Thursday, May 20

Full-Day Workshops

Graduate Research Network (Free; 9 a.m. - 4 p.m., with a break for lunch)
Please register with Janice Walker (GRN Coordinator) for the Graduate Research Network at http://class.georgiasouthern.edu/writling/GRN/2010/index.html

FDW-1: The Future of the Book ($80; 9 a.m. - 4 p.m., with a break for lunch)
Coordinators: David Blakesley and Patricia Sullivan
with Special Guests, including Shirley K Rose

In 2003, the participants in the digital publishing workshop at Computers and Writing produced Digital Publishing F5|Refreshed (Parlor Press, 2003), one of the first multimedia ebooks ever cataloged in the MLA International Bibliography. To top that, this workshop will engage participants in the ongoing consideration of the future of the book, both culturally and in Computers and Writing, culminating with the publication of a new book on the subject produced and written during the workshop and published at the conference for the C&W community. Special guests, including press representatives and others active in articulating the future of the book will be on hand throughout the day.

FDW-2: Second Life for Teachers and Writers ($80; 9 a.m. - 4 p.m., with a break for lunch)
Coordinators: Morgan Reitmeyer, Katherine Tanski, and Josh Prenosil

Professional writing, first-year composition, and rhetoric instructors have begun to recognize Second Life as a tool for engaging writers in the challenges of digital writing and digital identity formation for industries, organizations, and individuals. This presentation aims to introduce instructors new to Second Life, showing them how to work, write, and teaching in a virtual world, as well as its applications in composition, technical writing, business writing, multimedia, and distance education courses. 

Workshop participants with will acquire basic in-world literacy by making an avatar learning how to navigate in SL, and watching and practicing basic building techniques. The session will spend the first hour teaching users to alter and personalize their avatars as presenters model pedagogy on the rhetoric of avatar appearance. In the next half hour participants will take a virtual Second Life tour, beginning and ending at the Purdue Island sandbox. Participants will be given the chance to learn how to create clothing, objects, and buildings. Participants will also experience a Second Life writing activity and receive a collection of resources and curricular materials collected by the presenters (including a Second Life goodie bag). Finally, the presenters will engage participants in a discussion of the advantages of Second Life as a teaching and learning space for writing and collaboration, as well as the challenges of access and assessment.

Half-Day Workshops

HDW-1: Composing Digital Scholarship: A Workshop for Authors ($50; 9 a.m. - 12 p.m.)
Coordinators: Cheryl Ball, Douglas Eyman, and Madeleine Sorapure

This half-day workshop will guide and encourage authors interested in composing digital scholarship for online journals. Editors will discuss authoring processes from the beginning of research projects to the publication stage, including visualizing your design to add value to your research project, storyboarding/prototyping, creating sustainable and accessible designs, querying editors, finding local resources, submitting webtexts, and revising in-progress work. Although the workshop’s primary emphasis will be on webtext-sized digital scholarship (for journals like Kairos), authors interested in larger projects such as online collections and digital books will also benefit from this workshop. The editors in attendance can also speak to individual authors’ needs regarding the teaching and evaluating of digital scholarship.

HDW-2: Twitter from the Ground Up ($50; 9 a.m. - 12 p.m.)
Workshop Leaders: Bill Wolff and Rachael Sullivan
Workshop Assistants: Julie Meloni and Karl Stolley

This workshop is for people who are interested in creating Twitter assignments for the graduate and/or undergraduate classroom. Workshop participants will learn about Twitter grammars, about various kinds of tweets, and about third-party applications that enhance Twitter's functionality. To do this, participants will break into small groups to learn how to use an application and then will complete a short presentation to the larger group on the application. Participants will then be introduced to and discuss several Twitter assignments that have already been used in a classroom setting. We will discuss what makes for an effective assignment, as well as how to introduce Twitter to students, how to assess student work, and many of the side benefits of using Twitter in the classroom. These benefits range from continuing in-class conversations outside of the classroom to increased access to students to the possibility of the authors students are reading engaging in the discussion. Participants will come away from the workshop with their own Twitter assignment. They will also be encouraged to tweet the conference using the #cw2010 hashtag.

HDW-3: Twitter to Infinity and Beyond ($50; 1 p.m. - 4 p.m.)
Workshop Leaders: Karl Stolley and Julie Meloni,
Rachael Sullivan and Bill Wolff

This workshop introduces hands-on work with the Twitter API. Regardless of skill level, participants will learn to develop unique mashups, visualizations, and other novel Twitter applications. Focus will be on plugins for existing systems (Drupal, WordPress) participants already use, as well as the steps to building fully customized Twitter applications.

