in these studios, looking particularly at processes of inspiration, creativity, and communication. Our findings suggest that smaller studios operate in many ways as early designers in game design operated, with casual meetings and an emphasis on iterative design, but that no standard of documentation or design is practiced. The second part of the panel looks at the implications of this diversity of communication and workflow in the gamified writing classroom, specifically in the gamified online writing course.
F3: From Methods to Resistance: Digital Writing Scholars Crossing Into Digital Humanities Classrooms
This roundtable contributes to the burgeoning conversations among rhetoric and the digital humanities by seeking to define the pedagogical challenges and institutional issues that arise when writing/rhetoric/technical communication scholars design and teach digital humanities curriculum and assignments.
Speakers one through four will focus on how the "in/between" spaces of disciplines surface in their classrooms, while speakers five through seven will reflect on how the "in/between" spaces of their institutions have shaped their pedagogical approaches to teaching dh.
Moving to programmatic boundaries, speakers five, six, and seven plan to reflect on the ways the "in/between" spaces of their institutions have generated issues in their classrooms.
F4: Mini-Workshop: Markdown
This mini-workshop will offer an introduction to the Markdown writing syntax. Participants will learn about Markdown's history, Markdown-based writing applications, and Markdown's potential application in a number of professional, technical, and academic writing contexts.
The workshop builds on research from our ongoing study of professional writers who work with plain text composing syntaxes such as Markdown. Our participants value Markdown's plain text format, which allows them to write in a large collection of applications (rather than being locked into one particular word processor). These various applications afford task-specific workflows and interfaces. For example, one writer starts projects in a mind-mapping application on an iPhone, converts that text to a Markdown outline, then drafts the document's text in an application whose interface mimics a "stack of notecards" approach to writing. Other participants have developed idiosyncratic blogging workflows using custom scripts. We see a connection between these practices and Selber's call for functional literacy, and we follow Selber in arguing that there needs to be greater attention given to the functional dimensions of digital writing—especially in its relation to practices that extend beyond the classroom and into professional writing contexts. Markdown offers a helpful means of reconsidering such contexts.
In particular, mini-workshop participants will:
- write with the Markdown syntax and consider how it might be a helpful technology for teaching and research;
- explore a number of Markdown composing tools, including simple text editors, web-based Markdown writing spaces, and specialized PC/Mac Markdown tools;
- examine Markdown's use within content management systems and genres of professional practice; and
- consider how Markdown (and other similar plain-text syntaxes) might be used for born-digital scholarly work.
F5: Writing Communities Across Boundaries: Student Experiences with Digital Collaboration
For this panel session, we present our research findings on breaking boundaries between two first-year composition classes (taught by different teachers) through digital collaboration. In each section, students wrote collaboratively in pairs based on each section's specific theme. Then, pairs from one section joined pairs from the other section to form a group that deliberated and wrote using only the digital medium. Assigned Joanna Wolfe's Team Writing: A Guide to Working in Groups, students in each section were encouraged to incorporate tested strategies for building equitable partnerships while creating a social media campaign. These strategies were supplemented with scaffolded assigned readings on--but not limited to--social media, social justice, digital activism, and community engagement on the local and national level.
Speaker 1 will focus on the ways in which students used technology to challenge the boundaries of difference with an appreciation for the significance of power, oppression, and privilege (hooks; Ratcliffe; Royster; Young).
Speaker 2 will focus on strategies for teaching about and with social media as a pedagogical approach to challenging boundaries of difference and digital collaboration. Students read and wrote about social media (slacktivism, citizen journalism) to understand social media use today. Social media campaigns (such as #blacklivesmatter, Occupy Wall Street) were then used as models to understand both the genre of social media campaigns as well as how texts are rhetorically created, remediated, and circulated to cross boundaries.
Speaker 3 will pull from the results of this study to discuss rapport building and community within online spaces as compared to physical spaces. Specifically, Speaker 3 will detail the challenges the students in the study encountered when transitioning from face-to-face collaboration to digital collaboration.
F6: History of the Future
Crossing (Digital) Wires: Conversations With Writing Center Scholars on the Status of Publication in the 21st Century - Elisabeth Buck
This presentation synthesizes seven conversations with scholars working prominently within writing center studies. It addresses how these individuals conceptualize academic publishing in a landscape where traditional print journals increasingly conflict with open access, digital, and/or multimodal modes of publication.
MOOCs and Correspondence Courses: History Keeps Repeating Itself Because No One Was Listening - Steven Krause
Speaker three discusses the similarities between correspondence courses in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries and today's Massive Online Open Courses. To borrow from the consulting firm Gartner and their frequently cited "hype cycle," both instructional technologies experienced a rapid rise to an unrealistic "peak of inflated expectations," a fall into a "trough of disillusionment," only to be followed to a slow return to a "plateau of productivity."
Naming This Conference Truer; Reconsidering Our "Computers" Tag - Will Hochman
Our conference name game is a recurring theme. There are good arguments to keep "Computers" as the first name for us, but maybe it's time to change? Yes, there's our history as computer pathfinders, and computers are involved in almost everything we do, but maybe we don't need an established brand for our gathering as much as we need a better tag? The effect of this conference is that we leave wanting to compose more digital writing instruction. We need to discuss revising our title to more accurately reflect what the conference offers and what takeaways attendees can expect.I will argue for "Composing Digital Writing Instruction" as a name for our confluence in order to solicit, collect and tweet suggestions from audience and co-presenters.
F7: Rhetoric of Soundscapes and spaces
Fostering Sonic Spaces: Speaking and Listening Back - Mariana Grohowski, Brooke Chambers
In this presentation, the instructor of an undergraduate intermediate writing course and her former student reflect on the successes and failures of a sound-focused assignment: the "talking response." Privileging practical strategies for teachers interested in experimenting with soundwriting, this presentation will offer instructors invaluable insights into how students experience sound-focused assignments and provide implications for improved sound-focused assignments and activities.
MP3: The Meaning of Innovation? - John Silvestro
Drawing together the recent arguments that MP3s are a format that drives innovation with the theories of how circulation impacts communities, this panel explores the impact that MP3s have had on the underground metal community, a community that has experienced cycles of rapid and vast musical innovation followed by extended periods of musical rigidity and boundary-keeping. This panel will present both research approaches for studying and tracking circulation's impact on specific communities as well as introduce a theory about how the format of circulating texts drives or hinders innovation and change within communities.
Studying the Soundscapes of WAC Classrooms - Kati Fargo Ahern
This presentation will use listening data from writing classrooms across different disciplines to make an argument for soundscape studies within the scholarship of place, pedagogy, and learning spaces. In addition to using technology to enable students to build and design soundscapes, it is equally important to listen for and discover the role of technology, spaces, and disciplines in composing the soundscape of a "writing classroom."
F8: Public Space/Public Sphere
Technologies for Going Public: The Circulation of Student Writing and the Spatiotemporal Logics of the Digital Public Sphere - Dan Ehrenfeld
This presentation considers what circulation studies (Gries) offers compositionists interested in how digital technologies move student writing beyond the walls of the classroom and into more "public" contexts.
