Specific details for the conference can be found here:

http://www.socialmedia.ndsu.nodak.edu/?page_id=20

Kevin Kelly (2008) has suggested the first lesson of the Web is that we “have to get better at believing the impossible.” According to Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, the Web is only 5,000 days old and its growth to this point was unimaginable to those working with the Web just ten-plus years ago. Additionally, Tim Berners-Lee (2007) has argued “it is incumbent on all of us to understand what our role is in fostering continued growth, innovation, and vitality of the World Wide Web.” Kelly believes such innovation will make the Web the operating system in the future of computing and, in doing so, create a future Web that is inseparable from writing. In the spirit of these comments, we dedicate this issue to looking 5000 days ahead, to the future of computers and composition ten-plus years from now.

This special issue examines the theoretical, practical and pedagogical issues and implications of future versions and uses of the Web for the teaching of writing. The issue suggests what the relationship might be between computers and composition in the early years of the next decade—a vision for 2020—and beyond.

Questions to consider include the following:

1.     In what ways will enhancements in portability or mobility change how students receive information and compose with computer technologies and what, if anything, should composition teachers do to accommodate or recognize such changes in reading and writing?

2.     In what ways will the increasing individualization and customization of the Web, such as virtual worlds and personalized avatars, impact the teaching and learning of writing?

3.     In what ways will improvements in global access to the Web change the nature of composing with computers?

4.     In what ways will the Web and web applications become more ubiquitous in our lives, and how will the Web’s increased presence change the teaching of writing?

5.     In what ways will application genres evolve over the next decade and how might they change composing with computers?

6.     Which vision of the future Web is most promising/concerning for work in computers and composition?

7.     In what ways will semantic technologies and/or intelligent applications change the ways in which students access and use information in the process of composing with computers?

8.     In what ways will the assessment of writing change to accommodate developments of the Web?

The guest editors invite proposals that answer these or other questions regarding the future of the Web and its influence on the teaching of composition.

Proposals should be one page, single-spaced (approximately 500 words). Deadline for submission of proposals is July 1, 2010. Please send proposals via email to Randall McClure (randallmcclure@georgiasouthern.edu). Queries are welcome. Final manuscripts will be 15-30 pages in length, double-spaced. Manuscript deadline for accepted abstracts is September 15, 2010. Final manuscripts are scheduled to be due in February 2011, and the special issue is scheduled to be published in Fall 2011.

I had the pleasure of presenting in the CC this year in Louisville, and I am happy to say that it was one the best Cs experiences I have had so far.  My panel was well attended, and audience members asked lots of questions.  The moderator actually had to ask us to end Q and A because we ran out over our allotted time.  Here are a few details about how the CC works.  There are only two presenters per panel, each person getting 25 minutes to speak, which leaves lots of time for discussion.  Also, given the technological topics of these presentations, all presenters have access to computer projector equipment, which is not the case for regular Cs presentations.  The CFP deadline is usually well after the official Cs deadline.  In fact, the deadline comes after most people hear whether or not their Cs proposal was accepted or not.  Additionally, the CC is not part of the 1 presentation/1 speaking role rule at Cs, which means that it can be done in addition to any other speaking role you might have.

For budgetary reasons, this under-recognized component of the Cs is unfortunately not well publicized.  You won’t find any mention of it on the Cs website, and it is not mentioned in the conference program, though there usually are paper flyers available at the conference near where the official programs are given out.  If you are interested in giving a presentation on any topic related to the intersection of computers and composition/rhetoric, I hope that you’ll consider sending in a proposal for next year’s Computer Connection and that you’ll spread the word to others who might be interested as well.  Alternatively, if you don’t end up presenting at CC, look for the CC flyer at the conference when you register so you can come by to watch some of the presentations.

Here is the link to the Computers and Writing Clearinghouse website for more info on what the Computer Connection is all about and how you can submit a proposal.

http://computersandwriting.org/CCcall07

As shown in the Fall 2009 Computers and Composition Online special issue on Web 2.0, open source projects are a significant part of social media, especially media intended for education. Although some of Web 2.0 is open source, that overlap barely begins to cover the purpose, practice, and priorities that comprise open source in academia, especially for those who teach and research in composition studies. This special issue invites submissions centering on open source as it connects to writing and the teaching of writing.