This workshop is aimed at people who are looking to utilize RSS feeds and the Twitter API to develop their own unique mashups, visualizations, and other novel Twitter applications. Participants will learn about the basics of Twitter feeds, and how Twitter can do much of the work of selecting and organizing Tweets before they are pulled into a custom application. To do this, participants will also learn how to access the API, and a few common languages for doing so (primarily JavaScript and PHP). Using well-commented, basic examples, even people new to writing code will be supported to explore Twitter API access (additional supporting materials will also be made available to participants for use beyond the workshop). The workshop will then break into groups of people who use Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, or other Web/CMS software, and explore plugins that are available for accessing the Twitter API on their system of choice.

HDW-4: Remixing (Techno)Feminist Pedagogies in Virtual, Multimodal Spaces ($50; 1 p.m. - 4 p.m.)
Coordinators: Suzan Aiken, Emily Beard, Kristine Blair, Brittany Cottrill, Erin Dietel-McLaughlin, Christine Garbett, Lee Nickoson-Massey, Krista Petrosino, Christine Tulley, and Ruijie Zhao

The goal of this half-day workshop is to remix both feminist and technofeminist theory and specific digital pedagogical practices in an era of Web 2.0, helping participants develop multimodal assignments and select digital tools within a feminist pedagogical framework in order to level the playing field for our students within virtual classroom and community contexts. Workshop facilitators will thus foster a broadened definition of technological literacy acquisition that is consistent with a move away from purely functional literacy to address critical and rhetorical literacies, including an understanding of how 21st-century multimodal composing processes can help to transform cultural norms about difference and traditional expectations of who is and is not technologically literate.

Through mini-presentations, small-group work and reporting, and online communication forums, our interactive half-day workshop will address the following questions:

• In what ways can digital writing and communication tools enable specific technofeminist pedagogical practices, including establishing multiple points of access for students and teachers; fostering collaboration and mentoring; and valuing difference?
• What makes such pedagogical practices both feminist and technofeminist?
• What tools help deploy and sustain these practices: blogs, microblogs, other social networking applications?
• What multimodal composing genres (e.g., literacy biographies) help to privilege a multiplicity of voices?
• How do we assess the effectiveness of our approach on students’ comfort with, attitudes toward, and progress in developing digital identities?
• How and why should we communicate the philosophies behind our pedagogies to students, colleagues, and larger academic and external communities?

Saturday, May 22

Sugar-on-a-Stick: Networked Writing Instruction and Outreach for the K-12 Classroom (Free; 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.)
Coordinators: Tammy Conard-Salvo, Rich Rice (will be presenting via distance), John Tierney, Walter Bender, and Gerald Ardito
Continuing Education Credits Available

This mini-workshop allows participants to learn about using the new Sugar-on-a-Stick software as an inexpensive alternative to networked writing instruction in K-12 classrooms and how universities can create partnerships with K-12 institutions using the technology.

Since the XO laptop and its Sugar OS were introduced to the American public in 2007, computers and composition specialists have experimented with this technology most often reserved for developing countries. The XO laptop is unique in that it was designed for use by K-12 students in developing countries where access to electricity and the internet is unreliable. The mesh network technology inherent in the XO laptop allows students to participate in networked activities without an internet connection; the proximity of two or more XO laptops establishes a network where students can collaborate on writing, reading, and science assignments.

More recently, Sugar Labs has introduced Sugar-on-a-Stick, making the Sugar platform and mesh networking technology more widely available to anyone able to download the software. Access to this technology has the potential to shape K-12 education in the United States, particularly as organizations such as the National Writing Project and the MacArthur Foundation seek ways of supporting digital media and learning through initiatives such as “Digital Is”:http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2801. Sugar-on-a-Stick can potentially offer urban, rural, and financially and technologically challenged schools a low-cost solution for networked writing instruction and provide opportunities for students to complete writing activities in various subject areas.

In addition, universities have looked to technology such as the XO laptop and the Sugar platform to form connections with community organizations and K-12 schools. For example, Rich Rice and graduate and undergraduate students at Texas Tech University have used Sugar with the Lubbock Science Spectrum. They have developed an interactive exhibit promoting digital literacy called iPlay: http://richrice.com/5365/iplay-short.mov. And Gerald Ardito, graduate student at Pace University, is completing a doctoral thesis on Sugar while using the XO and Sugar-on-a-Stick in his middle school science classes.

Participants in this mini-workshop will learn about the XO laptop and the Sugar platform, how K-12 institutions are using the technology, and how universities are collaborating with K-12 institutions. If circumstances permit, participants will be able to test out Sugar-on-a-Stick using several laptops that will be available during the workshop, and they will receive instructions for installing and using the software. Finally, participants will be given a chance to brainstorm how they would use the Sugar software in their own classrooms and at their own institutions.

While anyone attending the mini-workshop will learn strategies for using Sugar in their classrooms, and post-secondary instructors will find the discussion useful for outreach, workshop facilitators expect to target local K-12 educators to encourage their participation.