Hacktivism as Social Action: Understanding Corporeal Ramifications of Digital Movements - Carleigh DeAngelis
This work discusses the crossover between the embodied nature of social activist goals and the affordances and ideologies of digital cultures, demonstrating how these seemingly oppositional concepts can work together to promote the goals of community members in both spheres. In particular I am interested in the ways in which hacktivism crosses the boundaries between digital embodiment, public communication, and social activism to extend its reach from digital forums into corporeal communities.
The Materiality of Digital Mapping: Two Postpedagogical Approaches - Karen Shaup, Matthew Pavesich
In this presentation, we respond to Paul Lynch's call in After Pedagogy for more postpedagogical approaches to teaching writing by "crossing wires" between the non-digital and the digital, like Jeff Rice in Digital Detroit. In one model, students write the city from the bottom-up, using geocaching, a scavenger hunt that relies on GPS technology and user-generated content. The database created by the students' individual contributions demonstrates how differently the same data can be configured, thus leading to discussions about writing as an open system.
Tumblr and the Personal Narrative: Reconfiguring Genre Through Multimodality - Benjamin Spanbock
This talk explores the potential of a post-structural aesthetic afforded by Tumblr to provide a critical intervention into the way we think about the personal narrative, and into how we assign and evaluate it our classes. In immersive spaces created online, students relying on the social media blogging site to create personal narratives "cross wires" between original content (both written and visual) and external content appropriated from world around them (particularly from across the internet). In doing so these students posit new, and in some respects problematic, ways of forming and expressing identity that deserves critical attention.
F9: Writing Pedagogies
Meeting Writers Where They Are: Technology as Bridge Between Theory and Praxis - Amanda Pratt
The emergent concept of "rhetorical ecology" dominates the current conversation on ontology within the writing classroom (Edbauer 2005, Cooper 2011, Syverson 1999). While this model allows teachers to elegantly consider students' subjectivity and materiality, displacing the rhetorical situation with innumerable intricacies of lived experience tends to leave composition teachers with more questions than answers—how does one cope with twenty-four hopelessly complex rhetorical ecologies in a classroom at any given time?
The Computer IS My Voice: Augmentative and Alternative Communication Devices in the College Composition Classroom - Pamela Chisum, Margaret Moore
This joint presentation examines the issues surrounding the "mainstreaming" of students with special needs. What pedagogical adjustments need to be made when a student who uses an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) device is placed in a regular first year composition class? How does a professor with no formal training in disability studies make the student feel included without the rest of the class feeling like they're waiting on her? Hear from the student about the challenges of composing with AAC software, and how the computer has literally become her voice.
Writing/Multiliteracy Centers as Spaces that Engage Liberal Arts Education - Elmar Hashimov
How can writing/multiliteracy centers engage humanities and liberal arts education in the context of the national conversation about their relevance in the STEM age?
Keynote 3 and Lunch
Crossing the Digital Divide: Engaged Scholarship, Writing, and Technology - Allen Brizee
Finn: "We'll figure it out. We'll use the Force." Han Solo: "THAT'S NOT HOW THE FORCE WORKS." The Force: in the Star Wars movies, it's the mysterious and ever-present energy field that, as Obi-Wan explains, "surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together."
The Force might be a fictitious concept, but it's still a powerful and empowering idea. The idea of the Force reminds us that we possess the power to bring about positive change. Importantly, the Force, as Obi-Wan also explains, is "an energy field created by all living things," so its emphasis is on the natural, not the technical. In fact, when we experience the Star Wars movies, we notice that the Jedis achieve their greatest feats by harnessing their own inner strength. Certainly, many Jedi heroics involve technology, but without a Jedi's willpower and moral compass, the Force and technology can cause terrible tragedy, as we learn from characters like General Grievous and even Darth Vader.
Today, also a time of technological wonders, the conflict between technology and ethics is difficult to discuss. Nevertheless, it's a moral imperative that we consider both the positive and the negative of our technological capabilities. For example, in his touchstone work, "Ethic of Expediency," Steven Katz discusses some of the risks we face when we adopt systems and technologies that are too efficient. Where I live, for instance, Baltimore, Maryland, a huge digital divide exists. Some people have access to amazing and innovative technology, while others don't even have computers or mobile devices. So the question exists: how do we use technology¾and writing¾to cross this digital divide? While I don't want to minimize the threat of today's digital divide by using the Star Wars tales as a springboard into my discussion, I think that we can look to the moral lessons George Lucas provides to help us consider what happens when technology is not human-focused, when it is not accessible and usable for everyone.
I propose that we look to Ernest L. Boyer's model of engaged scholarship to help us harness the powers of technology and writing, as well as the power within each of us, to help bring about positive change and cross the digital divide. In his landmark book, Scholarship Reconsidered, Boyer argues that academics can integrate the three main areas of our work¾teaching, scholarship, and service¾to inform and improve each of these areas. In my talk, I explain how Boyer's model can also help us use writing and technology to cross the digital divide and bring about positive change in our communities.
Allen Brizee earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University and now is an Associate Professor in the writing department at Loyola University Maryland. At Loyola, Allen coordinates the writing department internship program and organizes community-based research initiatives in Baltimore neighborhoods. His research interests include engaged scholarship, professional communication, WAC/WID, classical rhetoric, writing centers, and UX/human-computer interaction. His work has been published in Computers and Composition, the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Across the Disciplines, and in collected editions.
Town Hall 2
Computers & ... Professional and Technical Writing
Computers and Writing, as a field and in its membership, has always had a strong connection to composition/rhetoric, even while our work has helped to make possible expanded notions of composition and what constitutes "writing" as taught in secondary and higher education contexts. Recently, the C&W community has reached out to the emerging field of digital humanities, hoping to bring our histories and advances to the attention of a potentially allied field whose members primarily come from different academic disciplines and traditions (and thus may not be aware of the depth of research and technology-infused pedagogy that we have built over the past 40 years). This TownHall seeks to extend our trans-disciplinary networks by identifying connections between the work of Computers and Writing and the fields of Professional and Technical Writing, and the ways that our fields - both situated in writing studies -- can both complement and challenge each other's approaches to both teaching and research.
Chair: Doug Eyman, George Mason University
Concurrent Session DS: Digital Showcase
DS1: Back to the Future: MUDs, Mobility, & Library Box
Our digital showcase will illuminate the pedagogical possibilities of Library Box by demonstrating the functions and features that allow for connectivity. In doing so, we invite participants to explore and share files through Library Box in ways that can enhance their conference experience, scaffold their own presentations, classroom activities, community outreach, etc. Ultimately, our showcase will offer a platform for participants to engage in asynchronous file sharing and examine issues of digital delivery, copyright, and ownership.
DS2: Composing the Video Essay
This interactive showcase will teach video essay composition. It will involve multiple Mac laptops running Adobe Premiere Pro and iMovie. On one computer, an instructor will demonstrate various editing techniques, while participants can practice composing their own video essay on another computer. A third computer will show a series of video essays created by undergraduates on Adobe Premiere Pro. I also will provide a "pedagogical best practices" handout to help instructors begin thinking about how they might offer a video essay composition course at their home institution.
