Digital Writing, Rhetoric & Discourse

Call for Papers:
Computers and Composition Special Issues

“Designing | Writing”

Jonathan Alexander and Julia Reinhard Lupton, guest editors

Benjamin’s prescient figure of the “author as producer” has given way to the “author as designer,” at once a wordsmith, a typesetter, and a marketer who is expected to demonstrate some fluency with fonts and layouts as well as branding and publishing platforms. We invite proposals for a special issue on the topic of “Designing | Writing.” The mediation of text through numerous contemporary digital platforms has sparked consideration among a range of scholars in English studies about the relationship between textuality and design. Scholars in multimedia studies and rhetoric and composition note how writing is often placed in robust relationships to images and other design elements in multimedia “texts,” as well as how text itself is frequently graphically altered for a variety of aesthetic and rhetorical effects. Theorists of literature note the many ways in which textual layouts might constitute ideological claims, arise out of ideological assumptions and values, or occupy a brand niche. Students of literary forms such as poetry trace the manipulation of textual forms as itself a powerful form of meaning making. We invite scholars from rhetoric and composition, visual studies, design history, and literary studies to consider the ways in which writing and design are entering into new relationships with each other in the age of blogging, Twitter, the graphic novel, indie publishing, brand communities, fan fiction, and DIY everything.

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“Intellectual approaches to technology and society can be divided into two broad classes: those that treat a technology as an external, exogenous, or autonomous force that impacts social life and alters history, and those that treat a technology as the embodiment or symptom of a deeper cultural logic, representing or transmitting the cultural ethos that determines history.” — Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.

And more recently:

“There is something deeply depressing about having to argue over the cultural dominance of an immensely successful and beloved filmmaker like George Lucas in the context of art history. In anointing Lucas, Paglia has signed on to a currently popular thesis that blames serious artists who, because of their arrogance, have lost touch with the general public and brought about their own marginalization. This argument claims that the conventional fine arts have diminished in significance, leaving only those innovators who have ’embraced technology’ as worthy of our attention. This is a thin thread on which to hang the appraisal of a living artist. A ‘technology’ is no more than a way of doing something, a means to an end, and throughout history artists have been stimulated by new technological and conceptual ideas. There is nothing shockingly modern about the dynamic between artistic creation and technological innovation, be it an intellectual discovery like perspective or a new piece of hardware like the movie camera or the electric guitar. Art and technology have always moved hand in hand from one epoch to the next.”
— Paglia on Art, Glittering Images, Book Review, NYT, John Adams, November 30, 2012.

Our WQ schedule — thanks for the feedback, ideas, and suggestions!:

 Friday, January 18th: How Do You Read a Portfolio?: Teachers as an Interpretive Community (Dunham and Moore)

• Portfolios
  — Alexandra
  — Taylor
• Jung, “Reflective Writing’s Synecdochic Imperative: Process Descriptions Redescribed”

 Friday, February 1st: MOOCs

• Background notes
• What does it mean to have a writing MOOC?

 Friday, February 15th: Assignment and project workshop

• Bring one to share and to workshop

 Friday, March 1st: MOOCs, Part II

• “MOOCs as writing research platforms? What can we learn about learning?”
• D-WRD Background notes

Friday, March 15th: End-of-term Digication problems, opportunities, new approaches …?

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Discussed at our Friday 10/5 meeting:

“[T]he suppression of visuality in the alphabet’s abstract coding system provides the groundwork for normative representations of both cultural and individual development as matters of overcoming a dependence on the visual that is taken to be immature, ephemeral and manipulative” (Trimbur, 262).

“Studying and teaching typography as the culturally salient means of producing writing can help composers in the labor process and thereby contribute to the larger post-process work of rematerializing literacy” (263).

“Typography, on the other hand, calls attention to how the look of the page communicates meaning by treating text as a visual element that can be combined with images and other nonverbal forms to produce a unit of discourse” (267).

