Grad Students Shine at Computers & Writing 2006

The WIDE research center and the Rhetoric and Writing Graduate Program were well-represented at this year's Computers and Writing 2006 conference at Texas Tech University. Congrats to Graduate Student Andréa Davis for winning the Kairos/LORE Outstanding TA Award!

There were many MSU participants, both faculty and grad students, contributing to the C&W program this year. Here are some of the MSU student presentations:

Cheryl E. Ball and Douglas Eyman, “Kairos: A History of Cover Logos."

Over the past decade, Kairos has published a wide-ranging selection of scholarly texts that engage the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy through composition in the very media that best support those intersections. In this poster, we present a snapshot of the issues and themes that have been important to the field of Computers and Writing over the lifetime of the journal by displaying the cover graphics that have appeared from issue 1.1 in Spring of 1996 to our forthcoming tenth-anniversary issue due out this August.

Robyn Tasaka, “It’s Not Porn: Sexuality in Young Women’s Blogs.”

Much of the literature on women and online communication, such as Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise’s, “Wired Women” anthology, Julia Ferganchick-Neufang’s “Harassment Online,” and Susan Herring’s “The Rhetorical Dynamics of Gender On-Line,” focuses on the threats of cyberspace for women. Females, especially teenage girls, make up the majority of bloggers, according to both Herring and Perseus Software Development COO Jeffrey Henning. Apparently, online harassment is no longer keeping women from going online—at least in certain venues. In order to understand the blogging phenomenon, we must investigate blogs by teenage girls, which, despite the national interest in blogging, are neglected by the media, academia, and other bloggers. The blog’s private nature both eases and reinforces women’s concerns with sexuality. On one hand, while the women whose blogs I analyze do mention sexual harassment, they seem considerably less concerned than one might expect based on the existing literature. I believe this stems from their “ownership” of the blogs—they can, at least, prevent unwanted users from commenting. At the same time, because their real life personalities and lives are connected to their blogs, these women are very careful with the way they present their sexualities—as seen in the ways they write about clothing, men, and dancing.

Dánielle Nicole DeVoss, Moderator Angela Marie Haas, and Douglas Eyman, "Fostering and Sustaining an Ecology of Digital Writing: Community, Engagement, and Application." (358)

Increasingly, writing takes place in computer-mediated, networked environments and is distributed within and across networked spaces—on web sites, under the visible surface of the Internet on peer-to-peer systems, within blogs, and across other digital environments. In these spaces, multiple sign technologies (e.g., image, sound, video, text) produce artifacts that can be networked, interactive, and hyperlinked in ways that foster interactivity and transcend time. Given this, the shape of writing itself has changed; composing means weaving “traditional” media (like text, graphics, and audio) with, through, and for computer interfaces (DeWitt, Grabill, Takayoshi, WIDE Research Collective). Consequently, teaching, learning, and research within these environments requires a theoretical and curricular framework that recognizes the ways in which composing has evolved and facilitates the rhetorical practices critical to digital writing spaces.

This presentation offers such a framework—one that emphasizes building community, fostering critical engagement, and engaging in practical application as key tools for understanding, analyzing, and producing digital compositions. This presentation will describe the upper-level digital rhetoric course in which the presenters participated and share the course syllabus, goals, materials, and example student work; address the ways in which this digital rhetoric course lent itself to rethinking the ways in which we teach writing; and suggest ideas, activities, assignments, and curricular initiatives for teaching digital writing within the framework of community, critical engagement, and practical application.

Rob Reyes and Andréa D. Davis (digirhet.net), "old + old + old = new: Multimedia Writing, Copyright, and Remix Culture." (353)

Multimedia compositions require writers to handle multiple modes of representation and meaning-making. Whereas modern computers and robust networks allow composers to choreograph a variety of media, composers may not have the rhetorical or technical tools to create audio, video, or other visual elements for multimedia compositions. Composers may also wish to incorporate popular imagery or widely circulating audio or video into their work. However, most circulating work is copyright protected, even though it is relatively easy to download from Internet Web sites or file-sharing spaces. The presentation is influenced by the work of Lessig, Litman, Vaidnathan, Porter, Logie, and others, and explores four facets of copyright in multimedia writing: the widespread confusion about what constitutes appropriate use of copyright-protected materials; the complexities of ethically using another’s words and works; the cultural polarization of copyrightists and copyleftists; and writing teachers’ need to advocate Fair Use while the culture is extending copyright protection and closing access to modes and media of meaning-making. The presenters discuss multimedia pieces they have created that push the margins of copyright and Fair Use, and that open spaces for discussing multimedia writing’s key promises and perils.

Angela Marie Haas, “Wampum as Hypertext: Re-Imagining the History of Hypertext Theory.”

The “history” of hypertext is a Western frontier story, a narrative that most often begins with the exploration of the land of Xanadu and the Memex and eventually leads to the trailblazing of the WWW. Although some storytellers in the C&W community have interrupted this dominant narrative with non-Western themes, such as the Chinese I Ching, none have shared stories of hypertexts that existed in Native American territories long before the land of Memex and Xanadu. This presentation offers a preliminary hypertextual historiography of how several American Indian communities employed the material rhetoric of wampum belts as hypertextual technologies that extend human memories of inherited knowledges through interconnected, non-linear designs and associative storage and retrieval methods.

