description (from proposal)
A collaborative session with two of my textbook co-authors (Kristin Arola and Jennifer Sheppard).

I will discuss the practicalities of writing a collaborative textbook project with authors who share a theoretical and pedagogical approach but who haven’t collaborated as a group and are not co-located. This presentation will discuss how the authors modeled their own textbook’s approach to designing multimodal projects, following the same mistakes and having the same successes our students have when writing. This speaker will provide a meta-narrative of the book’s coming to fruition (even as it is still a work in progress, and we invite feedback on its current iteration, to be shown in the panel). We will detail, for instance, some of the collaborative techniques and technological programs we used, our internal and editorial negotiations to determine the *kind* of textbook we wanted (materially, theoretically, and practically), and the realizations we made about our assumptions in teaching writing to English majors (even in new media ways, as we do), but how we mistakenly dismissed first-year students taking Writing 101 as a possible audience for our book in the quest of creating a book useful to our colleagues teaching multimodal projects in their business, politics, and biology classes. We will provide examples from our writing process, to show the book-in-progress, and to show how this narrative of writing for students is formed on the idea that, as teachers of rhetoric and writing, we can never divorce our theoretical understanding of writing and the research of writing from our pedagogical approaches, either in the classroom or in writing for the classroom.

description
I discuss an undergraduate writing class where students learn to read, peer review, and write their own digital scholarship that draws on multiple media and modes of production (audio, video, graphics, written text, HTML, etc.) to enact their arguments. I describe how students transfer their alphabetic writing processes to multimedia, using example projects and reflections to show their learning.

accompanying materials

English summary

French summary

abstract
In this online asynchronous session, I presented results and discussion from the CCCC Survey on multimodal practices, with particular emphasis on the section about tenure and promotion issues for scholars working in digital media.

accompanying materials

• web archive version of my conference session (HTML)
  

abstract
In this roundtable, I focused on issues of being a new faculty member in a department and how I created a research identity that was transparent, if a little “quirky,” so that colleagues could begin to recognize my research agenda.

accompanying materials

• paper (HTML)

abstract
In English studies, the past decade has seen a dramatic shift toward analysis and production of multimedia texts (c.f. Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Wysocki, Selfe, Johnson-Eilola, & Sirc, 2004). This shift is informed by the study of rhetoric, which we define as reading and composing texts with an understanding of a specific audience, purpose, and context. In Dr. Ball’s Perspectives on Writing and Rhetoric class, students analyze creative multimodal texts using multiple reading strategies, and then compose their own texts. Although this generation of students is typically well-informed about technology, most of them have never encountered a digital, multimodal text whose purpose is primarily aesthetic. Studying the rhetorical situation in what literary theorists such as Eco and Rosenblatt would call an “open,” readerdriven, adaptable text provides a rich learning experience for students.In this class, students read several examples of open texts including “Murmuring Insects” (Ankerson, 2001), which successfully uses Eastern and Western multimodal elements—including written, aural, visual, animated, and other modes of communication—to juxtapose calm with fear while honoring the events of September 11, 2001. In this presentation, we show this piece in contrast to student-produced multimodal texts that attempt to adopt cultural contexts of other writers, often unsuccessfully. We conclude by suggesting why some students’ attempts at adaptation in these creative and social media are hindered by localized contexts. In addition, we demonstrate how students who don’t attempt to adapt their creative work to other’s contexts often make stronger rhetorical choices in their multimodal texts while still meeting the needs of various audiences.

accompanying materials

• podcast of session