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
Our mission is to find ways together to avoid both uncritical adoption of technology — i.e., when technology leads pedagogy, rather than the other way around — and to avoid the-other-side-of-the-coin unhelpful discourse: reactionary and ungrounded dismissal and resistance of emerging technologies based on unexplored assumptions. We can provide productive alternatives to those discourses of adoption/resistance by doing what writing teachers do best: critical thinking, exploring links between technology and literacy, trying things together, reflecting on them, and developing collective expertise.
If you would like copies of the two generative readings that inspire this collective-expertise approach, and were the first two DWRD readings in 2009, email Michael at mmoore46@depaul.edu:
Feenberg, Andrew. Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Hatmaker, Elizabeth, et al. [Normal Research Collective.] “Postmodern Pedagogy and the Death of Civic Humanism.” Social Epistemology 12 (Spring, 1998), 339-48.
Autumn Quarter meetings, 10:00 a.m.-noon — 143 McGaw — the first hour is generally for discussion, updates, and technology overviews; the second hour is used for hands-on practice, workshops, and technology problem solving. We are an informal group, and you are welcome to come and go as needed:
- Friday, 9/16: Multimodal assignment workshop — bring a draft?
- Friday, 10/7:
- Calley O’Neill (Education) and Sarah Brown (WRD/Education) on text & image banners.
- Reading, responding to, and assessing multimodal assignments. Read “Responding and Assessing.” Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers.
- Friday, 10/21: Multimodal composing assignments & discussion
- Friday, 11/4: Copyright and Fair Use
- Friday, 11/18: No D-WRD, but a DePaul Portfolio Community Meeting — 9:30 AM-11:00 AM in 203 Levan