Just for Fun: Teaching Writing through Immersive Online Games (357)
Kym Buchanan, “Designing Persistent-Alternate-World Games for Learning”
David Sheridan, “Kairos and the Promise of Immersivity: Alternate World Games and Rhetorical Context”
Janet Swenson, “Fun and Games—and Learning”

This session will explore the potential of immersive, multiplayer online games for teaching writing. Our principal example will be Ink, an online game being developed by the Writing Center at Michigan State University, with funding from MSU’s Writing In Digital Environments (WIDE) Center. Adopting the metaphor of a city, Ink focuses on civic concerns, emphasizing public rhetoric and its ability to effect social change. The world of Ink has an economy, a government, neighborhoods, streets, and forums for public discourse. As exigencies emerge in this complex social environment, players need to make appropriate rhetorical interventions. The immersiveness of persistent-alternate-world games like Ink foregrounds the highly contextualized nature of rhetorical production and circulation. Writers can assess the reception of their compositions in a variety of ways: they can study the interpretations, counter-responses, and actions of other players. Further, they can analyze the extent to which their exigency was, in fact, addressed in the way they hoped. The game encourages metadiscursive reflection through a variety of structures, especially “Paths”—sequences of activities (including composing and reviewing texts, as well as various forms of participation in groups and city council) whose completion is certified by other players within the game, that have themselves, achieved a certain level of game-play. In exploring the challenge of designing pedagogically-effective game environments, we will draw on three trajectories within the field of composition and rhetoric: (1) recent work that emphasizes the contextual nature of rhetorical production and circulation; (2) explorations of online discussion spaces; and examinations of games as educational tools. This session will combine formal presentation with interactive segments, including guided explorations of Ink, which will be in public beta testing at the time of the conference.

Stacey Pigg and Bill Doyle, “Turning the Computer Screen Green: When Does Digital Become Natural?”

Environmental and ecological metaphors abound to describe both the spatial characteristics of online communities and the “natural” development of literacy throughout individuals’ lives (Hawisher and Selfe, 2004; Barton, 1994). Although our everyday language and even our scholarly publications ring with discourse of nature and environment, it is far less often that we take the time to critically assess the relationships between disciplines of computers and writing and ecocomposition. Stacey Pigg discusses “A Place for Nature: Connecting Wikis and the Web of Life.” Many ecocomposition courses—as well as traditional first-year composition courses that include a unit on nature writing—incorporate field outings as part of the curriculum. Researchers in composition studies (Roorda, 1998) and environmental education (Orr, 1992) have written about the ability of such experiences to increase the “capacity to notice pattern in nature, and community, and to recognize that the patterns radiate outward to include the human observer” (Lyon x). Bill Doye discusses “Real Bodies in Nature: Listening for ‘Natural’ Digital Voices.” Robert Yagelski in “Computers, Literacy, and Being” remarks that “we must re-imagine not only how we approach the teaching of writing and the uses of technology in our teaching” Extending Yagelski’s logic to student learning, this presentation complicates the split between “real world” and “virtual” interaction by accounting for the ways in which students’ digital communication constitutes a very real way of “being in the world,” rather than a disembodied escape from the physical, natural world.

The Sites (and Sounds) of Publicity: The Promise and Challenge of Multimodal Public Rhetoric (358)
David Sheridan, moderator
Jim Ridolfo, “Purchasing Public Rhetoric: The Defense Department and the Iraq Press Scandal”
Anthony Michel, “Performing in the Mirror: Toward a Critical Praxis of Multimodal Rhetoric”
David Sheridan, “Public Images: Multimodality and Public Rhetoric in the Writing Classroom”

Although scholars within the field of composition and rhetoric have explored the potential of digital technologies to transform public rhetoric, as well as explored the multimedia and multimodal affordances of new media, there have been few attempts to bring these two trajectories of thought together. This presentation explores important opportunities that multimodality affords public and activist rhetors. If public rhetoric is defined as a set of rhetorical practices aimed at addressing issues of social justice, sustainability, and community, and if the public sphere refers not just to conversations in mass media, but to conversations among concerned citizens, what do we stand to gain and lose by integrating photographs, video, music, spoken word recordings, animations, layout elements, and graphical representations of information into the public sphere? We argue that reconceiving the public sphere as multimodal space constitutes a fundamental shift in democratic practice—one that requires both a reinterrogation of our models for public rhetoric, as well as a reimagining of the educational practices aimed at fostering critical citizenship. As theorists like Shipka (2006), Trimbur (2000), and Wysocki (2004) have recently pointed out, traditional models for rhetorical production are seriously inadequate when it comes to helping rhetors make decisions about modes, media, and technologies of production, reproduction, and distribution. Building on Shipka and others, we offer a framework aimed at helping public rhetors negotiate the complex processes of rhetorical circulation as it is affected by multimodality. We also suggest classroom practices that might foster a critically reflective approach to these transformed rhetorical practices.

Jim Ridolfo, “Paper Airplanes and Networks: Rhetorical Delivery as a Knowledge-Making Practice”

This presentation focuses on how acts of rhetorical delivery constitute knowledge-making events. Traditional heritage theories of rhetorical delivery focus on oral delivery with an audience present. Written delivery, however, remains a promising area for further scholarly exploration. In particular, as Jim Porter noted last year at C&W, network delivery calls for the development of new rhetorical theories of delivery. This presentation focuses on how “the rhetorical landscape” may be understood in terms of social and material resources—the available systems of delivery and distribution. I explore how rhetoricians may learn through engagement with these means of distribution. I then demonstrate how this engagement, either successful or not, constitutes the valuable discovery of episteme.