description
As first opponent on this Norwegian disputation (completed in English), I was responsible for

• reading a completed draft of the dissertation,
• writing up a report outlining why (and whether) I thought it was defendable
• working with the examination committee to create a topic for Eikenes’ “public trial” [presentation based on his dissertation]
• articulating a set of questions to pose during his disputation [defense]
• deciding, in consultation with the research committee, whether the candidate would pass the defense.

description
A one-day workshop to lead 30 faculty in the Languages, Literature, and Philosophy department in creating multimodal assignments for their writing classes.

description
Participating with VP of Research for Illinois State University, I spoke to new faculty members (in a morning and afternoon session) about personal and professional strategies for being a successful researcher at Illinois State.

semesters & syllabi

• Spring 2008: Audio Essays

description
I taught English 246 as an Audio Essay class, in the spirit of radio stories and documentaries like those heard on This American Life. We started by making playlists of favorite songs to introduce each other through musical choices (in order to discuss the rhetoric of music and other forms of audio). We then worked on audio poems for Poetry Radio on WGLT (the local NPR station), moved onto 5-7 minute audio documentary-like stories, and concluded with This I Believe reflections about the class and learning experience.

teaching innovations

• I installed Moodle, an open-source content-management system, for the first time on my personal server for students to use as a place to hold online discussions and to upload their audio files. I used about half the features in Moodle, students preferred it to Blackboard/WebCT, and so I may use it again, although the freely available ning platform, which was not available at the time, may be easier.
• This semester was the first time I used a blog platform for an entire syllabus. All schedules, policies, readings, resource links, and class news was posted to the class blog, which students seemed to like. (Still, however, I did not have students using their own blog; there wasn’t a purpose for that kind of blog-portfolio for this class.)

teaching challenge
A challenge I faced in teaching this course had to do with the available hardware in my classroom. Because this course isn’t always taught in a computer lab, I had originally been assigned a “dumb” classroom, which is what my field calls a classroom with no technology, as opposed to a “smart” classroom, a common term in instructional technology that refers to a classroom with at least a teacher’s computer station and projection equipment. So I switched into a computer classroom with 27 older stations and furniture that was literally falling apart. (Given that the building was currently undergoing life-safety renovations and this particular classroom was being phased out for the following year, I was happy to have it.) Although the machines did not have CD burners, which would normally be a must for an audio essay class, we made do. (It turns out that despite students’ lack of technical production in multimodal composition, they know how to burn CDs on their home computers. :) However, I had another challenge with this room, which was both technological and ideological: It was built to house a large seminar instead of a smaller-sectioned writing class, but the room layout was too long and narrow to conduct discussions. Each of the 3 classes assigned to that room that last semester of its existence had less than 22 students, so (with permission) I removed 5 computer stations and the worst of the broken desks, which made the room feel more cozy and condusive to discussion.

accompanying materials

• student’s audio poem from class, published in Euphemism

semesters & syllabi

• Fall 2007 (as English 289.22: Multimedia Writing Workshop): 18 students
• Fall 2008 (hereafter as English 239: Multimodal Composition): 12 students
• Spring 2009: 9 students (7 undergraduates & 2 graduate students, as independent studies)
• Fall 2009: 14 students (11 undergraduates & 3 graduate students, as independent studies)

description
Started as English 289.33: Multimedia Writing Workshop. I wrote the course proposal to turn it into a permanent class. During Fall 2007, I taught the course similarly to how I taught English 3040: Perspectives in Writing & Rhetoric the previous year as a faculty member at Utah State University; its topic was an open-assignment video course where students progressed from smaller, monomodal exercises to 5-minute multimodal videos of various genres. I didn’t like the organization for the course (as described in my teaching development plan under Teaching), so I changed the syllabus the next fall. For Fall 08, Spring 09, and Fall 09, the course focused on having students compose digital media scholarship for a peer-reviewed publication in English Studies. The publication venue changed for different semesters, as students responded to real calls for papers in the field of digital writing studies.

teaching innovations

• Fall 2007, I implemented a teaching innovation of showcasing the student’s work at the local, historic cinema. I was nominated for the department’s innovative teaching award for this effort, although it turned out I was ineligible because I had not been at ISU long enough to meet the award criteria of two years.
• Fall 2008 came a different innovation as I changed the syllabus — having students compose texts for peer-reviewed publications provided them with the elusive “authentic audience” while giving them a specific rhetorical situation in which to work. Also innovative this semester was taking as many of these students who could go to a national conference about multimodal composition. From this event, which they filmed, they built several digital media projects and proposed their inclusion into the digital conference proceedings. Their proposals were accepted, and as of Fall 2009, I am working with one student from that class to revise the student projects for publication.

accompanying materials

• original 239 course proposal
• current 239 syllabi (links to website index of all available semesters)

see also

• “Who Needs YouTube?!” (under Research Designs)
• “Talking Back to Teachers: Undergraduate Research in Multimodal Composition” (under Chapters)
• “A Case Study in Revision Processes in Student-Authored Digital Media Scholarship” (under Honors)