At Friday’s D-WRD meeting we used John Trimbur’s chapter “Delivering the Message: Typography and the Materiality of Writing” as a prompt for a good discussion on a range of pedagogical, writing, and technology issues:

• Pete introduced us to this interesting and accessible video on Gestalt & Typography
• Kinross on the “Rhetoric of Neutrality” (PDF)
• James Elkins’s Facebook page
• Elkins’s book, Visual Practices Across the University
• Typographic issues in Digication (student resources):
• Writing Center tutorial on CSS in Digication
• Molly Bang’s Picture This: How Pictures Work

 Friday, 10/5

• Typography in the writing class: Moore
• Reading: Trimbur, (From Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work.) “Delivering the Message: Typography and the Materiality of Writing.” PDF
• Compose, Design, Advocate, ch 9
• Background: Errol Morris:
  — Do this first
  — Then read this and this

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed.:

“The report is based on a survey conducted this spring of students and faculty at five universities where e-textbook projects were coordinated by Internet2, the high-speed networking group. Students praised the e-books for helping them save money but didn’t like reading on electronic devices. Many of them complained that the e-book platform was hard to navigate. In addition, most professors who responded said that they didn’t use the e-books’ collaborative features, which include the ability to share notes or create links within the text.” [Full article]

Major findings included:

• Only a minority of users elected to purchase a paper copy (12%).
• The lower cost of an eTextbook was considered the most important factor for students considering future purchase of an eText.
• The portability of eTexts also ranked very high as a factor leading to future purchase.
• Other important factors in future eText purchases included that it should be accessible without an internet connection and available throughout a student’s academic career, not just for a semester.
• Difficult readability of the text (e.g., difficult zoom feature) was mentioned numerous times by students as well as lack of native functionality on tablets such as the iPad.
• Faculty, for the most part, did not report using the enhanced eText features (sharing notes, tracking students, question/answer, additional links, etc.) and indicated the need for additional training.
• Because faculty did not use the enhanced features students saw little benefit from the eText platform’s capability of promoting collaboration with other students or with the professor.

More topics to follow, but here’s our AQ schedule — all meetings in McGaw 143, 10:00-11:00 a.m.:

Friday, 9/7

• Planning 2012-13 meetings and workshops
• Changes in Digication

 Friday, 9/21

• 2012 Presidential Election: Rhetoric, Technology, and Politics: Hermes & Moore

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You might want to read some of the reviews on Amazon:

“As a female physician, I have suffered for many years having to write with man-pens. I am so very grateful for this product.”

“My 17 year old daughter seemed DOOMED to attending a public university, but I bought her a pack of these pens and now she’s been accepted to Yale!”

“You know, before I started using these pens, I wasn’t considered ‘feminine’ enough. I had no interest in Twilight or Robert Pattinson , didnt like the right kind of movies, and my signature lacked cute little heart shapes above the i.”

“But, all that changed when I tried the new Bic For Her pens.”

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Campus bookstores hate the idea, and even some college students are skeptical of the new effort by a former California lawmaker to help them save money on textbooks for hundreds of classes on nearly every campus from Alabama to the Yukon Territory.

It’s a free price-check that lets students compare textbook prices and rentals, and buy from the source they like best.”

Read the rest of the article.

From the Wall Street Journal:

It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy on the Kobo e-reader—about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” And on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first “Hunger Games” book is to download the next one.

In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.

The perfect man, according to data collected by digital publisher Coliloquy from romance-novel readers, has a European accent and is in his 30s with black hair and green eyes. Optimal chest-hair level: ‘slightly hairy.’ For love scenes, 65% of readers prefer very steamy, 15% prefer tame and 20% are in the middle.

Read the rest of the article: “Your E-Book Is Reading You: Digital-book publishers and retailers now know more about their readers than ever before. How that’s changing the experience of reading.”

Via Academica.edu.

Via DePaul Library.

At our final D-WRD meeting for 2011-12, we collaborated on a Photo Essay assignment and scoring guide; over the summer, we will complete the assignment, putting ourselves in students’ shoes, and present our photo essays to each other at our first Autumn 2012 meeting. It’s a good opportunity to explore both multimodality in a low-tech way, and the integration of text + image.

If you’d like to join us, write to Michael at mmoore46@depaul.edu.

A survey currently circulating in the department will help to prioritize other digital and pedagogical initiatives for next year — stay tuned!

