Greetings!

Our plan for this term's TWIT/Computer-Mediated Pedagogies sessions is to combine readings, discussions, and hands-on activities. We'll start the schedule with paired readings that work together in different ways (weeks 2-5), then begin a series of teaching demonstrations and activities in the CCLI and in Walker 134.

So if you have a teaching activity or demonstration that you'd like to practice, to invent, or to share, please volunteer to sign up for weeks 6-15. Conversely, if you want to learn about a particular platform, software, or courseware, we'll find someone to come in and teach it!

The weeks we don't meet in the CCLI we'll meet in 134 and reflect on those practices and activities, and plan and rehearse our C&W presentations.

TWIT meets at noon on Fridays.

This Friday -- week 2 (readings will be on Anne's door by Wednesday): Some History

Selfe, Cynthia and Gail Hawisher. "The Rhetoric of Technology and the
Electronic Writing Class." College Composition and Communication, 1991, 42(1), p. 55-65.

Selfe, Cynthia and Billie B. J. Wahlstrom. "An Emerging Rhetoric of
Collaboration: Computers, Collaboration, and the Composing Process." Collegiate Microcomputer, 1986, 4(4), p. 289-299.

Week 3: Pedagogy! 

Romano, Susan. (1993). The egalitarianism narrative: Whose story? Which yardstick? Computers and Composition, 10(3), 528.
(also online @
http://corax.cwrl.utexas.edu/cac/archives/v10/10_3_html/10_3_1_Romano.html)

Takayoshi, Pamela. (1994). Building new networks from the old: Womens experiences with electronic communications. Computers and Composition, 11, 21-36.

Week 4: Our Teaching, Learning, and Work Spaces:

cancelled: moved to week 7, eh.

Week 5: Access Issues

postponed for one reason or another; moved to week 8. 
no need for alarm. 

well, maybe a little.

w/ Dickie Selfe @ Elon College: 

We'll still meet at noon: go to http://www.hu.mtu.edu:8000/, log on as a
Guest, or via your regular account, and type @join Dickie.

Sustainable Professional Development
"Life-long Learning:  Sustain THAT!"

I hope participants in this workshop will share strategies for sustaining technology- rich professional development efforts. This morning, Elon workshoppers hav been considering the technologies they would like to use and why they want to use them. We have also tried to develop strategies for maintaining a robust professional development program.

We look forward to sharing ideas on any of those topics as well as the following: We all know that the personal investment in time and energy to keep up with new techno-pedagogies is substantial. Our main question
for this discussion, then, is this:

• How do we sustain our own interests in technology-rich pedagogies over time?
• What keeps us interested and fascinated in the potential that new systems offer?
• How do we maintain a critical, thoughtful approach to technology as we play with all the bells and whistles?

OTHER QUESTIONS:

why bother with the extra work load?

what technologies shall we use?

what audiences can we imagine for our students?

Moran, Charles. "Access: The A-Word in Technology Studies." In Hawisher & Selfe (eds), Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. NCTE, 1999.

Reynolds, Thomas, J. and Charles R. Lewis. "The Changing Topography of Computer Access for Composition Students." Computers and Composition 14 (1997): 269-278.

Monroe, Barbara. "Re-Membering Mama: The Female Body Embodied and Disembodied  Communication." Feminist Cyberscapes : Mapping
Gendered Academic Spaces (New Directions in Computers and Composition Studies.) Ablex, 1999.

Richard J. Selfe with Cynthia L. Selfe and Johndan Johnson-Eilola. "Our
Pal Penelope: Weaving and Un-Weaving Models of Theory, Practice, and Research for Designing and Operating Computer-Supported Writing Facilities," in Approaches to Computer Classrooms: Learning from Practical Experience. ed. Linda Meyers, SUNY, 1993.

Today's TWIT will inaugurate the hands-on activity portion for the term. We'll start by meeting in 134, begin a discussion on the ways we currently teach in the CCLI and the ways we'd *want* to teach; we'll develop some activities together that we can engage, connect to the readings we've done, and begin to assess. Also, Dawn Hayden would like to gather some information about possible physical reconfigurations of the CCLI and has a survey she'd like to distribute.

Hope to see you there!

In today's TWIT, we'll look at Adobe's Portable Document Format
(PDF) software known as Acrobat. With this software, you can convert Word, Pagemaker, and HTML files into a document that is consistent in
cross-platform use; you can also scan text from books or articles into
a PDF for classroom use.

And since our goal is to tie these hands-on activities with the readings
we've done this term, we might see some questions emerge quickly: access, support, training, rhetorical analyses of the little Acrobat guy
who flies across the top of the screen, digital rights management &
copyright law, design constraints and possibilities ...

We'll start at noon in Walker 134, and maybe make our way across the hall to the CCLI at some point.

Hope to see you there.

For this Friday's session, Keith West has generously offered to lead a
workshop on how to password protect files and directories for online use.
This will be helpful for instructors who want to put copyrighted materials
online for course use now or in the future.

The library is also offering online reserves, for which they will scan
book chapters and journal articles and make them available to students
registered in your course via their online catalog (Voyager):
http://www.lib.mtu.edu/jrvp/libservices/coursereserve/ereserve/ereserve.htm

We'll start in room 134 at noon, and if Keith leads us over to the CCLI
for some hands-on practice, you can find us there.

Subject: This Week's TWIT Session: Making & working with CDs ...

This Friday at noon, superstar STC students Lucas Baker and Jon Pechta
will demonstrate how to place materials onto a CD.

Various other verbs have emerged for that activity: "pressing a
CD"; "burning a CD"; "copying" to a CD.  "Making" seems to keep us firmly in the craft and rhetorical traditions, so we'll go with that for now.

Jon and Lucas will also explain how folks can purchase blank CDs from the STC chapter, which I understand go for the jaw-droppingly low price of $2.00 each (CDs, not STC chapters) and hold 650MB worth of data.

Since it's near the end of the term, this will be a useful and productive
session for those ruminating on the best ways to backup or save files.

We'll meet at noon on Friday on the MAC side of the CCLI.

Week 15: Lunch! :)