Even now, five years since Computers and Composition Online published Laurie Taylor and Brendan Riley’s Open Source and Academia (Spring 2004), the open source movement grows in importance while at the same time remaining an under-the-radar stance, despite the significant inroads open source has made into writing pedagogy. At the heart of this lack of transparency is definition. What is or isn’t open source remains slippery. Scholars may see open source in academia as primarily an intellectual property issue and advocate Creative Commons use and more openness in scholarly publication. Others may see it as a software accessibility issue and support alternatives to proprietary software used in teaching, i.e., using Moodle instead of Blackboard or Open Office over Microsoft Word. Still others look to the rhetoric beneath the stance and and see open source as a continuation of the fundamental idea of academic freedom: in order to have freedom of expression, academics need to also control the ways their works are expressed, not outsource intellectual work to for-profit corporations that usually have different agendas than academics.

In this special issue of Computers and Composition Online, editors Lanette Cadle and Kristine Blair with guest editor Joe Erickson ask for webtexts that investigate the purpose, practice, or priorities needed for an open source  connection with writing theory or pedagogy. For the purposes of this issue, we will be using the most inclusive definition of open source possible and will consider, especially in the Virtual Classroom section, webtexts depicting assignments using free software that may not be purely open source, such as Google Wave, which is part of Google, but has opened the code for independent developers to use. Here are a few suggestions divided by sections:

Theory into Practice

This is where purpose will be examined, a place to ask—and answer—the why questions.

• Open source and academic freedom
• Defining open source
• An answer to the question, why would anyone give away software/code (why non-proprietary exists)
• Copyright, copyleft, or no copy: when copyright limits academic accessibility

• Collaborative programming as composition
• When is free truly free? The dilemma of free yet proprietary software

Virtual Classroom

Clearly, this is where case studies or how-to webtexts based on classroom practice will fit.

• Using an open source CMS (content management system)
• English Education majors and open source use
• When the classroom default is open source (Open Office vs. Microsoft Word, etc.)
• Assignments using FOSS (free OR open source software)

Professional Development

Open source is a huge issue for those interested in the larger issues of publication, ownership, and collaboration. Setting priorities and advocating priorities, including calls for action, would be a good fit here.

• Why are there no open source plagiarism detectors? Open source as a measure of usability in education.
• The open source university. What happens when a university consciously prefers open source

Reviews

Although book reviews are always welcome, this issue will be a very good place for software reviews. For examples of how this has been done in the past, see the Web 2.0 issue reviews of Open Office and Moodle. Suggested reviews include DrupalEd,  Sakai, Google Wave (highlight open source aspects of this project), Gimp, Zotero or any other software or social media that is open source (not proprietary) would be welcome. Please send a query.

Queries and submissions should be sent to Lanette Cadle at lanette.cadle@gmail.com, Kristine Blair at  kblair@bgnet.bgsu.eduor Joe Erickson at jericks8@gmail.com. Webtexts only—no word processor documents. Also, webtexts need to be produced using web authoring software such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage rather than created on a site such as Google Sites. Submissions need to be received by Friday, February 5, 2010 in order to allow time for peer review. Revisions due by Friday, May 7,  2010.

Call for Webtexts

Special Guest Edited Issue on Rhetorical Media and the Open-Door College

The central role of the Open-Door College English teacher is to provide learning opportunities that prepares a diverse body of students from across communities to transfer into four-year universities, become employable for vocational-technical and allied health positions, and also, be prepared to understand and engage themselves in civic duties. We use Open-Door college instead of Community College, Junior College, or Two-Year College, citing Mark Milliron’s essay “Saying Good-Bye to the Two-Year College,” in which he emphasizes the time it takes students to graduate or earn certificates in vocational-technical programs is contingent upon the individual students lives. Where two-years is manageable for some students, three or four years may be ideal for another student who enrolled at the same time.

English faculty teaching at Open-Door Colleges strive to create courses that challenge students to recognize common rhetorical situations that they will encounter after our classes and teach them innovative, and perhaps uncommon responses to those situations. However, new media texts have provided a change in how students will choose to answer common situations and with that comes a challenge to the Open-Door College English teacher. The change is our traditional and non-traditional/returning students are learning how to produce and consume interactive, digital, aural, and web 2.0 texts without us. Our students are creating and responding to rhetorical situations of which many Open-Door College teachers are barely aware.

In this call for Webtexts, we ask that participants conceive rhetorical media as texts created and interpreted from three valuable perspectives: New Media texts, Alternative Media texts, and converging media texts. New Media, here, references how students and teachers experience composition and other forms of digitally-mediated communication (Gitelman 2008); alternative media references how students and teachers use their texts to create and positively transform political and cultural situations (Coyer and Downmunt 2008); converging media here is an open-door college’s approach to Henry Jenkins’ (2008) theories and applications of media convergences, or where old and new media come together to create stronger, more meaningful communication situations.