Meeting times: 10:00-11:00 a.m.
143 McGaw Hall.

 Friday, January 20th:

• Planning for WQ
• Discussion item: “themes” and metaphors in student digital portfolios

 Friday, February 3rd:

• Teaching Portfolio Workshop

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In honor of DePaul’s Centennial

… as published in the special Centennial edition of The DePaulia, September 4, 1998

Unlike a topic such as athletics, computers have a relatively short history in DePaul’s first 100 years. However, they have come very far in such a short period, from near anonymity 30 years ago, when there were just a few on campus (used for administrative purposes) to the present, when most students use computers for various reasons.

The first computer lab was in the area where the career center in SAC is currently housed. Opened in the late 70s, these looked much different, as they were just teletype terminals that used punchcards, which were used for computer programs. “You would type information and send it the mainframe to be processed,” noted Peter Teel, a Customer Technology Services technician and DePaul graduate. However, students would often have to wait over 8 hours for their results, as the university was cooperating with the University of Illinois at Chicago, in its early endeavors to provide computing resources to the student community. [read more]

Via Scott Markwell (WRD) and Paula Dempsey (Library):

Via Dana Dunham and Brainpickings.org:

Lately, the word “curate” seems to be used in an greater variety of contexts than ever before, in reference to everything from a exhibitions of prints by Old Masters to the contents of a concept store. The risk, of course, is that the definition may expand beyond functional usability. But I believe ‘curate’ finds ever-wider application because of a feature of modern life that is impossible to ignore: the incredible proliferation of ideas, information, images, disciplinary knowledge, and material products that we all witnessing today. Such proliferation makes the activities of filtering, enabling, synthesizing, framing, and remembering more and more important as basic navigational tools for 21st century life. These are the tasks of the curator, who is no longer understood as simply the person who fills a space with objects but as the person who brings different cultural spheres into contact, invents new display features, and makes junctions that allow unexpected encounters and results. […]

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This article, from last week’s NYT Education Life section is better and more interesting than the title — “Blogs vs. Term Papers” — suggests. In fact, it is nicely contextualized with some current thinking in literacy studies, including this, from Andrea Lunsford:

“We’re at a crux right now of where we have to figure out as teachers what part of the old literacy is worth preserving,” says Andrea A. Lunsford, a professor of English at Stanford. “We’re trying to figure out how to preserve sustained, logical, carefully articulated arguments while engaging with the most exciting and promising new literacies.”

Professor Lunsford has collected 16,000 writing samples from 189 Stanford students from 2001 to 2007, and is studying how their writing abilities and passions evolved as blogs and other multimedia tools crept into their lives and classrooms. She’s also solicited student feedback about their experiences.

Her conclusion is that students feel much more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging with it. They feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade.

Anne Wysocki (UW-Milwaukee) was in town and in the department to give a talk on “Paging Memory / Screening Memory.” She also visited 143 McGaw, one of our teaching labs, where she met some First Year Writing students in Deborah Weiner’s class, and talked to them about their multimodal composing projects and digital writing portfolios.

Anne’s site.

Background for Friday:

• 17 U.S.C. § 107 : US Code – Section 107: Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
• Brief glosses on those limitations on exclusive rights (Stanford Univ.)
• RiP: A remix manifesto. 2010 documentary available for free viewing on Hulu (90 minutes).
• Alternatives to the Preemptive Criminalization of Students: Productive and Ethical Classroom Practices in Copyright & Fair Use (Moore)

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Digital WRD is a professional-development working group that meets twice a month, 1st and 3rd Fridays, to discuss — and to develop a culture of mutual support for — teaching with technology, with attention to access, equity, and agency:

• We discuss historical and contemporary research related to technology, rhetoric, literacy, and pedagogy
• We share and workshop assignments that we’re trying out in our classes for feedback
• We develop collective expertise in areas such as multimodal composing, digital portfolios, social media, and online communication
• We provide mutual support for learning new technology platforms — digital, audio, video, textual, graphic — and integrating them in our teaching and learning
• We compose teaching and project portfolios where you can reflect on and present your teaching and professional work in any number of contexts in support of your professional development

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Campus Connect — the portal to all things DePaul — especially employee and instructor info, course rosters, grades, and teaching evaluations.