DS3: Dress Profesh
Academia has long been concerned with privileging the mind over the body—to be "too stylish" as an academic means to risk not being taken seriously. According to Eileen Green, "little attention has been paid to the ways in which…academics…use clothing strategies to 'place' themselves within academic cultures which marginalize and exclude them" (98). This digital showcase will feature the Tumblr Dress Profesh (www.dressprofesh.com), which features user submitted photos of what it means to dress "professionally". Dress Profesh works from the premise that all dress codes, whether implicit or explicitly stated, are racist, cis sexist, sizeist, ageist, classist, etc. This digital showcase project will invite participants to reflect on how they perform "professional" and the implications that that performance has for reinforcing institutional systems of power by having two parts: 1) a screen with the archive of Dress Profesh submissions for participants to scroll through and view and 2) a pop up photo booth where participants can create their own submissions on the spot.
DS4: Generative Wire-Crossing: Mutt Genres and the Personal Video Essay
This Digital Showcase submission features a "Personal Video Essay" assignment. While this assignment could be understood as a "mutt genre" created for a school context and having little real-world applicability, it also showcases the pedagogical advantages of "mutt genres" for teaching video production. The display offers a poster documenting the project's influences, design, and rationale and samples of students' video essays.
DS5: physComposition: Using Physical Computing and Circuit Crafting to Compose Physical-Digital Texts
In this digital showcase I will exhibit some of my experiments combining physical and interactive computing, circuit crafting, and handmade books, what I call physComposition, and share materials and ideas on how we might use physical computing and circuit crafting as compositional tools to explore issues of materiality, multimodality, material composition, and programming as a form of writing.
DS6: Is dance writing? Composition, translation, activism, reflection
This digital video borrows from the genres of screendance and digital reflection to engage the question of dance as writing by means of (i) interviews with dance choreographers who identify social justice activism as part of the work their dances perform, (ii) personal reflections on the effects and effectiveness of dance as a medium for presenting political ideas (in contrast, say, to alphabetic writing), and (iii) analyses of particular philosophical and literary texts and concepts that open up the kinds of writing and thinking that can be performed by a dance.
DS7: My Reviewers: Peace Through Communication
A comprehensive suite of tools, My Reviewers is an e-learning environment; a system of document-markup tools and workflows that facilitate peer review and team projects; an eportfolio system; an assessment tool to expedite accreditation reports; a publication platform for etexts; a research project for universities to research student success, pedagogy, development and transfer of writing competencies, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and cognitive competencies, and usability design.
DS8: Packaging Concepts
By embracing and expanding upon Marshall McLuhan's "the Medium is the Message," the presenter encourages students to explore how physical medium impacts their compositions by having them utilize actual packaging materials (plastics, corrugated board, etc.) and design software to "package" their messages.
DS9: Pedagogy of Virtual Reality
This digital showcase problematizes the evolving rhetoric of virtual reality. As such, the presenters will examine the critical, rhetorical, and pedagogical strategies for creating an informed and humanistic approach to consuming and creating Virtual Reality (VR). Participants will be invited to discuss ways that virtual reality can or should be implemented in a digitally-enhanced writing classroom.
Concurrent Session G
G1: Digital Research Methods: Databases, Ethics, Enactments, Histories, and Processes
This roundtable offers seven perspectives on how writing research methods and ethics continue to evolve in the face of ever-changing digital writing spaces and practices. Participants offer 5-minute Ignite-style presentations related to their own research sites (Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Pinterest, among others) and artifacts (websites, social media posts, Wikipedia articles, message boards, user profiles, web surveys, metadata) as well as their methods of data collection and analysis. The panelists will leave ample time for attendees to share their own experiences with and questions about digital writing research.
Presenter 1: "Researching the Twitterverse: Perils and Possibilities"
Presenter 2: "RAD to the Bone or At Least Trying"
Presenter 3: "Objects to Think With vs. Objects of Study"
Presenter 4: "Uncovering Web Histories"
Presenter 5: "Interpreting and Mining Writing-Center Surveys"
Presenter 6: "What metadata adds to understanding the circulation and reception of ideas"
Presenter 7: "Research Ethics in Online Spaces"
G2: The Contingent Labor of Online Course Delivery: Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Digital Innovation in Writing Programs
The implementation of online and hybrid courses involves multiple stakeholders with very different concerns and investments in online education. As a result, discussions of online learning can provide a unique forum for investigating the power dynamics and relationships that are central to higher education, particularly with concern to the needs of the contingent or temporary laborers who teach many of these courses. Our panel gives voice to the contingent labor centrally involved in the development of hybrid and online courses.
Collaborative Course Design & Negotiating Institutional Constraints
The first speaker, a graduate student, will begin by tracing the history of online and hybrid courses in our writing program, making visible the numerous stakeholders involved and their many complex relationships to the courses' development process. She will then consider how she and Presenter 2, another graduate student, had to develop multiple identities as designers, instructors, contingent laborers, and collaborators.
Instructor Agency & Standardized Course Shells
The second speaker will turn our attention to implementation, wherein 20 graduate students taught hybrid and online first-year composition courses over a two-year period. The instructors kept teaching journals, and our analysis of those journals revealed a problematic tension between instructor agency and standardized course shells.
Contingent Workers, Institutional Memory, and Professional Development: Gaps Between Innovation and Integration
The presenter will explore this disjuncture between innovation and integration, which puts both the need to build institutional memory and the desire to deploy effective teaching methodologies at odds with ethical professional development practices. Further, she argues that in the absence of programmatic redesign, teachers bear the burden of bridging the gap between the well-resourced stages of development and testing, and integration of such courses into a traditional writing program structure.
G3: Distant Readings of Disciplinarity: A Dialogue about Data Visualization, Topic Modeling, and other Data-Driven Methods
In this panel, the presenters share findings and methodological insights from two large-scale data-driven studies. In addition to sharing the findings of their research, the presenters will also engage in dialogue with each other and with the audience about the affordances and limitations of both human and machine reading methodologies for making sense of larger data sets.
100 Years of New Media Pedagogy: Re-seeing Disciplinary History through Data Visualization
Speakers 1 and 2 will present a working draft of an article-length dynamic interface that features several interactive data visualizations. Our project offers a distant reading (Moretti; Mueller) of nearly 800 articles in English Journal from 1912-2012 that reference the use of technology in conjunction with teaching practice.
Topic Modeling Communities of Discourse in Doctoral Dissertations
Speaker 3 will share interactive data visualizations derived from a computational content analysis of over 2,000 full-text doctoral dissertations in composition/rhetoric, dating from 2001-2010. Because this corpus is larger than any individual researcher could read, the analysis relies on on topic modeling: an algorithmic means of identifying clusters of words which tend to co-occur within documents, and the proportions in which those clusters combine (cf. Blei et al; Mimno; Ratliff; Goldstone and Underwood).
G4: Rhetorics of Social Media I
Fight Club and Social Media: Turning to Electracy and Technology to Teach Argumentation - Eric Stephens
In light of Ulmer's larger project to discover the various ways technology and electracy make powerful impacts on education and pedagogy, the speaker developed a lesson plan utilizing entertainment and social media to teach important rhetorical principles in argumentation; namely, concessions and rebuttals. By drawing on Tyler Durden's first homework assignment in Fight Club—to start a fight and lose it—the speaker asks students to make a strong claim on a social media platform, discuss it, refute others, and, ultimately, to concede.
