Canned Goods

With still another 5.5 days left to this trip (K.’s sister is getting hitched Sunday), added to the 8 we’ve already been away, we’re sure Q is getting very lonely and in need of a long sit on my lap and brushing once we return. Thanks to Jhondra for taking care of her in our absence.

[edit: pics added 5/24]

As are most folks, I’m in recovery from the conference.
I spent yesterday in Frankenmuth, MI with K., taking as many snapshots of us posing with a variety of tourist-trap sculptures (if only I can find a cable so I can transfer the images from the camera–bad packing list): a fiberglass giraffe; the giant mouse head on slice-o-cheese; 9 ft tall angels (at the world’s largest Christmas store). Not sure why we get pleasure from this sort of activity.

Anyway, I met a lot fun and brilliant folks this week (and was able to put faces with many for whom I only through blogs). I greatly appreciated the mentoring and support in our community (all the encouragement/info from Bradley; I’ll start some home brewing as some as, well, I’m done with grad school). I’d especially like to thank Scot for putting up with up to 2 hrs of driving a day introducing me to his peeps.
As a ped-head, hearing so much theory floating around reinforced how valuable it is to what I’m working on, even if I can’t escape the pull of the pedagogical imperative.

As far as the conference itself, it was the best I have attended. My only major complaint is Why have Sunday panels? And this goes for all the big cons. Not only are people leaving for home, but there are organizational meeting running concurrently. Low attendance sucks. No attendance is worse. Why not start a day earlier or reduce the number of panels to avoid this? If it weren’t for a couple friends/colleagues (Scot and Annette) and Jody Shipka (thanks for coming!), I was about to thank the first two panelists for their presentations and walk out. I’ve done the present to just the other panelists before. Why bother?

All in all, great trip, good beer (loved the DBC IPA), and I wish I had had more time to walk around and see everything Detroit has to offer.

As usual there’s all that teaching to be done, but luckily I’ve made it a bit easier this week with students presenting their favorite projects from the semester–and they are, so far, wonderful. Yes, many of the Photoshop and Flash projects may not be the Flashiest, but, as one of my students smartly put it, there are a lot of intangibles that go into the production of a final product. With the work they’ve done, I know they have fulfilled the basic goals of the course:

—to reconsider how we typically define writing,
—better understand the workings of the web, and
—to have some of the technical and social skills that will allow them to produce in a variety of media.

One of the most exciting projects of the semester, in my book, has been their Wikipeida entries. We all learned more about how this community works to collectively construct knowledge.

Also, I’ve been really busy with a few presentations and putting a couple proposals together (when will I get to my prelims?)

Last week I co-taught/led a Writing Center OGE (ongoing ed) workshop on multimodal writing: “It’s Not All Linear Text Anymore: The Least We Should All Know to Help Writing Center Students Compose Multimodal Texts in New Media Landscapes”. I had a great time talking about how/why we work with new kinds of writing in the Writing Center. AND, the process of drafting my ten minute prez helped to prepare me for another talk, this Monday, for the department’s Board of Visitors about how I and my students are using technology for new ways of producing and circulating writing. I have to thank Matt, one of my students, for allowing me to show his research paper-turned blog article. They were very impressed and clearly understood that his remediation of is original text to the blog was essential to achieve his purpose because of its ability to easily embed video. Without him, and the work of my other students, this prez would have left me using new media objects produced by others else where and would have been nowhere near as impressive.

Conference props — the biggie being for Cs, I’m lucky enough to be on a great (proposed) panel with Samantha Blackmon & Alice: “Changing Writing, Alternate Realities: Games and Game Theory in the Writing Classroom.” And I recently submitted to the Writing Across Borders con at UCSB.

In addition to (proposed) self-promotion, the reason I mention these activities is because my experience, I hope, is an example for my students that I can talk about in the classroom: I wrote so much more than ended up in the final products. I easily had 20-30 mins. of material for the BoV prez’s 5 minute slot (ended up going 10, of course, with discussion). This process gave me the opportunity to see what I was thinking and choose from what I felt would be the strongest example for this particular audience.

Now, on to my Computers & Writing paper/prez. I guess I’ll get back to my prelims in June.