First Year Writing Teaching Resources — teaching resources, syllabi, assignments, readings, faculty development.

First Year Writing Digital Portfolios & Digication — student and instructor resources; examples, assessment, workshop materials.
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Shannon Carter, Guest Editor

SPECIAL ISSUE: (Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric

Undergraduate research is distingushed by four characteristics: mentorship, originality, acceptability (in terms of the relevant disciplinary research methods and techniques), and dissimination. (see Hakim, 1998, p. 190)

It is with great pleasure and pride that we introduce you to (Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric, a Kairos special issue dedicated to undergraduate research in new media.

Background

As teachers and scholars in new media, we’ve long craved a vehicle like this—a scholarly context building on the tradition of successful print-based journals dedicated to undergraduate scholarship and the Kairos tradition of publishing cutting-edge, multimodal scholarship.

Thanks, Zac!

In light of Saturday’s focus on multimodal assignments (and the new learning outcomes), I wanted to pass along the link to an e-journal called Currents in Electronic Literacy, which is published by the University of Texas at Austin:  http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/.  The current issue is dedicated to multimodal literacy and pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on sound and text.

The specific article that I was thinking about on Saturday is called “Remixing the Personal Narrative Essay,” and I think it’s relevant for those who are interested in teaching the literacy narrative as a multimodal piece and keeping it in 103:  http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/2011/remixingthepersonalnarrative.  The article details how a personal narrative essay was remixed as a multimodal assignment, and it includes the assignment prompt and the final product as well.

Although most of us won’t be able to visit a recording studio with our students, there are a number of ways to replicate this type of assignment with the resources available at DePaul.  In general, I thought it was just a nice example of outside-the-box thinking for those of us who are interested in revamping the literacy narrative to make sure that it’s complex enough to warrant inclusion in 103.

From the article’s opening paragraph:

Is the English classroom ready to go multimodal?  As Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis point out, the changing social and technological landscape has led to “meaning [being] made in ways that are increasingly multimodal—in which written-linguistic modes of meaning are part and parcel of visual, audio, and spatial patterns of meaning” (5). According to a recent report sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, “more than one-half of all teens have created media content” (Jenkins 3), suggesting that students are more than ready for the English classroom to go multimodal.  Perhaps a better question is:  Where to begin?

Thanks, Scott!

A discussion by Andrea Lunsford on plagiarism and the problems posed by students who view research materials as “open source” documents that don’t need to be cited in a traditional way.

A book — Writing Assessment and the Revolution in Digital Texts and Technologies, which was recommended to me by an old friend / colleague

Integrating new communication technology in writing courses inevitably leads to questions and concerns about intellectual property, copyright law, and fair use privileges. A new book — Reclaiming Fair Use —  addresses many of these issues in ways that will benefit writing teachers and those of us interested in culture, technology, law, and literacy practices.
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Digital WRD is a professional-development working group that meets twice a month, 1st and 3rd Fridays, to discuss — and to develop a culture of mutual support for — teaching with technology, with attention to access, equity, and agency:

• We discuss historical and contemporary research related to technology, rhetoric, literacy, and pedagogy
• We share and workshop assignments that we’re trying out in our classes for feedback
• We develop collective expertise in areas such as multimodal composing, digital portfolios, social media, and online communication
• We provide mutual support for learning new technology platforms — digital, audio, video, textual, graphic — and integrating them in our teaching and learning
• We compose teaching and project portfolios where you can reflect on and present your teaching and professional work in any number of contexts in support of your professional development

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From DePaul’s Teaching Commons: The Teaching & Learning Certificate Program is a workshop-based program for all full- and part-time faculty at DePaul who are interested in enriching their teaching practices in collaboration with colleagues from across the university.

To attain a Teaching & Learning Certificate, instructors complete a minimum of six workshops within two years. The workshop series begins with an introduction to the Digication e-Portfolio platform, which is used throughout the program to develop a teaching portfolio. The workshop series culminates in a reflective teaching portfolio workshop.