Gendered Technologies of the Self(ie), or Why We Really Need to 'Keep Up' with the Kardashians - Kristine Blair
This presentation includes an analysis of the role of various technological genres and processes in promoting a cult(ure) of the self, arguing that these genres promote a performance of gender that remains hypersexualized.
Image Events in the Digital Public Sphere: Combating Wicked Environmental Problems in the Great Lakes - Jack Hennes
The Speaker demonstrates how student analysis of image events on social media, particularly those depicting wicked environmental problems, can serve as just one way to enact public rhetoric pedagogy while also working with the guiding metaphor of ecology. Beginning with the Great Lakes as a local natural resource at significant risk, the Speaker then illustrates how students can examine the impact and circulation of public images through: 1) simple social media visualizations, 2) analyses, and 3) composing network models. Ideally, this teaching framework encourages students to identify —and engage with— issues that impact their local communities and their broader networks of civic life.
From Corporeality to Virtual Reality: The Corpse in the New Media Corpus - Brenta Blevins
Examining museum exhibits, video games, and augmented reality, this presentation takes up such questions as: What are ramifications for living bodies in choosing particular media for representing the deceased? How do media shape the representations of bodies across increasingly distributed and online spaces? How do such decisions shape body literacy and discourses and ultimately impact living bodies?
G5: Tools for Writing Researchers, by Writing Researchers
Writing researchers regularly have to hack tools designed for other purposes in order to gather and process data about participants. Very few tools are actually designed with writing researchers in mind, let alone are responsive to researcher needs, so there are real questions to be answered about what a tool would look like that natively supported the interests of writing researchers while treating student humanely as participants in that research.
Eli Review, invented at Michigan State University, is one tool where these interests can be played out in the wild. Designed and maintained by composition and rhetoric scholars, Eli Review has added and evolved features specifically in response to researcher needs and continues to look for ways to grow to support not only individual teacher researchers but a community of scholars in rhetoric and composition.
G6: What Does Feminism Look Like?: Defining Feminism and Fandom through #FeministsAreUgly, #TheBachelorette, and #ScreamQueens
Feminists have long debated what constitutes--and who gets to constitute--what feminism looks like, especially as it is written online (Blair & Takayoshi, 1999; Blair, Gajjala, & Tulley, 2009). This panel takes up three current phenomena where feminist communities construct, negotiate, and contest definitions and iterations of feminism using hashtag activism as their method of writing and debating.
From Selfies to Celebrities: #FeministsAreUgly as Cultural Critique or Cultural Confirmation?
Presenter 1 examines the possibilities for feminist activism through the #FeministsAreUgly movement. Using a grounded theory approach, the presenter identifies and quantifies the key traits of a sample of tweets when the hashtag reemerged in April 2015.
Analyzing the (Feminist?) Twitter Practices of Bachelorette Fans
This presentation interrogates whether live tweeting reality dating shows could be viewed as feminist digital activism. Analyzing tweets concerning The Bachelorette in 2015 reveals that a subset critiques the sexist, heteronormative, patriarchal tropes the show is founded on. The fan tweets initially suggest the conflicted investment of viewers who are critical of the show while simultaneously gaining pleasure from watching it. Thus, there is tension visible in the tweets in that many viewers provide feminist critique while also enjoying anti-feminist elements of the program.
From "Final Girls" to #ScreamQueens: Bloodying Definitions of Feminism
Speaker 3 investigates how a horror-genre TV Show (ScreamQueens) provides audiences with culturally constructed representations of gender that continue to shape, reshape, and reinforce positive and negative perceptions of feminism within digital spaces such as Twitter. Specifically, Presenter 3 discusses the results of a qualitative research study analyzing the intersection of #ScreamQueens and #Feminism to investigate how the depictions of female characters in ScreamQueens negate and perpetuate stereotypes.
Concurrent Session H
H1: Brad Pitt Wants to Know "What's in the Box": How Technology, Rhetoric, and Disability Studies Play a Key Role in Breaking (open) Black Boxes
Black boxes are a concept that originated in engineering and science. The idea is that a process can be so complex that the input and the output represent the most salient aspects of that process. This panel will critically analyze black boxes using disability studies and theoretical frameworks from various disciplines such as rhetoric, writing pedagogy, and engineering in the hopes to show that black boxes generate provocative questions for interdisciplinary research. In particular, our panel directs attention to the ways in which disciplines can become black boxes that obscure difference, identity, translation, and embodiment.
H2: Pedagogical Challenges
Bridging Cultural Dimensions: Matriculation From the English Language Center to the University - Brandy Bippes
This study explores matriculation trends from a local/national intensive language center to a public research university and considers ways the university might begin to recruit and accommodate under-represented populations in technical communication, a field dependent on computer-generated writing, bridging majors in partnership with local/national community intensive language programs.
Not Top-Down, But Outside-In: Academic Support Programs and Digital Collaboration - Alicia Brazeau
What role can academic support programs play in the promotion of discussions and pedagogies for digital writing technologies and projects? What are the challenges and rewards of collaboration among libraries, technology departments, and academic support programs in fostering new attitudes and approaches to digital and multimodal composing across campus? This presentation seeks to answer these questions by describing a collaborative intervention between Educational Technology, the Library, the Writing Center, and Publication and Design to support senior thesis writers in their experiences with research and composing technologies, and multimodal presentations.
Scaling Up: Moving from Course and Program Electronic Portfolios to Institutional and Inter-institutional Collaborations - Michael Day
What are the conditions necessary for expanding electronic portfolio use from individual and class-based implementations to institutional and inter-institutional partnerships and collaborations? This presentation tells the story one writing program's Inter/National Coalition for Eportfolio Research-sponsored development of an electronic portfolio assessment that became the basis for an institutional eportfolio and a regional electronic portfolio partnership.
Writing Before College: Multimodality and Transfer - Ryan P. Shepherd
This presenter will use results from survey and interview data to present an overview of multimodal writing experiences students may have had before entering university. He will then offer insights on how to more effectively use these experiences to create and build upon multimodal texts in first-year writing classrooms.
H3: What It Means to Compose for the Web: The Lessons of Curating Three Exhibits for the Museum of Everyday Writing
This panel highights what we learn about composing for the web when composing, creating, and curating exhibits for the new Museum of Everyday Writing. Through accounts of how three exhibits were created--one on graffiti; another on tattoos; and a third on postcards--we learn about the roles materiality, multimodality, and audience play in composing for the web, as well as about what the three exhibits collectively teach us about composing, creating, and curating--and their relationships to each other.
Presenter One describes an MEW exhibit exploring the graffiti on each wall of an unfinished building curiously located in the yard behind an apartment complex, which has become a site for graffiti artists, novice and seasoned alike.
Presenter Two shares her exhibit focusing on tattoos as a form of remediation celebrating embodiment. The exhibit showcases photographs of text-based tattoos and the stories behind the ink. Tattoos provide a unique starting place for considering "Composing for the Web," as the physical ink is often translated into pixels on social networks when individuals craft digital identities through their own web writing practices.
Presenter Three highlights four antique postcards (one, nearly a hundred years old) as epistolary artifacts. Postcards reflect a unique genre in the evolution of letter-writing, a practice that facilitated the circulation of knowledge as much as it curated social bonds.
Presenter Four reads across these accounts of composing for the web to discern patterns, contrast those with composing for the screen and for the page, and raise new questions about composing, including what this kind of curation helps us newly understand.
