Thursday, April 29, 2010

GRN and Travel Grant Submissions

We have just discovered a problem with the online submission forms for the Graduate Research Network and the Computers and Writing/GRN Travel Grant Fund.

According to our IT folks, a spam filter patch is the culprit. They are working on the problem, but in the meantime, any submissions posted after 9pm on Monday, April 26, 2010, were NOT received. I don't know at this time if they are recoverable or not.

To be on the safe side-and for those who have waited until the last minute to submit-we are extending the due date for submissions until Thursday, May 6, 2010.

Please submit the required information via email to jwalker@georgiasouthern.edu.

You can see the required fields online:


Again, please do NOT use the forms. If you have any questions about whether or not your application(s) have been received, please email me at jwalker@georgiasouthern.edu. We apologize for the inconvenience!

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

CCCC 2010 Preview Notes

  1. http://iamdananderson.net/screencasts/cccc2010

    "I'm a Map I'm a Green Tree" from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

    Daniel Anderson's presentation for the 2010 CCCCs conference.

    At the conference, he strips the voiceover out of the video and delivers it live. Using the "I'm a Mac I'm a PC" commercial clips against the "I'm a Map I'm a Green Treet," he shows the confluences (word?) of the word and technology.

    What I find interesting in this video is how he accessed information in the video, using:

  • flickr
  • google/google books
  • Wikpedias
  • scans of a book
  • Scan of a scholarly journal
  • Macmail/email
  • Pandora radio site
  • Photoshop and sound mixer

LILAC questions: So, are WE (scholars) using these tools to locate and access information (are we? I do!). If so, what are we (or should we be) teaching our students?

2. http://stevendkrause.com/scholarship/cccc-2010/

Steven D. Krause, "RIP-ping, Mixing, Burning: A Remix Manifesto as Research Writing" CCCC 2010 presentation.

Presentation shared pre-conference as a blog using flickr photos (which he created as slides of course in iMac), movie trailers (video from YouTube about patents, books, and music…. Sampling, remixing, scholarly journals, data—research and then remix to make something new—transformative uses?) Krause's point seems to be that students might be "chicken" to reach beyond the 5-paragraph essay, for a variety of reasons:

"First, despite the notion that incorporating new media/popular culture like movies, music, and more into our classes is a good idea because it is what the "kids today" are into and this is the "digital native" world they know, I once again found in my students a surprising amount of ignorance and apathy. And I found this especially among my "true freshman" students, as opposed to the sophomores, juniors and seniors who found their way into first year composition for various reasons. I'm not entirely sure what the cause of this ignorance and apathy about what should be their contemporary culture is all about, but it certainly seemed to be there."


"Second, and perhaps this is one of the causes of their ignorance and apathy, there is the problem of the assumptions and inevitable compartments about "school" versus "life." SImply put, I think a lot of students have in mind stuff we do in school and stuff we do in life, and there is a bright and uncrossable line between these two realms. This is one of the problems I've seen about incorporating things like Facebook into my teaching, and I think it extends to an extent here. I think students' default positions are often to see things like remix culture– all the stuff that GirlTalk was doing and most of the things discussed in RiP– as being distinctly in the "life" realm and they are uneasy about that crossing the border into "school."

"Finally, and this is where the chickens thing comes from, I think that students are often very leery of leaving the confines of the cages of convention that they have been raised in. As I understand it, even when so-called "free-range" chickens are raised in humane conditions (and they often are not, of course), they are reluctant to leave their cages and certainly not their source of easily obtained food. They are, after all, domesticated animals. I think that a lot of students are in this sense "chicken:" too scared and too dependent on an educational system designed to domesticate them to think outside of "the box" even when the assignment explicitly asks them to do so. In fact, after going through all of the cage-breaking tricks I tried throw at them with these exercises, a disappointing number of them retreated to the old and stale school genre they are most familiar with."


Does this relate to LILAC? The video certainly relates to IP class!






Monday, April 12, 2010

Rhetorical Reflections: Borderless Communication in a Multimodal World

I was delighted to attend the symposium Friday, April 9, 2010, hosted by Georgia Institute of Technology and Bedford/St. Martin's on "Rhetorical Reflections: Borderless Communication in a Multimodal World."




The symposium featured a roster of fantastic speakers, including Andrea Lunsford, Ron Balthazar, Robin Wharton, Michael Neal, Michael Pemberton, Rebecca Burnett, L. Andrew Cooper, TyAnna Herrington, Mike Palmquist, Joanne Harris, Manuel Perez Tejada, Letizia Guglielmo, Laura McGrath, Janet Bean, Christy Desmet, Karen Gardiner, Angela Hall-godsey, Amy Kimme Hea, Roxanne Mountford, Daniel Vollaro, Andrea Wood, Paulette Richards, Candice Welhausen, Jared Johnson, Matthew Paproth, Danielle Lawson, Nirmal Trivedi, Lee Odell, Susan Katz, and Bedford/St. Martin's own Nick Carbone, Leasa Burton, and Karita France dos Santos. If I left anyone out, I apologize profusely. It was indeed a cornucopia of ideas!

In addition to the speakers, the symposium featured a roster of Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship poster presenters. The projects were astounding, and the conversations that ensured were lively and well-informed. I came away with so many ideas and so much to think about!

The symposium was held at the historic Academy of Medicine in Atlanta, GA. The building is on the historic register and has recently been ceded to Georgia Tech. It will soon be undergoing renovation, but in the meantime, it was a wonderful location for a symposium bringing together rhetorical reflections from the Agora with the 21st century classroom!

Kudos and thanks to Georgia Institute of Technology and Bedford/St. Martin's for sponsoring this event.