From the Diane Rehm show, 28 July: “The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.”

• Students will be able to articulate, for multiple audiences, meaning-making capabilities of textual, graphic, auditory, and video modes
• Students will be able to compose in multiple modes with intended rhetorical effects, and to articulate the steps they took to achieve those effects
• Students will be able to contextualize meaning-making capabilities of multimodality for academic, professional, and community audiences

Image from “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.”
Harvard Educational Review, New London Group, 1996.

The theme of the 2012 conference is: Architexture: Composing and Constructing in Digital Spaces. This theme encourages submissions that look at a variety of aspects focused on the production of digital texts in the writing classroom, from changes in process and publication to administrative and practical challenges to implementing multi-modal compositions. We will support this theme in a variety of creative and, we hope, engaging activities to encourage conference goers both participate actively in the conference and re-think production.

http://chasslamp.chass.ncsu.edu/~cw2012/

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Onsite Conference: Thursday, May 17, 2012 – Sunday, May 20, 2012
Proposal Submission Opens: September 1, 2011
Proposal Due Date: October 22, 2011 (before midnight EST)
Notifications of Acceptance: December 15, 2011
Registration Opens: January 15, 2012
Online Conference: Dates to be announced

Keynote Speakers: David Parry, Alex Reid, Anne Wysocki

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As of May 15th, 2011:

DePaul courses that have at least one Digication assignment: 154
DePaul students who have participated in Digication courses: 2181
DePaul faculty who have used Digication: 129

# of WRD courses that have used Digication: 125
# of WRD students who have used Digication: 1846
# of WRD faculty who have used Digication: 54

So that we can attend to some of the intellectual contexts for our work with students and with technology, the D-WRD Working Group is gathering summer readings to share in preparation for our meetings and workshops next year.

For starters, this summer, these two work well as a pair:

• “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.”
  Harvard Educational Review, New London Group, 1996.
• “Live and Learn: Why We Have College.”
  Louis Menand, The New Yorker, June 6, 2011.

Then, in the fall:

• “Designs for Social Futures.”
  Ch. 10 in Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, 2000.
• “Writing Program Administration and Instructional Computing.”
  Ken McAllister and Cynthia Selfe. The Writing Program Administrator’s Resource. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002.
• “Writing, Technology and Teens.”
  Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2008.
• Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Arum and Roksa, University of Chicago Press, 2010. Excerpts on writing and critical thinking.
• “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.” David Noble. First Monday, 1998.

Some of the questions that we can pursue together:

• What do we know about writing? How do we know it? How should we teach it?
• What theory of language or discourse informs your classroom practice?
• How are changes in higher education and the shifting purposes for attending college affecting our understanding of media, technology, literacy, and learning?
• What is the relationship between Vincentian social values and teaching with technology?
• “What are the instructional goals of the writing program? How can these goals be made to drive a computer-based program/course/activity/facility/decisions?” and “Who is being served by these goals and the computer-based instruction that is derived from them? Who is not?” (McAllister & Selfe 345)

D-WRD Friday workshops in 2011-12 will focus on pairing a reading in teaching with technology — scholarship, criticism, or a case study — with hands-on software practice.

For example, we might read Cynthia Selfe’s “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing” paired with a workshop on Audacity, a free, cross-platform sound editor.

We can read excerpts from Lessig’s Remix and Ridolfo and DeVoss — “Composing for Recomposition” — followed by introductory tutorials in iMovie and Windows Movie Maker.

We can read Gunther Kress’s “Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media,” followed by our own explorations and practice with Photoshop.

Have other ideas or requests?
E-mail Michael.

Christine Tulley
Kristine Blair
“Remediating the Book Review: Toward Collaboration and Multimodality across the English Curriculum.” Pedagogy, 2009.

Abstract

In this essay, Tulley and Blair combine instructional and editorial perspectives to analyze how the process of digital composing reshapes often entrenched notions of authorship and composing practice within the English major by having students re-envision a traditional print genre, the book review, in digital space.

This article and others like it are available via DePaul’s full-text journal databases.