H4: Consolidation as Exploration: An Opportunity for Redefining Boundaries for Digital Writers
In the wake of the consolidation of two universities--a small polytechnic university and a large state university--our department was tasked with reframing a degree for digital writers. Over the last year we have navigated a host of challenging administrative hurdles, and what we've come up with — a Bachelor's of Science in New Media Writing — explores the intersection of digital literacies, content creation, and new media narrative structures. In our presentation, we will outline two concentrations within our degree (Content Development and Writing for Interactive Fiction and Games) and describe, in detail, the design of four new courses (New Media Writing I and II, Writing for Interactive Fiction and Games, and Digital Collaboration) that explore issues of platform architectures, digital ethics and ownership, and interactive narrative artifacts.
H5: Digital Publishing Projects and a Pedagogy of Professionalization
In this session, the speakers will address three digital publishing projects borne out of Computers & Writing's position at the intersection of global, transdisciplinary research and teaching. These three projects are hosted at one institution but function across the boundaries of schools, academic disciplines, and nations. They include a university-wide digital publishing institute, a digital publishing platform, and a pedagogy of professionalization for masters students who work as research assistants for these projects.
H6: The Orthos Project: Testing the Boundaries Between Hybrid and Computer Assisted Learning in First-Year Composition
This mini workshop introduces participants to strategies developed for a cluster of first-year composition courses examining the crossing wires between hybrid pedagogy and computer assisted writing instruction (including developments such as adaptive or personalized learning, calibrated peer review, and "crowdsourced" grading). Our approach to these courses involved collaborative design, pooling resources, shared course management, and gamification.
H7: Traversing Cultural Divides for Student Veterans in the Writing Center, the Technical/Professional Communication Classroom, and on Facebook
There are significant cultural differences between the U.S. military, U.S. civilian culture, and the academy, and returning vets face a challenging transition from military life to civilian culture (Valentino). In just the past five years, over a million Post-9/11 military personnel have traded their weapons for college textbooks. However, these students face a variety of issues often exacerbated by the pace and pressure of academia (Vance and Miller). Panelists seek to better support student veterans and their writing teachers through an exploration of the rhetorical practices of each and the ways in which new media and digital technologies enable and hinder cultural crossings.
H9: Can You Hear Me Now?: Voice, Voices, and the Teaching of Voicing
This panel will inquire into the teaching of voice by presenting and discussing the authorial/editorial choices that have driven decisions within the panelists' research and teaching and those that show up in their students' audio-visual (a-v) writing. In addition to presenting exemplary a-v pieces, the session will include assignments and training activities that the panelists have used with their students and collaborators. These will be offered in the service of informing the ethical choices that shape the way students, colleagues, readers, and auditors may better hear authorial voice and subject voices in the a-v texts of others and reveal means for discovering, developing, and demonstrating their own voices.
H10: Seeing it differently: Visualization and making in research and pedagogy
This panel investigates connections between visualization and making, taking "visualization" in both senses: to make something visible to the eye (as in data visualization) and to form a mental image (as in imagining another kind of self). Visualization can help to clarify information, shape our understanding of abstract ideas, and question received notions. Understanding visual making as a heuristic opportunity, this panel investigates how teacher-scholars and students can use visual spaces and modes to hone rhetorical skills, refine research practices, explore pedagogical commitments, and experiment with a range of DIY approaches.
H10: Seeing it differently: Visualization and making in research and pedagogy (Navickas)
This panel investigates connections between visualization and making, taking "visualization" in both senses: to make something visible to the eye (as in data visualization) and to form a mental image (as in imagining another kind of self). Visualization can help to clarify information, shape our understanding of abstract ideas, and question received notions. Understanding visual making as a heuristic opportunity, this panel investigates how teacher-scholars and students can use visual spaces and modes to hone rhetorical skills, refine research practices, explore pedagogical commitments, and experiment with a range of DIY approaches.
H10: Seeing it differently: Visualization and making in research and pedagogy (Shapiro)
This panel investigates connections between visualization and making, taking "visualization" in both senses: to make something visible to the eye (as in data visualization) and to form a mental image (as in imagining another kind of self). Visualization can help to clarify information, shape our understanding of abstract ideas, and question received notions. Understanding visual making as a heuristic opportunity, this panel investigates how teacher-scholars and students can use visual spaces and modes to hone rhetorical skills, refine research practices, explore pedagogical commitments, and experiment with a range of DIY approaches.
H11: Rhetorics of Social Media II
#Shoutyourabortion: Listening to Reproductive Justice Activists, 140 Characters at a Time - Morgan Leckie
This presentation situates initial findings from participant-observer and person-based research examining the recent Twitter hashtag movement, #Shoutyourabortion within a longer rhetorical genealogy of women's historical attempts to gain reproductive freedom in order to demonstrate why and how a particular social movement's history can inform current studies of online civic engagement.
A Social-Media Approach to Classroom-Based Service Learning - Stan Harrison
Ccommunity-supported social media outlets – like Facebook and Yelp – help students to study and profile actual consumers. Having engaged with a variety of community-supported social media outlets, students then contact their target business, conduct interviews, and write and deliver professional ad copy. Because they can engage with, study, and write for their local community without leaving the classroom, students can now receive their college education and serve their community without having to write on location.
Audience Addressed, Invoked, Involved, Articulated, Enraged: What Makes Some Facebook Audiences Push Back Anonymously? - Erin Karper
This presentation examines how "enraged" audience members use various sites such as Lamebook, Failbook, and the various "STFU" [Shut the Fuck Up] sites (such as STFU Parents) to anonymously express outrage and/or engage in public shaming of Facebook posters. What are the most common types of posts which provoke an enraged audience? Why do some audience members turn to other sites to shame their Facebook "friends"? Is this an effective mechanism or an appropriate one? What implications do audience actions like this have for pedagogy, especially for pedagogy which uses social media to create community within the classroom or without?
From Theory to Practice: What Social Media Has Taught Me About Audience (A List) - Ash Evans
This talk presents a rhetorical framework for audience on social media, taking into consideration the people, customs, expectations, and habits that comprise the social media site The List App. Examining her failed attempt to enter into The List App community, the presenter discusses the disappointments—as well as the theoretical and pedagogical importance—of putting into praxis what she theorizes.
Concurrent Session I
I1: Writing Communities
A Study of Writing in Wikipedia: Ten Years Later - James Purdy
This presentation considers what writing activities characterize recent Wikipedia articles and to what extent these writing activities have changed. It will report preliminary results of a follow-up study analyzing all versions of three Wikipedia articles, archive, design, and writing, over a three-year period (2012–2014) and compare them to results of a similar study analyzing all versions of these same articles ten years earlier (2002–2014) with particular attention to adding, deleting, organizing, and formatting content; adding deleting, and fixing hyperlinks; editing; vandalizing; and the blurred lines between scholarly and "non-scholarly" sources and individual and communal/collaborative authorship.
Authentic Circulation: Buzzfeed, Ethics, and the Age of Immediacy - Dustin Morris
This presentation examines the external process of circulation and how understanding how a text moves through digital delivery should be important to understanding what authentic texts are in the age of digital reproduction. I shall examine two objects: first, the Boston Marathon Reddit scandal, then move to Buzzfeed's listicle practices. Each will underscore how control, from an original author, is loosened when texts exist on the internet.
