Mediated Disaster Rhetoric (another topic for ATTW?)
I'm guessing this topic will be addressed at the conference because it must surely be on the minds of lots of technology oriented rhetoricians. NCTEs "request/resource" site, WPA's site, all of the myriad resources springing up on the web to help victims of Katrina. And most of those victims are still worrying about food--how many have access to the internet? Just another way that those who already had the resources to begin with are doubly, triply more prepared than those who did not have vehicles to get out, did not have insurance for their possessions, etc. We have the sense that our technologies pull us together when they just as frequently separate us and make the distances more acute.
Friday, September 09, 2005
ATTW
So I don't misplace the call:
Call for Papers: Association of Teachers of Technical Writing
9th Annual Conference
Proposals due: October 28, 2005
Wednesday, March 22, 2005, 8:30 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.
In conjunction with the 2005 CCCC Annual Convention (March 22-25)
Chicago, Illinois
Texts/Technology
ATTW invites proposals for papers, panels, and poster presentations to be given at its annual conference immediately preceding the CCCC. The full-day event includes concurrent sessions, poster presentations, book exhibits, and opportunities for exchanging ideas, working on projects, and networking in a supportive and challenging academic environment.
Conference theme: Technology as Text
This year's conference will explore our field's unique relationships with technology. We will explore and examine new research, teaching methods, workplace practices, and administrative activities that inform and teach us about new, current, and past technologies. The goal of these presentations will be to help us better understand and practice technical communication and communication in scientific, professional, and workplace contexts.
Inform, Teach, Critique
We challenge participants to create presentations that will inform the field about new communication technologies and at the same time interrogate these technologies for their social, ethical, technical, practical, environmental, or material implications. Rather than look to tutorials or demonstrations, we are seeking robust studies, explorations, and research partnerships that engage subjects on several levels and demonstrate new ways to study and report on the technologies that we invent, use, and are subject to in workplace, academic, and daily practices.
Potential Topics
Some particular areas of interest include (but aren't limited to) research that examines,
* the implications, challenges, and rewards a specific technology brings to communication practices,
* connections between technological and theoretical knowledge building,
* relationships of our own technology learning to the practice of scholarship: what does mastering a new technology or creating new technology, constitute in terms of our scholarly, intellectual enterprise?
* presentations that teach and interrogate a specific technology,
* the social values associated with specific communication technologies including the economic value, ethical implications, and value added of communication technologies,
* pedagogies that enable students to engage, address, and use communication technologies
* research methods that the field can use to examine and understand new, current, and past communication technologies.
* investigations into the social contexts in which technologies are implemented and used.
Proposals, limited to 200 words, are due October 28, 2004. We offer two general formats:
Regular Sessions: 15 minute talks within 45-minute panel presentations. We will give presenters the opportunity to post copies of their presentation or paper at the ATTW Conference site approximately two weeks before the conference.
Poster Presentations: We will include opportunities for posters (3'x4') to be presented throughout the day with special times dedicated for conversations and specific discussions regarding this work.
Submit proposals for regular sessions via the ATTW website at http://www.attw.org. Connect to the site, register (or enter your password), then follow the links for conference paper submissions. All proposals will be peer reviewed. Proposals will be accepted after September 12, 2005.
Workshop Sessions: We will make room for two 1 1/2-hour workshops as an alternative to panels of speakers. Workshops might focus on pedagogical issues, strategies for working with external partners, consulting, or research issues. Please submit workshop proposals directly to Brenton Faber at Clarkson University (faber@clarkson.edu).
Registration and updates will also be available on ATTW's e-mail discussion list (ATTW-L) and web site (www.attw.org ). For additional information, contact Brenton Faber at Clarkson University (faber@clarkson.edu) or Bill Karis at Clarkson University (karis@clarkson.edu).
So I don't misplace the call:
Call for Papers: Association of Teachers of Technical Writing
9th Annual Conference
Proposals due: October 28, 2005
Wednesday, March 22, 2005, 8:30 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.
In conjunction with the 2005 CCCC Annual Convention (March 22-25)
Chicago, Illinois
Texts/Technology
ATTW invites proposals for papers, panels, and poster presentations to be given at its annual conference immediately preceding the CCCC. The full-day event includes concurrent sessions, poster presentations, book exhibits, and opportunities for exchanging ideas, working on projects, and networking in a supportive and challenging academic environment.
Conference theme: Technology as Text
This year's conference will explore our field's unique relationships with technology. We will explore and examine new research, teaching methods, workplace practices, and administrative activities that inform and teach us about new, current, and past technologies. The goal of these presentations will be to help us better understand and practice technical communication and communication in scientific, professional, and workplace contexts.
Inform, Teach, Critique
We challenge participants to create presentations that will inform the field about new communication technologies and at the same time interrogate these technologies for their social, ethical, technical, practical, environmental, or material implications. Rather than look to tutorials or demonstrations, we are seeking robust studies, explorations, and research partnerships that engage subjects on several levels and demonstrate new ways to study and report on the technologies that we invent, use, and are subject to in workplace, academic, and daily practices.
Potential Topics
Some particular areas of interest include (but aren't limited to) research that examines,
* the implications, challenges, and rewards a specific technology brings to communication practices,
* connections between technological and theoretical knowledge building,
* relationships of our own technology learning to the practice of scholarship: what does mastering a new technology or creating new technology, constitute in terms of our scholarly, intellectual enterprise?