To all WRD faculty teaching FYW courses next year (2011-2012)

The WRD Department has received a generous grant from Academic Affairs to sponsor a First-Year Writing Digication Workshop on Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2011, from 9:30-4:00 in McGaw 143.  The workshop will be run by Michael Moore with support from a FITS staff member, Emily Stone, and will help prepare faculty to use Digication for students’ digital portfolios beginning in Autumn Quarter.

Faculty participating in the day-long workshop will receive a $150 stipend plus lunch and refreshments.  Priority will be given to faculty who have not already undergone Digication training or who feel they need more preparation to use it effectively in their courses.  Workshop is limited to 20 participants.

If you are interested and able to participate, please contact me.

Note that any advance preparation that you can manage this quarter (e.g., meeting with Michael or attending one of his Digication mini-workshops) is a plus.  We realize that this is a major programmatic shift and want to provide all the support we can.

Thanks,
Darsie Bowden
Professor – Writing, Rhetoric & Discourse

Total DePaul Digication Users

— Active Digication courses that have at least one assignment: 112
— Students who have participated in Digication courses: 1764
— Faculty who have used Digication: 138

# of WRD courses that have used Digication: 99
# of WRD students who have used Digication: 1491
# of WRD faculty who have used Digication: 46

# of non-WRD DePaul courses that have used Digication: 13
# of non-WRD DePaul students who have used Digication: 273
# of non-WRD DePaul faculty who have used Digication: 92

The Teaching Commons is offering a follow-up session to the workshop “Academic Integrity in the Digital Age,” titled “Teaching in a Multimodal Era.” Presenters Calley O’Neil (SOE), Emily Stone (FITS), and Sarah Brown (SOE) will share how-to’s of using Creative Commons, Flickr and Digication in the classroom. The hands-on workshop will take place on Tuesday April 12 from 10:00-11:30 AM in SAC 232 (LPC). Please RSVP to LaVern Thomas (lthoma16@depaul.edu or 2-7587) so we can make sure that we will have a seat/computer for everyone.

Also, please help us spread the word to any of your colleagues who might be interested in attending. All are welcome!

Rana T. Husseini, Ph.D.
Office for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

Friday, April 1: noon-1:00 lunch & discussion:

• Review WQ Pilot and surveys: 188 from students, 5 from instructors
• Review submission process and final-exam meeting times
• “How do I …?” FAQ
• Plan SQ meeting agendas and workshops

Friday, April 15th: 10:00 a.m.-11:00: Typography Workshop typography workshop postponed to a future SQ meeting. See 4/15 meeting notes here.

• Background reading: Web Style Guide (Yale UP) chapter 8 on typography



• Background reading: St. Martin’s Handbook, chapters 23 (document design) and 24 (online texts)
• Duncan, Michael. “Whatever Became of the Paragraph?” College English 69.5 (2007): 470- 495.

I find discussing paragraphs with my students extraordinarily difficult; I am never sure if I am being too prescriptive or too open-ended when I make my tentative suggestions on their writing. The immense complexities of paragraphs’ structures—how they duel with their neighbors, with the whole essay, with ambiguous sections and divisions, and of course with their nebulous, rebellious contents known as sentences—it all feels impossible to explain sometimes. Seeking assistance, I naturally started a hunt for theory concerning the paragraph, and I found a long, unresolved debate about how paragraphs should be taught, as well as about their intrinsic nature.

But there was something odd about the scholarship. In the last fifteen or so years, there has not been any major work on paragraph theory in composition. The last theoretical discussion of the subject in journals appears to be Rick Eden and Ruth Mitchell’s largely unanswered “Paragraphing for the Reader” in 1986 and Frank D’Angelo’s splendid literature review of the topic sentence from the same CCC issue. Save for some scattered empirical work, such as Randall Popken’s four studies of topic sentence genres from 1987 to 1991, paragraph theory has all but disappeared from composition research. (Duncan 470)

Friday April 29th10:00 a.m.-noon:

• Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (PDF)
• Digication & digital portfolio discussions

Friday, May 20th: 10:00 a.m.-noon:

• Using LMS features in Digication (Johnson, Friddle, and Staley)
• FYW digital portfolio guides for students and faculty, 2011-12