In this special edition of Computers and Composition Online, we are faced with examining obvious challenges to the Open-Door College teacher:

1. To figure out what issues and obstacles specific to the Open-Door College environment keep many Open-Door College teachers from addressing Rhetorical Media texts and the situations and responses they create. Is it lack of technological or pedagogical resources? Not enough time to read/create new scholarship about Rhetorical Media? Ultimately, how might we better encourage and support Open-Door College teachers to learn and teach Rhetorical Media in their English courses?

2. To address how learning and teaching Rhetorical Media can better prepare our diverse bodies of students to respond to new audiences and situations in their personal, professional, and civic lives.

3. And, to ask ourselves and answer if teaching and learning about Rhetorical Media compositions can bring us closer together as a faculty who cares about the success of our students.

For the Open-Door College student and teacher, Rhetorical Media compositions must be experienced in a ways that benefit our communities. Some pertinent questions that can be asked and answered here are:

Theory into Practice:

* How and why are RM texts and technologies logical “fits” to the Open-Door College purpose and student population?

* In which ways do RM compositions create learning outcomes that bring faculty from across our own departments and other disciplines together?

* How can RM compositions add to what constitutes good writing and reading skills at the Open-Door College?

* Can assessing RM compositions help Open-Door College teachers better assess the needs of our students?

* How can reading and composing RM texts prepare vocational-technical students and other member of the community to become marketable in a recession?

* Can creating and communicating with a RM composition reshape the identity or opportunities of a non-traditional re-entry student?

* What are some ways that RM compositions have already enriched our communities? And, how can composing and reading these texts strengthen the reciprocal relationships and expectations between schools, local employers, community outreach programs, and Open-Door Colleges must remain strong in order for our communities to succeed?

* Can teaching RM assist a college in retention?

Virtual Classroom:

* How do instructors incorporate RM texts and assignments into their classes?

* What are examples of student, or instructor and student, RM texts?

* Can teaching RM in developmental composition courses create stronger bridges for crossing over to Credit courses?

* Can teaching RM texts create new relationships between ESL learners and the English language?

Professional Development:

* How do RM texts and technologies help us develop professionally?

* How can RM texts change the way Open-Door College teachers adopt and use textbooks?

* How can learning communities benefit from New Media, Alternative Media, and Converging Media experiences?

Timeline

* Proposals due: October 15, 2010

* Feedback on proposals: November 15, 2010

* Full drafts of manuscripts/webtexts: February 15, 2011

* Editors feedback: April 1, 2011

* Revision submissions: June 15, 2011

Send submissions to guest editors:

Matthew Kim: matthew.aaron.kim@gmail.com
Shelley Rodrigo: shelley.rodrigo@gmail.com

Rhetoric/Composition/Play: How Electronic Games Mediate Composition Theory and Practice (and Vice Versa)

Computer and video games continue to inundate the entertainment market, and culture along with it. Traditional text games, adventure games, first-person shooters, the immersive worlds of role-playing games (massively multiplayer or otherwise), simulations, “casual” games such as solitaire, and even web advertisements posing as games have formed a landscape rich with opportunities to examine composition-rhetoric’s history, theory, pedagogy, and practice, where scholars can use, examine, and imagine the impact of games and gaming on writing.

Writing and rhetoric permeate games and game communities, and as a recent Pew study found, the civic engagement of gamers is greater than that of non-gamers, with higher instances of players considering moral and ethical issues as well as social responsibility — and in many cases, communicating with others about these issues. Engaged writing is also connected to the way gamers learn the complicated strategies, tactics, and rhetorics within game worlds, while games are increasingly used as tools to teach writing.

Rhetoric/Composition/Play will be an edited collection designed for scholars new to computer/video games as well as those who are more expertly versed. The book will consist of academic essays that assess, theorize, and contextualize computer/video games vis-a-vis composition-rhetoric. We invite 900-1200-word proposals for this proposed collection.

Specifically, we invite proposals that investigate the following (although the lists are not exhaustive):

1) Rhetorical theory and computer/video games (Theory: Rhetorical/Critical/Ideological/Cultural)

• How do various rhetorical theories intersect with game and play theories?
• How does playing games foster rhetorical readings of gaming spaces for the gamer?
• How does playing games necessitate certain rhetorical strategies and practices within game worlds and/or communities?
• What kinds of rhetorical agents and/or agency does playing games construct?
• How do other theoretical and critical approaches intersect with game and play theories?
• How do rhetorical, critical,ideological, and cultural approaches help us better understand the impact of games in literacy practices?
• What roles do games play as objects of production/ consumption?
• What are other assessments and critiques of the intersections between rhetorical and critical theory and computer/video games?

