4Cs Conference Wrap Up

I have to say that today I bailed on all conference sessions. I was feeling a bit overloaded so I decided that I needed a day out and about. I slept in and then had Indian for lunch and headed out for a local yarn shop that makes their own yarns. Very nice stuff at Art Fibers , but a little too novelty yarnish for me. (Pink sparkly yarn isn't exactly my style). Then I took a taxi to another yarn shop down by the Castro, Imagiknit and walked around for a bit and bought a few things :-) After that several of us meet up for the 1st annual Stitch n Bitch 4Cs. Pictures will follow when I get back to Indiana.

Back to the conference, I know that I have sounded pretty negative over the last couple of days, but I can say that I did go to some good panels. (More below the fold) Yesterday I saw a great paper by a grad student in University of Wisconsin, Alice Robison. Her paper, "Videogaming as Co-Design: Multiliteracies Outside the College Writing Classroom" looked specifically at gamers and game designers and how gamers design games for themselves as a part of the interactive gaming experience. She also connected the co-design process and the ideas behind it to notions of play and desire (to interact with writing) in the composition classroom. Very interesting take on game theory.

After lunch I went to the featured session with Mark Jury and Mike Rose. Fabulous papers on "Rethinking Ability, Literacy, and Achievement: Studies Across Education, the Workplace, and the Community" Jury and Rose looked at prisons and logging communities. It was truly an interesting panel. I have often thought about different and differing literacies, especially since I come from a family where there are numerous kinds of literacies. I left the session and bought Rose's book on Work and Literacy. I've read the first few pages and it was worth the $10 that I paid for it at the book display.

At the blogging SIG last night we did a lot of brainstorming and had a generally good conversation. Clancy and I did a breakout session on Blogging: Hiring/Tenure/Promotion. One of the things that I proposed was working on a resolution for Cs/NCTE to have blogging recognized as a scholarly activity. We need to be sure that the work that we put into our blogs and the blogs that we use in our classes gets recognized by or departments and universities. We also noted that bloggers like scribblingwoman have successfully had their blogging work recognized. Clancy brought up the fact that we need to pay more attention to how blogging is changing publishing and the edited collection as a genre, especially in light of the publication of Into the Blogosphere .

There were also breakout groups on Institutional Uses of Weblogs, the Future of Blogs in NCTE/CCC Online, and Blogs and Student Writing/Privacy. I'll link to extended discussions of those things as they appear around the internet.

After the SIG I went to dinner with Will , Barbara, and Janet at Les Julians (or something like that), it was an Italian place with good live jazz and mediocre pasta. The company was good and the wine was plentiful so it was worth it :-) After dinner Barbara pooped out, but the rest of us went back to the rock n' roll party (pictures to follow when I get back to Indiana).

Tonight I am relaxing with some t.v. and probably some URBz on the Nintendo DS a little later.