Updates

Student Work web magazine: last call for submissions!

Calling all those who teach English courses at UWM!

Last summer, you may have seen a call for submissions of excellent undergraduate and graduate work to be included in the department’s Student Work web magazine, spring 2012 issue. If you’ve already nominated students for inclusion, thank you! If you have more student projects you’d like to nominate, or if you are hearing about this for the first time…

The magazine showcases excellent undergraduate *and graduate* work in English courses across all tracks and plans. If any of your students’ work from spring 2011 or fall 2011 deserves to be showcased, please send me (sulliv97@uwm.edu) the student’s name and email address, the name of the piece (if you still have it), and the course it’s from by Monday, April 16. I can then contact students for their permission and their files, as well as statements about their work.

We’re interested in essays, poems, stories, images, digital texts, web applications, videos, crafts, comics… you name it: if it can be digitized (which might mean scanning/photographing something), we can use it.

Work from THIS semester would go in the spring 2013 issue — stay tuned for more info about that, or feel free to send those nominations now.

Thanks for your help in making our department an encouraging presence in the lives of students.

spring 2011 workshops

*updated*

Holy cow! We’re announcing spring workshops when it’s actually spring-ish in Milwaukee. (And by that, I mean it’s rainy and in the 30s. But crocuses are coming up!)

Here’s what we have cooking on the stove:

4/1: 2-3:30 pm: iMovie: Rachael Sullivan will walk you through the basics of iMovie and facilitate a discussion of how and why you might have your students do animated writing, mashups, multimodal composing, remixes or shorts in your English classes.

4/21: 12:30-1:45 pm: Gaming, World Building, and Narrative: Trent Hergenrader will show us how blogs, Google docs, wikis and other technologies are at work in his special section of English 236: Introductory Topics in Creative Writing.

4/22: 1-2:30 pm: ePortfolios and Multimodal Composition: Matt Russell from the Learning Technology Center (LTC) will present ePortfolio, a digital portfolio program integrated with D2L, and discuss how and why you might use it to facilitate multimodal composing in your English classes.

where I am on the internet today

running in the background: Al Jazeera English

via HASTAC: DML Central (and following that: Cathy Davidson’s 21st century literacies class and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s website) and John Holland on teacher quality

sweet new journal isues blowing my mind

This is probably redundant — if you ever check this blog, you probably keep up on journals like CCC and Computers & Composition. But just in case you haven’t checked them out for a while, I highly recommend going to the library or its website or your not-yet-sorted-through mail pile to fish out these journals.

CCC‘s new special issue on the future of rhetoric and composition includes, among other things, Steven Fraiberg’s “Composition 2.0,” which tackles multimodal/multilingual literacy in a high-tech Israeli workplace. Computers & Composition‘s March issue is devoted entirely to Composition 2.0.

There’s all kinds of good stuff here, but I thought I’d highlight two articles:

• The first touches on remix, which we’ve addressed in a past workshop. Abby Dubisar’s article “Palin/Pathos/Peter Griffin: Political Video Remix and Composition Pedagogy” promises all kinds of mixy and mashy greatness.
• And just in case you’re a writing instructor still looking for inspiration or justification for getting on board with digital technologies in your English pedagogy, let me suggest J. Elizabeth Clark’s “The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy.”

Of course there’s more — but there’s always more. So what’s been blowing your mind lately?