2) Composition and computer/video games (Practice: Writing/Learning/Playing)

• How and to what extent are processes of gaming, playing, and writing similar or divergent?
• How do game design and writing as design overlap?
• What are other assessments and critiques of the connections between writing and computer/video games?

3) Writing pedagogy and computer/video games (Praxis: Pedagogy/Composition/Gaming)

• How can electronic games help us reconceptualize classroom spaces?
• How can gaming worlds become pedagogical spaces?
• How can electronic games inform traditional writing practice?
• How can electronic games inform a critical, cultural pedagogy that facilitates students’ critical reading and rewriting of game spaces?
• What are other examinations of pedagogies that use electronic games to teach rhetorical and/or writing concepts and practices?
• What are some critiques, examinations, historicizations of current pedagogical trajectories of using off-the-shelf games, serious games, games-for-learning, and simulation in the writing classroom?
• What are the pedagogical differences between teaching with a game designed specifically for pedagogical purposes and teaching with a game designed originally for entertainment?

Send 900-1200-word proposals with brief author bio (with university affiliation) via email to Matthew S. S. Johnson (email: matjohn at siue dot edu) AND Richard & Rebekah Colby (email: rshultzc at du dot edu). Deadline for proposals is 15 January 2010. Final manuscript length will be approximately 15-35 pages (standard,double-spaced). Queries welcome.

Writing instructors who teach online or in networked classrooms are embracing highly collaborative Web 2.0 applications in their writing pedagogy. This essay collection, under contract with Fountainhead Press in the X Series for Professional Development, seeks to provide writing instructors with examples of writing classroom pedagogy that has creatively and effectively used new Web 2.0 applications in composition courses (such as FYC, Research Writing, Basic Writing, Argumentative Writing,and so forth). Accepted essays will blend theory and practice, explaining why particular Web 2.0 applications can be helpful to students as they create their texts and providing advice to teachers on overcoming challenges when working with particular Web 2.0 applications.

The essays should 1) provide examples of assignments that use particular Web 2.0 applications (whether one at a time or in conjunction with one another), 2) include a theory-driven explanation of how and when these applications fit into the course and semester, 3) incorporate examples of student work that demonstrate the usefulness of the Web 2.0 applications, and 4) speculate about the types of infrastructures and resources needed in order to teach with Web 2.0 applications.

I invite manuscripts from writing instructors who can address the goals above and who are interested in sharing their pedagogy with teaching assistants, new teachers, or those teachers new to Web 2.0 technology. Manuscripts should be sent to Claire Lutkewitte via email (.doc or .rtf format) by December 30, 2009. My email address is celutkewitte@bsu.edu.

Please refer to the Fountainhead X Series style guide at http://
www.fountainheadpress.com/english/XSeries_Style_Guide.pdf
for specific requirements, especially noting the requirements for
permissions to use student work.

Here are a few examples of the Web 2.0 applications
and usages that essays could emphasize:
• Blogs open to the public.
• Photo sharing applications, such as Flickr
and Photobucket.
• Video sharing applications, such as You-
Tube and stashSpace.com.
• Social Networking applications, such as
Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.
• Google applications, such as Google Docs
and Google Notebook.
• Wiki applications for creating/revising
course curriculum and sharing pedagogy or
for having students write collaboratively,
do peer review, brainstorm topics, and keep
track of deadlines.
• Folksonomies, such as del.icio.us, for social
bookmarking and tagging.
• Web authoring applications, such as Weebly,
to help students create digital portfolios.
• Data Mashups, such as Flickrvision, to
assist students in combining data in useful
ways.

In Participatory Popular Culture and Literacy Across Borders we will explore how students’ online literacy practices intersect with online popular culture. The book will draw chapters from literacy and popular culture scholars from a variety of countries to illustrate and analyze how literacy practices that are mediated through and influenced by popular culture create both opportunities and tensions for secondary and university students. We invite theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical essays for the collection. Areas of participatory popular culture may include, but not be limited to, fan fiction, fan forums, video, blogs, social networking sites, remixes, music creation or downloading, video games, comics and graphic novels, and multi-person role-playing games.