Composition and Communities: The Inquiry Project as a Bridge Across Disciplines - Landon Berry
This presentation examines the inquiry project as a site for discourse community and digital media investigations. By exploring how digital media and technologies facilitate writing (broadly defined) for communities, composition students can pursue membership in a specific discourse community that is related to their major or personal interests
Rhetoric Under the Interface and the Rise of Sensors, Surveillance, and Telepathic Communication - Estee Beck
This talk will speculate on the role of computation upon rhetoric and present a theory of algorithmic culture and surveillance in connection with computers & writing and rhetorical theory, and imagine computers & writing's place alongside sensor technologies and the promise of telepathic communications.
I2: Networked Bodies/Networked Identities: Connecting Bodies in Digital Activism/Writing
This panel seeks to explore implications of individual bodies joining and separating in networked spaces, and resist traditional/monolithic notions of unity in activism, scholarly citation practices, and disembodied digital writing.
Speaker 1: Citation, Ethics, and Digital Social Networks -
As digital composition has proliferated, notions of Intellectual Property (IP)--who 'owns' writing--and 'original' authorship come into conflict with conversations around fair use or remix culture; both sides are laden with labor issues and unequal power relations. Speaker 2 will examine discourses around a high-visibility activist hashtag as a way to consider politics of citing these conversations--and the bodies implicated--in our own scholarship.
Speaker 2: Modding the I: An approach to dis/connection in networked affective publics -
Speaker 3 invites the audience to collaboratively, collectively examine the structures of feeling and social distance pertaining to networked activism. This interactive writing workshop will use tattoo transfers, movement, and augmented reality to destabilize assumptions about bodies and trigger affective responses intended to harness rhetorical empathy to move our online affective publics from dis/connection to collaboration and collectivity.
I3: Where does "this" fit?: Supporting Access to Coding Literacies in Composition
This presentation argues for increased disciplinary and programmatic support of coding instruction within professional training and graduate programs in rhetoric and composition. The speakers explore this concept through narrative, drawing from their experiences learning how to code in the face of institutional obstacles.
Through an independent study, Speaker 1 was able to incorporate coding into his curriculum with institutional support. This support, however, was contingent on several situational factors: a recent faculty hire with coding knowledge and willingness to participate, the cancelation of a planned course offering which allowed space for an independent study, and a department that recognized coding as an area that might be studied.
Speaker 2 developed interest in web coding during the digital rhetoric seminar, but ultimately struggled to find time and motivation. Over four months, she slowly worked through an HTML textbook and attached herself to some projects that never progressed. Unable to integrate substantial support in her own plan of study, she began attending Speaker 1's independent study meetings and participating in its project. This work then became an extracurricular pursuit on top of her full course schedule, teaching, and administrative work.
Speaker 3's story starts in the digital rhetoric seminar when she decided to improve her coding literacy in lieu of a "traditional" seminar project. With full support from the professor, she developed a basic understanding of coding languages, primarily HTML and CSS. Speaker 3 sought to continue building on and applying this knowledge to other projects after the class ended, including the development of digital teaching materials and program websites. However, without the time and opportunity that direct institutional support previously offered, other tasks took priority and these projects were necessarily set aside.
I4: DALN Organizational Meeting
The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) is approaching its 7,000-submission milestone, and currently finds itself in the middle of a transitional phase (a new hosting partner, a 2.0 revision, new directorship, etc.). This organizational meeting, open to contributing partners, affiliates, and any other interested parties, will include a short presentation on the state of the DALN. This presentation will be followed by solicitation of feedback about building and sustaining the DALN going forward, and it will conclude with an open discussion about collection event strategies, incorporation of the DALN in teaching and scholarship, and other related topics.
I5: Ways of Knowing and Doing in Digital Rhetoric
As scholars who identify as digital rhetoricians, we were interested in exploring how others who do work in Digital Rhetoric describe their individual experiences and how those experiences begin to frame the contours of this nascent field. In order to gain such insights, we interviewed participants at the Symposium: in particular, we asked 23 different scholars 10 questions about not only how they define and understand digital rhetoric but also how they teach and research digital rhetoric, and we video-recorded their answers.
Presenter 1 will provide an overview of the project, including introducing the scholars who were interviewed, the questions they were asked, and the process of conducting the interviews and analyzing the audio and video data.
Presenter 2 will describe and unpack the considerable variation in how scholars understand and approach digital rhetoric. Some interviewees view Digital Rhetoric as a new and distinct field, while some consider it an extension and continuation of rhetorical studies--a transition that mirrors the move from a focus on oral to a focus on print cultures.
Presenter 3 will speak to the pedagogical practices developed within and common to the field of Digital Rhetoric. The interviewees responded to a series of questions about pedagogy: for example, in teaching digital rhetoric, what are the goals and outcomes, how do you achieve those outcomes, what scholars and texts would and do you assign, what is your favorite assignment, and how do you assess digital rhetoric?
I6: Crossing Wires or Crossed Wires: Post-Positivist and Slactivist Reflections
Although the status of technology within composition studies is more extensive than in the past, inequities still exist and new resistances still emerge. While new methods and technologies allow faculty to expand pedagogical and discursive horizons, old problems remain, some in new incarnations. This panel proposes to discuss the challenges created when the wires of evolving technologies and resistance to evolving digital pedagogies are crossed.
Speaker one will discuss Slack, an enterprise communication solution with considerable pedagogical potential. Speaker two will discuss the changing nature of electronic course delivery via the LMS, which might be destined to become a series of apps. Speaker three will reflect on student resistance that can happen even when tech dreams come true.
I8: The Technological We: How Our Tools Tell the Stories that Compose Us
In this panel, the speakers will work together to present various perspectives on how our digital tools can help to construct not just the stories we tell, but the way these stories shape us as humans within a range of activity systems.
Strange Sounding Spaces: The Literate Activity Spaces of Musicians (and Communities) in the Making
Focusing on the concept of "musicking" (Christopher Small, 1998), Speaker 1 will present several multi-site ethnographic observations of Michigan musicians that trace the movement of their literate activities through digital and non-digital media in order to explore how musical identities are formed and how they interact within a music "scene."
Gown Seeking Town: The Process and Effects of Multimodal Composition in Civically-Engaged Classrooms
Scholars such as Stuart Selber (Multiliteracies for a Digital Age), and Jody Shipka (Toward a Composition Made Whole), have argued not only for the integration of a variety of composition media within (and outside of) the classroom, but have also revealed some of the rhetorical implications embedded in multimodal composition. Speaker 2 will expand upon these notions through a semester-long research-based project concerning the effects of preferred composition media on the product and process of student digital literacy narratives, presented alongside interviews with other instructors who have utilized non-traditional media in storytelling practices.
On the Possibility of Accessing "True" Stories: Complicating Digital Storytelling, Curation and Access
Digital storytelling (through a variety of platforms) has become integral to our lived experience in contemporary society. Myriad websites and digital archives encourage people to tell their own stories in their own words or voices. Speaker 3 will work to consider the way that these "true" stories are often shaped and curated in terms of collections, how the collections themselves are molded by their publishing platforms, and how issues of access can shape which stories get told.
