Jennifer Campbell's Panel Summaries

Research Network Forum

The Research Network Forum is a full-day event held on the Wednesday preceding the conference, and I found it to be an informative and productive experience. The day began with two plenary speakers. Paul Kei Matsuda discussed the need to integrate multilingual perspectives into writing research, for example by including ESL outliers in larger quantitative studies and conducting more small-scale qualitative studies of multilingual writers. Rebecca Rickly discussed graduate education in research methods and the need to embrace failure in learning how to conduct effective research. After the plenary addresses and Q&A, we divided into 29 pre-arranged groups, with each table consisting of three to four works-in-progress presenters and a discussion leader. We had lively discussions of each presenters project and found it very difficult to keep on schedule. After a break for lunch, we reconvened for the Editors Roundtable. David Blakesley, from Parlor Press, discussed current challenges to scholarly presses and offered a practical list of ways we can support scholarly presses, such as reviewing their books and writing letters to administrators. Michael Spooner followed with a less optimistic talk about the current state of affairs for Utah State University Press, which may very well be cut later this year. He echoed a lot of what Blakesley said about challenges in the industry and explained how the press would react to the possible scenarios. After Q & A, participants had the chance to meet with editors from over a dozen journals, ranging from well-established publications like Pre/Text and The Journal of Basic Writing to brand new journals like Technoculture. The day concluded with a second breakout session where we had the chance to share our works-in-progress with another group and discussion leader. Having two rounds of discussion was very useful; time for each was limited, but I was able to cover a couple of big questions of scope in the first session, then ask the second group about more specific aspects of my design in the second session. I highly recommend the Research Network Forum. It was a great way to kick off the conference by meeting new people, hearing several good speakers, and having energetic discussions. RNF is also an attractive option because its deadline is later than the rest of the CCCCs proposals, so you can apply if your first effort doesnt get accepted. If you are on another panel, however, you can still participate in RNF, which doesnt count as a speaking role for the CCCC program.

Digital Technologies and Multimodal Composition

I attended several sessions related to technology and multimodal composition, and I was struck by the wide variety of content that was being grouped under similar titles and area clusters.

For example, session D.31 Digital Currents: Best Practices in Composition during the First Two Years, tagged as Information Technologies, focused primarily on electronic tools for accomplishing traditional tasks. Kip Strasma, from Nova Southeastern University, discussed Performing Distributed Peer Response in Internet and Digital-enhanced Composition Courses. Strasma has three to five spotlight students post their drafts to a discussion board utility for each assignment, and all students respond to that smaller group. Thus, each student gets a chance to receive comprehensive feedback, but not for every assignment. The class works together to create a review checklist, and then they post comments. The spotlight authors then synthesize the comments they have received in a write-up that is emailed to the instructor. The instructor then confirms, challenges, or adds more comments to the student responses before the author revises. The author also has the chance to rate the usefulness of each response they received from their peers using a Likert-type scale. All students complete a meta-analysis of the review process and how it affected their revision process. I can certainly see the value of having students synthesize and reflect on the peer review process, and it seems that the electronic format facilitates response and feedback, though the same goals could be achieved without integrating technology.

I was rather disappointed with Xiao Wangs Constructing E-Portfolios in Composition Courses Online, which highlighted the uneven definition of E-portfolios. She described her practice for online courses of having students generate portfolios, but the only thing electronic about the process is that students submit papers to smartthinking.com for feedback and turn their final portfolios in by email using zip files or a flash drive. Everything else Wang discussed, and the examples she showed, were pure old-school text portfolios.

Suzanne Labadie, from Oakland Community College, did deal more with intrinsically digital phenomena in Revising Research in the Age of Wikipedia. Labadie discussed how the critical and purposeful use of Wikipedia and class wikis can help students overcome problems with academic tone and objective reporting, teach students about plagiarism and documentation, and challenge superficial research methods. Wikipedia, especially with its addition of warning icons about style and citations, can demonstrate effective research and writing practices, while having students create well-developed wiki research sites can challenge the assumption that digital writing is all casual and superficial like texting or emailing. A lively discussion ensued about the benefits and drawbacks of wikis, and questions demonstrated that the audience was more interested in the analysis and production of these digital texts than they are in technology tools that add little to traditional instruction.

D.31 was uneven and didnt offer much from the cutting edge, but this was a trend I noticed at several sessions. Even worse was session J.31 Taking It to the Web: Digital Writing in Composition Classrooms. The session was tagged as Composition/Writing Programs, but the speaker I was really interested in hearing speak about Kent States transition to a Multimodal and Digital curriculum wasnt there. A second presenter was also absent due to a family emergency, so her husband read her paper about the need to mentor online instructors and then talked about his own online class. The talk digressed so far from the purported topic of the session that an audience member interrupted and asked if he would skip going over the content of his syllabus and explain how he takes it to the web. The other speaker, Alexandr Tolj, discussed digital essays, which were primarily traditional written compositions with graphics and links added to enhance the content for oral presentations. The results were interesting, but not exactly web-based or interactive, and had nothing to do with larger programmatic issues.

Another information technologies session, E.15 Blogs: Understanding the Potential and Challenges, included an interesting mix of projects. Derek Boczkowskis The Defective Yeti Dustup, aka When Writing (and Teaching) Goes Public: Blogging and the Wall-less Classroom was an entertaining anecdote about the perils of asking students to engage with public bloggers without preparing them for blog etiquette and public response. Unfortunately, Boczkowski said basically the same thing about these problems as Charles Tryons 2006 Pedagogy article Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition but without the focus on the real benefits of the pedagogy. Michael J. Faris read a paper that challenged the common conception of blogs as online journals or diaries by emphasizing their more public ancestors zines. He outlined several similarities between the genres as multimodal, circulated public writing with a content or scope that is specific but not fully defined. Both are often personal and political and challenge traditional notions of authorship. Pamela Gay provided an interesting example of place-based writing in her discussion of blogitorials. She described a course devoted to debates about zoning, housing, and neighborhood culture in the communities around her campus in Binghamton, New York Each student created an individual blog that was linked to a course blog. The students conducted research that enables them to write from an informed, situated perspective. Assignments consisted of 750-word informative blog entries that concluded with critical reflections and questions intended to generate ongoing online discussion. Gay noted that students found it difficult to conclude with an opening to dialogue rather than a definitive statement but found the project successful as a way of integrating an alternative genre that functions as an environment for learning.

This array of presentations demonstrated very different conceptions of technology and multimodal composing. I found some inspiration for my own classes and for our program, but I found greater inspiration to explore how our field is defining technology in the classroom, digital writing pedagogies, and multimodal composing. Ultimately, Im wondering how we can get beyond treating superficial use of technology tools as innovation and embrace the rhetorical possibilities of newer textual forms that are truly multimodal, interactive, and situated in online spaces that foster an engaging and expansive distribution of knowledge.

The Point Front Page