* presentations that teach and interrogate a specific technology,
* the social values associated with specific communication technologies including the economic value, ethical implications, and value added of communication technologies,
* pedagogies that enable students to engage, address, and use communication technologies
* research methods that the field can use to examine and understand new, current, and past communication technologies.
* investigations into the social contexts in which technologies are implemented and used.
Proposals, limited to 200 words, are due October 28, 2004. We offer two general formats:
Regular Sessions: 15 minute talks within 45-minute panel presentations. We will give presenters the opportunity to post copies of their presentation or paper at the ATTW Conference site approximately two weeks before the conference.
Poster Presentations: We will include opportunities for posters (3'x4') to be presented throughout the day with special times dedicated for conversations and specific discussions regarding this work.
Submit proposals for regular sessions via the ATTW website at http://www.attw.org. Connect to the site, register (or enter your password), then follow the links for conference paper submissions. All proposals will be peer reviewed. Proposals will be accepted after September 12, 2005.
Workshop Sessions: We will make room for two 1 1/2-hour workshops as an alternative to panels of speakers. Workshops might focus on pedagogical issues, strategies for working with external partners, consulting, or research issues. Please submit workshop proposals directly to Brenton Faber at Clarkson University (faber@clarkson.edu).
Registration and updates will also be available on ATTW's e-mail discussion list (ATTW-L) and web site (www.attw.org
Brainstorming for ATTW: wikis in community engagement
Last night, during 3, 5, and 7 o'clock feeding sessions and in response to the ATTW cfp, I began to think about the intersections of civic engagement and technology and returned to a technology I've been interested in for some time for its communal knowledge making quality, the wiki. Admittedly, I have not read the scholarship on wikis, though I have visited that virtually mainstream wiki, the Wikipedia many times and have discussed the possibility of a teaching wiki for our department with Kevin.
My thought of last night was that I should make building a literacy wiki one of the projects of the new Literacy, Culture, and Identity course, and I should talk about the role of the wiki in community engagement writing at ATTW. Previously, I had thought about simply building a web-based literacy resource, something I was thinking about even in my grad program. Now, however, the wiki seems more ideal because it would allow multiple users to add to and adjust it. It would also raise lots of interesting literacy questions in and of itself--requiring a bit of engagement of the technology in the spirit of Cindy Selfe's constant urgings not to allow the technology to be invisibile, to question the social implications of the technology itself.
Oh, and, while this will make Kevin crazy, that leads me circuitously back to Birkerts who questions technology and its impact on the activity of reading. Is Birkerts so much more unfounded in his arguments than Plato/Socrates? Do we allow Plato the room to be nutty about a technology we take for granted simply because he lived so long ago and he is firmly planted in the canon about which we have stopped overtly warring?
The things I would need to do if I decided to pursue this route:
* read the scholarship on wikis to know what has been said about their use
* think about what implications that scholarship has for community engagement practitioners, for the goals of civic education (if this territory has not already been hashed and rehashed, as I suspect it might have been, even though the technology is relatively new)
* learn how to build a wiki
* build it
* meet with community members to consider whether it can serve any purposes for them (if I want it to be part of the community writing on that level--it might simply be an additional project that would prepare students for their community work)
* integrate it into the literacy course
Clearly there's some work to be done in this path. And how do I write an even halfway decent abstract in time--lots of reading and thinking. . .
What might wikis offer the Literacy, Culture, and Identity course?
Last night, during 3, 5, and 7 o'clock feeding sessions and in response to the ATTW cfp, I began to think about the intersections of civic engagement and technology and returned to a technology I've been interested in for some time for its communal knowledge making quality, the wiki. Admittedly, I have not read the scholarship on wikis, though I have visited that virtually mainstream wiki, the Wikipedia many times and have discussed the possibility of a teaching wiki for our department with Kevin.
My thought of last night was that I should make building a literacy wiki one of the projects of the new Literacy, Culture, and Identity course, and I should talk about the role of the wiki in community engagement writing at ATTW. Previously, I had thought about simply building a web-based literacy resource, something I was thinking about even in my grad program. Now, however, the wiki seems more ideal because it would allow multiple users to add to and adjust it. It would also raise lots of interesting literacy questions in and of itself--requiring a bit of engagement of the technology in the spirit of Cindy Selfe's constant urgings not to allow the technology to be invisibile, to question the social implications of the technology itself.
Oh, and, while this will make Kevin crazy, that leads me circuitously back to Birkerts who questions technology and its impact on the activity of reading. Is Birkerts so much more unfounded in his arguments than Plato/Socrates? Do we allow Plato the room to be nutty about a technology we take for granted simply because he lived so long ago and he is firmly planted in the canon about which we have stopped overtly warring?
The things I would need to do if I decided to pursue this route:
* read the scholarship on wikis to know what has been said about their use
* think about what implications that scholarship has for community engagement practitioners, for the goals of civic education (if this territory has not already been hashed and rehashed, as I suspect it might have been, even though the technology is relatively new)
* learn how to build a wiki
* build it
* meet with community members to consider whether it can serve any purposes for them (if I want it to be part of the community writing on that level--it might simply be an additional project that would prepare students for their community work)
* integrate it into the literacy course
Clearly there's some work to be done in this path. And how do I write an even halfway decent abstract in time--lots of reading and thinking. . .
What might wikis offer the Literacy, Culture, and Identity course?