I8: The Technological We: How Our Tools Tell the Stories that Compose Us (Warren-Riley)
In this panel, the speakers will work together to present various perspectives on how our digital tools can help to construct not just the stories we tell, but the way these stories shape us as humans within a range of activity systems.
Strange Sounding Spaces: The Literate Activity Spaces of Musicians (and Communities) in the Making
Focusing on the concept of "musicking" (Christopher Small, 1998), Speaker 1 will present several multi-site ethnographic observations of Michigan musicians that trace the movement of their literate activities through digital and non-digital media in order to explore how musical identities are formed and how they interact within a music "scene."
Gown Seeking Town: The Process and Effects of Multimodal Composition in Civically-Engaged Classrooms
Scholars such as Stuart Selber (Multiliteracies for a Digital Age), and Jody Shipka (Toward a Composition Made Whole), have argued not only for the integration of a variety of composition media within (and outside of) the classroom, but have also revealed some of the rhetorical implications embedded in multimodal composition. Speaker 2 will expand upon these notions through a semester-long research-based project concerning the effects of preferred composition media on the product and process of student digital literacy narratives, presented alongside interviews with other instructors who have utilized non-traditional media in storytelling practices.
On the Possibility of Accessing "True" Stories: Complicating Digital Storytelling, Curation and Access
Digital storytelling (through a variety of platforms) has become integral to our lived experience in contemporary society. Myriad websites and digital archives encourage people to tell their own stories in their own words or voices. Speaker 3 will work to consider the way that these "true" stories are often shaped and curated in terms of collections, how the collections themselves are molded by their publishing platforms, and how issues of access can shape which stories get told.
I8: The Technological We: How Our Tools Tell the Stories that Compose Us (Macarthy)
In this panel, the speakers will work together to present various perspectives on how our digital tools can help to construct not just the stories we tell, but the way these stories shape us as humans within a range of activity systems.
Strange Sounding Spaces: The Literate Activity Spaces of Musicians (and Communities) in the Making
Focusing on the concept of "musicking" (Christopher Small, 1998), Speaker 1 will present several multi-site ethnographic observations of Michigan musicians that trace the movement of their literate activities through digital and non-digital media in order to explore how musical identities are formed and how they interact within a music "scene."
Gown Seeking Town: The Process and Effects of Multimodal Composition in Civically-Engaged Classrooms
Scholars such as Stuart Selber (Multiliteracies for a Digital Age), and Jody Shipka (Toward a Composition Made Whole), have argued not only for the integration of a variety of composition media within (and outside of) the classroom, but have also revealed some of the rhetorical implications embedded in multimodal composition. Speaker 2 will expand upon these notions through a semester-long research-based project concerning the effects of preferred composition media on the product and process of student digital literacy narratives, presented alongside interviews with other instructors who have utilized non-traditional media in storytelling practices.
On the Possibility of Accessing "True" Stories: Complicating Digital Storytelling, Curation and Access
Digital storytelling (through a variety of platforms) has become integral to our lived experience in contemporary society. Myriad websites and digital archives encourage people to tell their own stories in their own words or voices. Speaker 3 will work to consider the way that these "true" stories are often shaped and curated in terms of collections, how the collections themselves are molded by their publishing platforms, and how issues of access can shape which stories get told.
I8: The Technological We: How Our Tools Tell the Stories that Compose Us (Walker)
In this panel, the speakers will work together to present various perspectives on how our digital tools can help to construct not just the stories we tell, but the way these stories shape us as humans within a range of activity systems.
Strange Sounding Spaces: The Literate Activity Spaces of Musicians (and Communities) in the Making
Focusing on the concept of "musicking" (Christopher Small, 1998), Speaker 1 will present several multi-site ethnographic observations of Michigan musicians that trace the movement of their literate activities through digital and non-digital media in order to explore how musical identities are formed and how they interact within a music "scene."
Gown Seeking Town: The Process and Effects of Multimodal Composition in Civically-Engaged Classrooms
Scholars such as Stuart Selber (Multiliteracies for a Digital Age), and Jody Shipka (Toward a Composition Made Whole), have argued not only for the integration of a variety of composition media within (and outside of) the classroom, but have also revealed some of the rhetorical implications embedded in multimodal composition. Speaker 2 will expand upon these notions through a semester-long research-based project concerning the effects of preferred composition media on the product and process of student digital literacy narratives, presented alongside interviews with other instructors who have utilized non-traditional media in storytelling practices.
On the Possibility of Accessing "True" Stories: Complicating Digital Storytelling, Curation and Access
Digital storytelling (through a variety of platforms) has become integral to our lived experience in contemporary society. Myriad websites and digital archives encourage people to tell their own stories in their own words or voices. Speaker 3 will work to consider the way that these "true" stories are often shaped and curated in terms of collections, how the collections themselves are molded by their publishing platforms, and how issues of access can shape which stories get told.
I9: Research, Records, and Writing: A Panel on the Use of Digital Archives in FYC
In composition studies, most references to digital archives connect to databases filled with work written by students, and it is often under the topic of digital or e-portfolios (Lunsford; Yancey). Branching out into Web 2.0, discussions of digital archives often bring us to topics connecting to blogs (Bull, Bull, Kajder; Lee); however, there are more forms of user controlled digital archives. This panel will look at methods for incorporating different aspects of digital archives into the classroom.
Concurrent Session J
J1: Contested Sites of Power: Identity Representation in Digital Publics
This panel redefines this notion as "context collapse" to consider how online networks work across publics. Through a consideration of identity representation across digital publics, each speaker interrogates how digital bodies serve as contested sites of power.
The Body Politic: Tattoos as Transnational Protest and Publics
By combining Nick Couldry's (2014) argument for networked transnational public spheres and Mary Queen's (2008) approach to global digital rhetoric in which circulation structures meaning, Presenter 1 will examine the transnational movement, referred to as #DMCS, a the Vietnamese acronym, which is often times accompanied by the English translation: #FuckCommunism. These hashtags are tattooed onto protesters' bodies and apparel, which are then posted as images to social network sites like Twitter and FaceBook.
Stop Tagging Me in Photos: Visualizing Professional Publics Online
This presentation reports on interviews from undergraduate student writers who have created professional portfolios as part of Speaker 2's class. Through discussions of visual design and content, these students describe the process of representing their identities for professional audiences, which often feel imaginary for students. This work not only sheds light on the importance of the visual in building identities online, but also critiques the advice students are given about professional identity representation.
That's Outrageous! Exploratory Research on Online Shame Culture
Some digital users participate in a swarm culture of shame (Rickert, 2015; Rice, 2015) leaving damaging effects upon the target. Elsewhere, as political communication & media scholar Mathias Klang (2015) addressed, people use their real life identities & accounts when shaming online. In effect, the decision to associate a real life identity when engaging in shame culture marks a new development in what was previously viewed as anonymous online commenting. Speaker 3 will report on exploratory research of a longitudinal research study about online shame culture.
J2: Blurring Boundaries with/in Online Archives: The Case of the Museum of Everyday Writing
The Museum of Everyday Writing is designed to blur the boundaries between the academic and the everyday; however, we found that the technology accessible to us as non-coders favored categorization and hierarchical boundaries. Using a pilot version of our Museum, this panel will analyze the choice of Content Management System, construction of metatadata, and experience of user participation, demonstrating how we employ technology to balance these tensions and to generate multiple layers and levels of connectivity.
