Tagged: course info

Backchannels

Ross, C., Terras, M., Warwick, C., & Welsh, A. (2011). Enabled backchannel: Conference Twitter use by digital humanists. Journal of Documentation, 67(2), 214-237.

Findings – Conference hashtagged Twitter activity does not constitute a single distributed conversation, but rather multiple monologues with a few intermittent, discontinuous, loosely joined dialogues between users. The digital backchannel constitutes a multidirectional complex space in which the users make notes, share resources, hold discussions and ask questions as well as establishing a clear individual online presence. The use of Twitter as a conference platform enables the community to expand communication and participation in events amongst its members. (p. 214)

During our presentations, I would like you to use our course hashtag, #ENGL605, for one or more of these purposes: making notes, sharing resources, discussion, and questioning. Similarly, I would like individuals who are presenting to monitor this backchannel for questions or feedback on their talk.

Conference presentation opportunties

Many of you may have already received Brian Ballentine’s email about presentation opportunities at conferences related to professional and technical writing. If not, I’m reposting the message here. While some of the deadlines are coming up fast—particularly ATTW, which is due at the end of the month—I want to remind everyone that the Computers and Writing Conference will be held nearby at Frostburg State and the deadline for proposals—Nov. 29—comes after you will have your presentations prepared for this course, making it a potentially ideal place for you to share your research projects.

In any case, if you are interested in applying for any of these conferences and want feedback on potential proposals, or if you have any questions about the application process or anything else conference-related, just let me know.

Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW)

Also a CCCC pre-conference event (note that ATTW does require separate registration from CCCC). As their web site says:

New teachers of technical and professional communication are particularly invited to attend the conference, as are graduate students and CCCC attendees with interests in technical and professional communication.

Deadline for ATTW submission: Oct. 1

ATTW Conference site: http://www.attw.org/?q=node/167

If you’d like to join the ATTW list serv (free) you can here: http://www.attw.org/?q=node/28

CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition Computer Connection

The Computer Connection, a project of the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition (7Cs), seeks submissions for short presentations and workshops to be delivered at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Las Vegas, March 14-16, 2013.

Each year the Computer Connection hosts many excellent presentations, covering a broad range of topics including presentations on particular classroom practices, using specific software tools, institutional and administrative practices, new online resources, content management systems, open source tools and resources, and usability and
remediation in online environments. The 7Cs committee once again invites proposals for presentations so that we can share our expertise and provide engaging, dynamic demonstrations of how we use technology as teachers and scholars.

This is a very good opportunity for people who are new to the conference to give a shorter presentation (15 – 25 minutes) in an intimate, dialogue-facilitating environment. Each year, the CC has featured a mix of new folks, established scholars, and graduate students (although certainly some of our presenters fit more than one of those categories). The audience tends to be small but very engaged and ranges from postsecondary writing and communication teachers eager to learn new strategies for using computers and the Internet in their classes to technorhetoricians interested in cutting edge tools and technologies.

Computer Connection presentations are not subject to the CCCC “one speaking role” rule. Computer Connection proposals are blind reviewed by a panel of referees constituted by the 7Cs committee.

An LCD projector for display, speakers for sound, and a live Internet connection will be available.

If you are interested, please email your name and presentation proposal (including a title and brief description) to the coordinator (Douglas Eyman – eymand@gmail.com) by October 15, 2012. Feel free to email if you have any questions.

The Research Network Forum (RNF) at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)

The RNF is a pre-conference event hosted at the annual CCCC. It is a great opportunity for grad students to submit works in progress and have a faculty member from another university provide feedback on how to move the work toward publication.

Deadline for RNF submissions: Oct. 31

RNF web site: http://researchnetworkforum.org/

General info about this coming year’s CCCC, March 13-16 in Las Vegas: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/conv

Computers and Writing

In 2013, the hosts of Computers and Writing invite you to think about mechanization. What new technologies for our lives and our classrooms will be shaping our lives into the future? How has technology changed the way we write and think? How has writing become automated and mechanized? What historical traditions and technologies influence the way that you teach today? While we normally consider the computer technologies we use in our classrooms now at this conference, we also want to consider and celebrate the mechanizations of the past that have brought us to this moment. How have the mechanizations and inventions of the past shaped us as scholars, students, and educators today? How can we balance continuing to use and celebrate the technologies that work for us now as educators and continue to seek out what will change our practices in the future?