Friday, June 3rd: 10:00 a.m.-noon — for our final D-WRD meeting this academic year,

• Scott Johnson will review his Digication course site for us, showing how he uses the Assignment feature
• I’d like to cast the net one more time for feedback, questions, and concerns regarding digital portfolios in general, and Digication in particular — both for solving any problems right now, this term, and looking ahead to 2011-12. Since digital portfolios will be required in every FYW section next year, this seems an opportune time to anticipate problems and opportunities
• When we began D-WRD as a support group for our DOTS cohort, we started by reading a book together — Scott Warnock’s Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. I propose that we begin the AQ with another shared reading. Some possibilities:
  • Denis Baron — A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution.
  • Cynthia Selfe, ed. — Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers.
  • Wysocki, et al. — Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition.

Other possibilities?

Spring Workshops:

• Friday 3/18 — 10:00 a.m.-noon 143 McGaw
• Friday 3/18 — 2:00-4:00 p.m. 143 McGaw
• Friday 4/1 — 10:00 a.m.-noon 143 McGaw
• Friday 4/1 — 2:00-4:00 p.m. 143 McGaw
• Friday 5/13 — Introduction to Digication — 2:00-4:00 p.m. 143 McGaw
• Friday 5/27 — Introduction to Digication — 10:00 a.m.-noon 143 McGaw

Get access to Digication ahead of time, via your Campus Connect credentials, with this IS form.

Background:

Beginning with the Autumn 2011 term, all sections of FYW will require students to compose digital portfolios with Digication, DePaul’s digital portfolio platform. While there is nothing new about portfolios in writing programs — they have been standard practice for about 30 years — and while there is nothing new about digital portfolios in writing programs, the practice and the technology might be new to many of us here at DePaul. Our workshops then, combine pedagogical contexts with practical, hands-on activities.

How we’ll use our workshop time:

• 45 minutes: context and overview of the program
• 45 minutes: creating your Teaching Portfolio in Digication, which will prepare you to anticipate students’ questions, as the process is the same — and you get a teaching portfolio out of it!
• 30 minutes: open lab and problem-solving

How to Prepare:

• Visit Digication — see how students and faculty in a range of disciplines use Digication in programs around the country
• Visit DePaul’s Digication public directory to see how DePaul students and faculty have already been using the platform
• Visit the First Year Writing Program’s Digication site — student and faculty resources
• Collect materials that you can use to compose your own Teaching Portfolio during our workshop.

Resources:

• Why digital portfolios? (D-WRD)
• “Principles and Practices in Electronic Portfolios” (NCTE)
• Miller, Ross and Wende Morgaine. “The Benefits of E-portfolios for Students and Faculty in Their Own Words” (Peer Review, Winter 2009)
• Yancey, Kathleen. “Electronic Portfolios a Decade into the Twenty-first Century: What We Know, What We Need to Know” (Peer Review, Winter 2009)
• Yancey, Kathleen. “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work” (CCC 55:4 / June 2004)
• The best resource we have, however, is each other, and the department’s D-WRD Working Group is an active example of collective expertise. We meet twice a month to share assignments, teaching tips, technology problems, and to talk about pedagogy.

Digication Documentation

• Quickstart [PDF] 2 pp.
• Portfolios [PDF] 37 pp.

Calley O’Neil (School of Education) and Michael Moore (D-WRD) will be a part of the Teaching Commons Discussion and Workshop Series: Academic Integrity in the Digital Age on Friday, February 25th, 2011. 12:00PM-2:00PM. LPC, Richardson Library 300 (Rosati Room)  If you are interested in attending, please RSVP to LaVern Thomas at TLA@depaul.edu or x2-7587.

Academic integrity is a core value that all DePaul faculty members share, yet it is one that presents a unique set of challenges as the context for student learning continues to change. With the introduction of new teaching technology in the classroom and the increase in digital resources available to students, there is more uncertainty about what constitutes academic dishonesty and how faculty members should best respond in their classes. This workshop is designed to raise awareness about relevant issues and to provide a forum for discussion about best practices for faculty from across the university. All are encouraged to attend. Lunch will be served.

