June 7, 2006

Talking to Colleagues and Administrators
Gail Hawisher (or here) and Kris Blair (or here or here) led this first session of the morning.

Kris talked about electronic thesis and dissertations at Bowling Green. Gail talked about a writing with video course.

Kris assumes that everyone agrees that we want to integrate multimodal composing into the writing curriculum, but that where we want to move to is integrating multimodal composing into all areas of English studies.

Also, there is a need to educate that electronic thesis and dissertations are more than Word documents saved as a PDF and submitted electronically.

Gail is Director of The Center for Writing Studies at UIUC. She spoke about the Writing with Video course at UIUC. Here is an April 2006 news article about the course: New U of I video writing class draws diverse group of students.

Gail asks, “Should a FYC course sit in the English department? Or, should it sit in an Art/Design course?” At UIUC, there was a long process of collaboration that enabled the course to come to fruition. WITS and WAC networks already in place helped Gail connect with others and get things going.

By next spring, they hope to have 8 of these courses up and running!!

Cindy recommended Postmodern Ecology.

Gail said that other disciplines may have the resources to support these initiatives and pay or contribute to paying TAs.

Kris said that when video projects are created, the finished projects can help spread the message that the work that English Studies does is more than just word processing and thus, we need better technological resources.

Heidi McKee recommended Sustainable Computer Environments as very helpful when she was talking with her colleagues about establishing tech initiatives.

Gail gave a handout on doing collaborative video work. Our group of six put together a small video clip in about 15 minutes. It was really really rough, but we were able to do it with all six of us working together. I was amazed that we were able to do it.

Then, in one of the video clips that we watched again, Cindy talks about how if we don’t start teaching multimodalitity literacy, we’re going to become very narrow teachers of just alphabetic literacy.

Is that were we want to end up? I don’t think so.