J3: Left to Their Own Devices: Dis/allowing Students' Use of Technology in the Classroom
This roundtable features five instructors sharing their widely differing policies on how students may engage with technology in the classroom.
Speaker 1 places the technology use policy in the civility portion of the syllabus, and frames technology use in terms of the workplace, providing explicit examples of when the use of personal technology is appropriate (such as researching discussion points) and inappropriate (focusing on the device at the expense of listening and participating in discussions and presentations).
Speaker 2 officially restricts technology use to classroom activities only, but relies on classroom consensus to delineate for appropriate use. Because personal devices are often the only way to receive emergency messages, however, students are permitted to have their devices on and in sight during class. It is...an imperfect system.
Speaker 3 has students discuss what policies they want to be in the syllabus, and that section is collaboratively authored.
Speaker 4's class is almost entirely digital, including drafts and their final projects. There are basic behavioral limits in the syllabus, but heavily group-centered assignments and a lot of workshop-style activities and discussion circumvent a lot of texting or browsing FB.
Speaker 5 has made "Please put away your cell phones" the official policy. There are legitimate uses for any tech, so what's most important is being attentive to what's being done in class.
J4: Civil Writes: Service Learning in Writing Courses
This session addresses the conference theme of "crossing wires" by discussing how writing courses at several levels were designed with strong service learning components that introduced students to writing across contexts and sites. As faculty in a Predominantly Black Institution (PBI) in the Southeast, in a county with a history of generational illiteracy and high unemployment, this panel's speakers are called to integrate community engagement in their classes in effort to cross boundaries between citizens and their communities. Moreover, as Herzberg argues, and as echoed by the speakers, the composition classroom is a fitting place for socially and civically engaged projects because such activities are deeply rhetorical and, therefore, connected to language and communication. This session addresses the conference theme of "crossing wires" by discussing how writing courses at several levels were designed with strong service learning components that introduced students to writing across contexts and sites.
J5: When Writing is More Than Writing: Bringing New Media into the Classroom and Across the Curriculum
Our panel suggests that digital technologies can help prepare students for writing in the twenty-first century. More importantly, we illustrate how using new media in the writing classroom can help students connect the personal to the academic by allowing them to apply their digital literacies in a more structured setting.
Shakespeare vs. Seuss: How Epic Rap Battles Help Students Write more Persuasive Essays
In this presentation, I explore how a popular new media—Epic Rap Battles of History (ERB)—can be used to help composition students analyze and develop clear counterarguments and refutations. Drawing on classroom experiences, I highlight my ERB assignment and students' analyses.
Music Video Visual Analysis: Innovative Pedagogy of Civic Engagement
I will explore some challenges that multimodal composition scholars face as FYC students are rapidly gaining advanced digital literacies. Often, these literacies surpass instructor knowledge and training. To rise to the challenges, instructors must make space for writers to share their knowledge of complex, new genres created with their personal technology.
Today's Big Brother Challenge: Using Spontaneous Multimodal Activities to Spark Creative Collaboration in FYC Classrooms
I will explore some challenges that multimodal composition scholars face as FYC students are rapidly gaining advanced digital literacies. Often, these literacies surpass instructor knowledge and training. To rise to the challenges, instructors must make space for writers to share their knowledge of complex, new genres created with their personal technology. Additionally, I will demonstrate effective, multimodal composing activities that, when used spontaneously and framed in playful and contemporary ways, can spark creativity and positive response to genres commonly featured in FYC classrooms.
"Writing into Academic Communities": Using Digital Writing Technologies to Write Across the Curriculum
I present a course design synthesizing digital writing technologies and WAC theory and praxis. Because WAC asks students to think about what they are producing, how they produce it, why, and for whom, they become better writers who are experts in content, discourse conventions, strategy, and audience (Kellogg, 2008).
J6: CMS, LMS and Open Source system configurations and challenges
Beyond the LMS: Open Source Challenges in Crafting the Digital Classroom - Geoffrey Gimse
This presentation examines the limitations of different digital platforms within the writing classroom. I then take that analysis one step further by discussing the challenges that arose as I built an alternative system that leveraged Open Source components to provide my students access to their own online tools and community.
Content Management Systems as Peer Review Mediators - Suzan Flanagan
In this presentation, I examine the occluded genre of anonymous peer review in the context of content management systems. I argue for more transparency of peer review as a genre and consider (a) how anonymous peer review processes can be simulated and mediated in cross-institutional college writing classrooms, (b) how computer-mediated peer review can prepare emerging faculty for academic publishing, and (c) how scholars can use technological interventions to push against the boundaries of this occluded genre.
Criticism or Community?: Breaking the Binary Thinking about Peer Review in Online Writing Classes - Kara Mae Brown
Many instructors have advocated for the use of anonymous reviews to encourage students to compose more critical reviews, forgoing the opportunity to build community among peers. A survey of students across two semesters of an advanced online writing class shows that rather than choosing either anonymous or open peer reviews, each method can be used strategically at particular moments in the semester for particular purposes.
Evaluating Time in the Knowledge Economy: A Critical Discourse for Digital Writing - Valerie Robin
This presentation explores the complex relationship between time, materiality and an economics of rhetoric as it relates to value creation in the work of writing. I use a short history of constructed time, coupled with several composition scholars who have addressed this time in both labor-oriented and digital spaces.
J8: Walking the Wire: Empowering a Strong Balance between Digital Communities and Support
The panel will offer practical information that attendees can apply directly to OWI, regardless of the situation at their institution. The speakers will share their experiences of having been placed in charge of teaching online with little or no experience, or having been asked to train others to teach online at early stages in their careers when they had little or no previous experience with online instruction. The speakers in this panel want to reiterate this importance and maintain that proper ongoing support and training is needed for instructors to be successful in OWI.
Speaker 1 will discuss the need for strong departmental communities and connections between the stakeholders for online education, especially in light of accreditation mandates happening university wide. She will present and explain examples from one regional comprehensive university's English Department and how she implements training and develops community building at the graduate level, as well as for part-time and full-time faculty.
Speaker 2 will address lack of proper training for OWI, working without a WPA or department chair that has OWI experience. Speaker 2 will give guidance on how to utilize the resources available with the aim of helping instructors see that they have power, and community is possible even if they feel alone and powerless in the physical and online learning spaces they inhabit.
Speaker 3 will discuss accessibility for both instructors and students and how accessibility in f2f classes is something many can be fixed on site, but in online spaces, accessibility can range from digital access to various disabilities.
Town Hall 3
The Moral Imperative of Making Your Work Open Access, and How To Do It
In this Sunday afternoon Town Hall, join us for an invigorating round of lightning talks on open access issues by OA advocates, digital rhetoricians, and digital librarians. These panelists discuss major open-access initiatives relevant to your lives as C&W scholars, teachers, and editors. The discussion includes the impact and value of open access to scholarly writing in and beyond the field of writing and rhetoric, analytics for OA scholarship, curricular use of open access materials, discoverability of freely available work, how librarians can help you with OA work, and how to make your work open (in print journals) without paying out the nose.
Moderators:
Benjamin Hockenberry
Cheryl E. Ball