Please RSVP to LaVern Thomas at TLA@depaul.edu or x2-7587 with your name, department, and any dietary restrictions. For more information, contact Rana Husseini, Assistant Director for Teaching Support in the Office for Teaching, Learning and Assessment, at rhussein@depaul.edu or x2-6712.

6 pm, James Elkins (School of the Art Institute) revisits his observations on how we see things with a particular look at art.

Elkins can be helpful as we navigate possibilities in multimodal composing:

“Outside of painting, sculpture, and architecture, and outside of television, advertising, film, and other mass media, what kinds of images do people care about? It turns out that images are being made and discussed in dozens of fields, throughout the university and well beyond the humanities. Some fields, such as biochemistry and astronomy, are image-obsessed; others think and work through images.”

“So far visual studies has mainly taken an interest in fine art and mass media, leaving these other images — which are really the vast majority of all images produced in universities — relatively unstudied. Outside the university, scientific images crop up in magazines, on the internet, in popular-science books.”

More “Seeing Things” at the Art Institute: September 2010–June 2011

Two interesting readings for your “free time”:

Dancing with the Stars
by Lewis H. Lapham

“As the habits of mind beholden to the rule of images come to replace the structures of thought derived from the meaning of words, the constant viewer eliminates the association of cause with effect, learns that nothing necessarily follows from anything else.”

And:

“Perceptions of the world furnished by the camera substitute montage for narrative, reprogram the dimensions of space and time, restore a primitive belief in magic, employ a vocabulary better suited to a highway billboard or the telling of a fairy tale than to the languages of history and literature. The camera sees but doesn’t think.”

The Computer Made Me Do It
NYT Sunday Book Review

“Humanity is migrating to cyberspace. In the past five years, Americans have doubled the hours they spend online, exceeding their television time and more than tripling the time they spend reading newspapers or magazines. Most now play computer or video games regularly, about 13 hours a week on average. By age 21, the average young American has spent at least three times as many hours playing virtual games as reading. It took humankind eight years to spend 100 million hours building Wikipedia. We now spend at least 200 million hours a week playing World of Warcraft.”

Information Services staff members tested Digication in IS-supported labs this week, using  Firefox and Internet Explorer, and created test portfolios.

If you ever have trouble in one of the computer labs or classrooms, contact the Technology Support Center (TSC) at x2-8765 if it is not a classroom emergency, or x2-5900 if it is a classroom emergency. The TSC will need to know the location (campus, building, room), the computer number, what steps happened prior to the issue and the error received — a screenshot is helpful.

Students:

• Log in to Digication
• Select drop-down menu, “Portfolio Tools”
• Select “Submit”
• Select COMPOSITION & RHETORIC
• > “Next Step”



• Select WRD Portfolio
• > “Next Step”
• Select Mid-Term or Final Portfolio Submission
• Select — check box — for your portfolio (All Pages)
• Select “Save and Submit”

Faculty:

• Log in to Digication
• Select Course
• Select Assignments
• WRD Digital Portfolio
• Select appropriate (Mid-term or Final) portfolio by student

Forwarded from Pete V.:

This year’s  CCCC Annual Convention in Atlanta, GA features a number of timely sessions on online writing and learning, using technology, social networking, and more.   Sample sessions include:

• Understanding State-of-the-Art Online Writing Instruction: Results from the CCCC Committee’s National Survey on Best Practices
• Reconfiguring Student Experiences in Online Writing Classes
• The Untamed Virtual World: Making Interesting Mistakes in Online Teaching Spaces
• ePortfolio 2.0: Revising and Expanding the Role of Electronic Portfolios in a Developmental Writing Curriculum
• Social Networks, Classroom Communities: Using Social Media to Foster Active Learning Communities
• “We Don’t Do That Here”: Pushing the (Digital) Boundaries of What We “Do” in Writing Center Spaces
• Accessing Agency:  Traversing the Spaces Between Classroom Composition and Digital Writing

Browse the  Searchable Program  <http://lists.ncte.org/t/2651948/684224/10404/0/>  for more highlights from CCCC.