Some potential topics could be:

Repurposing technology
Computers across the Curriculum
Digital Publishing
Steampunk (or punking classrooms and technologies in general)
Remixing traditional and “new” technologies
The cyborg tradition
Research methodologies for digital research
Art and media in the classroom
The place of gender and race in the classroom and/or the field
Second Language acquisition and technology
Disabilities and computers
Literacy studies
Autonomy in digital spaces
Mechanical or “robo” grading
Historical approaches or studies of any composition/rhetoric topic
The use of semiotic domains in writing instruction
Video games, games in classes, and gaming the college classroom
Fandom studies
Internet Protocols and Procedural Rhetoric
First year writing
And any other topic about the continuing use of technologies and mechanizations that transform college pedagogical practices.

We welcome proposals that interpret the conference themes from a variety of perspectives. Sessions can be in panel, roundtable, or workshop format. Workshops can be half-day or full-day). People proposing alone will be placed onto a panel if your proposal is accepted.

This will also be the first year that Computers and Writing will feature two special meetings—a Caucus on Gender and a Caucus on Race. These open meetings will discuss gender and race as they relate to the field—how can we continue to be inclusive? How can we become more diverse? What help can we offer to colleagues struggling with issues related to either? The conference Chairs hope these will be productive meetings that will become yearly and develop action networks to help faculty and graduate students struggling with a wide variety of difficulties and discrimination. We also seek volunteers to serve as co-chairs of these meetings (please e-mail Dr. Jill Morris, jamorris@frostburg.edu, if you are interested in being on this panel of co-chairs).

Frostburg serves as a backdrop to this conference, allowing us to celebrate the beauty of technology (steam and otherwise), to reconsider aesthetics in design, and to evaluate anachronistic gear-head uses and users in our classrooms and communities. Frostburg is situated on one end of a historical rail line that operates between Cumberland and a depot just a short walk from campus, giving participants an opportunity to experience an historical steam-driven train ride through the Western Maryland countryside as well. The downtown area is a short walk from campus and features many small bars, restaurants, and shops. We look forward to seeing you in June 2013!

For more information, please visit our website at http://www.computersandwriting.org/cwcon/2013/
Deadline for C&W submissions: Nov. 29

Like the RNF at Cs, C&W has its own grad student research forum called the Graduate Research Network (GRN). That web site is already up and the deadline isn’t until May of 2013: http://www.gradresearchnetwork.org/

Tasks to complete before the second class meeting

The following is a list of tasks and assignments that you must complete before our second class meeting on Tuesday, 8/28.

  • Register for an account on this site so you can post your weekly reading responses. I have to approve your account, so
    1. Be sure that I can tell that you are you and not some spambot; the easiest way to do this is to include your name in your username or registration. If you don’t want to do that—say, because you are partial to a particular username that you have had since your AOL days, but that username isn’t easily recognizable as you—simply register for the site, then send me an email to the effect of, “I registered as ZaphodBeeblebrox.”
    2. Register early enough so that I will have time to approve your account before your first reading response is due on Sunday night, 8/26. Although I sometimes check my email on the weekends, I don’t do this all the time, so your best bet is to get your registration completed before the end of the workday on Friday.
  • Create a Twitter account and
    1. make it public (caveat: if you already have a private or public Twitter account that you want to keep private or simply keep separate from the course, create a new account for course tweets then delete it after the term has ended),
    2. post a message containing the course hashtag, #ENGL605,
    3. follow myself and all other members of the course. The easiest way to do this is to wait until after our second class meeting on 8/28, when everyone has posted a message with the course hashtag, then follow everyone who has posted.
    4. You should then regularly monitor the messages using the course hashtag. In class we will discuss using Twitter in your teaching and ongoing professionalization.
  • Create a Google Docs account and
    1. create a collection (what GDocs calls folders; I am likely to frequently refer to these collections as “folders”) for your course work,
    2. title the collection using the format ENGL605-F12-[Lastname] (for example, a student named Zaphod Beeblebrox would have folder titled ENGL605-F12-Beeblebrox), and
    3. share that collection (not individual documents, the entire collection) with jmj5805 [at] gmail [dot] com.
    4. When you share the folder with me, be should give me permission to edit documents in the folder. Otherwise I won’t be able to comment on your work.
  • Before midnight on 8/26, post your reading response to the course blog.