Possible areas of inquiry include:

• How do students negotiate and interpret popular culture texts from outside their culture?
• How do students draw from international popular culture when creating their own texts?
• What literacy practices do students engage in with international popular culture?
• How are these literacy practices multimodal?
• How are such literacy practices with online popular culture changing students’ conceptions of texts?
• How is popular culture shaped by participatory audience members from around the world?
• What discourse conventions shape international online conversations and texts about popular culture?
• How do material conditions and questions of access and agency influence literacy practices with international popular culture?
• What role does language play in these literacy practices?
• How do issues of politics, power, and resistance influence such literacy practices and texts?
• How are practices of sampling, textual poaching, and bricolage enacted in different cultures?
• What role do such practices play in considerations of literacy classroom pedagogy?
• How do such practices shape rhetorical concepts such as audience, genre, and authorship?
• How do issues of identity (gender, social class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age) connect to these online literacy practices and texts?

Please send a 2-3 page proposal for your essay to Bronwyn T. Williams, University of Louisville, USA, (bronwyn.williams@louisville.edu) and Amy A. Zenger, American University of Beirut, Lebanon (az07@aub.edu.lb). The deadline for proposals is 15 January 2010. Chapters selected for the collection will run 20-25 pages (5,000 to 7,500 words). Please feel free to contact the editors with questions about possible proposals.

As shown in the Fall 2009 Computers and Composition Online special issue on Web 2.0, open source projects are a significant part of social media, especially media intended for education. Although some of Web 2.0 is open source, that overlap barely begins to cover the purpose, practice, and priorities that comprise open source in academia, especially for those who teach and research in composition studies. This special issue invites submissions centering on open source as it connects to writing and the teaching of writing.

Even now, five years since Computers and Composition Online published Laurie Taylor and Brendan Riley’s Open Source and Academia (Spring 2004), the open source movement grows in importance while at the same time remaining an under-the-radar stance, despite the significant inroads open source has made into writing pedagogy. At the heart of this lack of transparency is definition. What is or isn’t open source remains slippery. Scholars may see open source in academia as primarily an intellectual property issue and advocate Creative Commons use and more openness in scholarly publication. Others may see it as a software accessibility issue and support alternatives to proprietary software used in teaching, i.e., using Moodle instead of Blackboard or Open Office over Microsoft Word. Still others look to the rhetoric beneath the stance and and see open source as a continuation of the fundamental idea of academic freedom: in order to have freedom of expression, academics need to also control the ways their works are expressed, not outsource intellectual work to for-profit corporations that usually have different agendas than academics.

In this special issue of Computers and Composition Online, editors Lanette Cadle and Kristine Blair with guest editor Joe Erickson ask for webtexts that investigate the purpose, practice, or priorities needed for an open source  connection with writing theory or pedagogy. For the purposes of this issue, we will be using the most inclusive definition of open source possible and will consider, especially in the Virtual Classroom section, webtexts depicting assignments using free software that may not be purely open source, such as Google Wave, which is part of Google, but has opened the code for independent developers to use. Here are a few suggestions divided by sections:

Theory into Practice

This is where purpose will be examined, a place to ask—and answer—the why questions.

• Open source and academic freedom
• Defining open source
• An answer to the question, why would anyone give away software/code (why non-proprietary exists)
• Copyright, copyleft, or no copy: when copyright limits academic accessibility

• Collaborative programming as composition
• When is free truly free? The dilemma of free yet proprietary software

Virtual Classroom

Clearly, this is where case studies or how-to webtexts based on classroom practice will fit.

• Using an open source CMS (content management system)
• English Education majors and open source use
• When the classroom default is open source (Open Office vs. Microsoft Word, etc.)
• Assignments using FOSS (free OR open source software)

Professional Development

Open source is a huge issue for those interested in the larger issues of publication, ownership, and collaboration. Setting priorities and advocating priorities, including calls for action, would be a good fit here.

• Why are there no open source plagiarism detectors? Open source as a measure of usability in education.
• The open source university. What happens when a university consciously prefers open source

Reviews

Although book reviews are always welcome, this issue will be a very good place for software reviews. For examples of how this has been done in the past, see the Web 2.0 issue reviews of Open Office and Moodle. Suggested reviews include DrupalEd,  Sakai, Google Wave (highlight open source aspects of this project), Gimp, Zotero or any other software or social media that is open source (not proprietary) would be welcome. Please send a query.

Queries and submissions should be sent to Lanette Cadle at lanette.cadle@gmail.com, Kristine Blair at  kblair@bgnet.bgsu.edu or Joe Erickson at jericks8@gmail.com. Webtexts only—no word processor documents. Also, webtexts need to be produced using web authoring software such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage rather than created on a site such as Google Sites. Submissions need to be received by Friday, February 5, 2010 in order to allow time for peer review. Revisions due by Friday, May 7,  2010.

Here is the link for more information:

http://class.georgiasouthern.edu/writling/GRN/2009/index.html