pz-writing.net

Introduction to Drupal

IGI Global has announced the upcoming release of Design and Implementation of Educational Games, which I co-edited with Diane Wilcox. The book is coming out at the end of March but is available for pre-order now, both on Amazon and on the publisher's website. I'd like to thank all the contributors to this collection and, of course, Diane, for being a terrific co-editor. Coneniently, if you click on the link on the left, you can pre-order the book from Amazon.

I have missed the last two CCCC gatherings, so I am quite excited to finally be going this year. My presentation will be on innovative and sustainable models of academic and professional publishing and will detail the work we have been doing on Writing Spaces. For the panel, I am in the distinguished company  of Charlie Lowe, Dave Blakeseley and Jim Porter. I am excited--this is an excellent group to be a part of.

On a related note, getting a hotel room for this CCCC has been next to impossible. Don't know about other institutions, but we had not been authorized to book travel until mid-February, by which time all three "conference" hotels appeared to be sold out. As a result, I am staying in Indiana. Luckily, it is only a couple of miles from the conference. :)

Here is the news article
from, you guessed it, the Drupal site. At the risk of sounding like
someone whose enthusiasm for open source content management and web
design platforms is off the charts, I am guessing that whoever is
responsible for White House's IT needs, might have seen something in
Drupal than more traditional web packages did not have. To
contextualize this a bit, Blackboard had been on a blitz crieg arguing
that ope source systems are just "not as secure" as commercial ones.
Well, I think they probably had a thought or two about security over at
the WH when making this move.

An update on the graduate symposium: we now have a functional website, www.communicationsymposium.org. While some content is still being added to it, it is is now possible (and desirable) to submit proposals and via the website. Coming soon are links to online symposium registration and other online goodies.

Here is the call for proposals. The website is now being designed by the graduate students themselves and will be up and running in the next couple of weeks.

Graduate Symposium on Communication James Madison University Harrisonburg, VA
“Communication in the 21st Century: Obstacles and Opportunities” Friday, April 16, 2010

The School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University welcomes proposals from graduate students in any discipline for a one-day symposium.

The symposium will explore all facets of communication; from the way it is taught in the classroom to the way it shapes our society. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• applications of communication theories to 21st-century communication practice
  
• communication and new media
• communication and media convergence
  
• visual communication
• multi-modal and multimedia communication (visual, verbal, and audio)
  
• 21st-century theory and practice of web communication
  
• intercultural communication in a globalized world
  
• 21st-century technical and scientific communication: issues, problems, perspectives.
  

Formats for presentations will include 15-minute panel papers, research posters, and multimedia displays. A website providing more information about the symposium and serving as a repository for abstracts and presentations will be available by the beginning of November (a URL will be provided in subsequent calls).
The keynote speaker for the symposium is Dr. James Dubinsky, Director of the Center for Student Engagement and Community Partnerships at Virginia Tech and the former director of their professional writing program. He is the president of the Association for Business Communication and the editor of the volume Teaching Technical Communication.

Proposals for presentations must be submitted electronically as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format by Monday, December 7 to kleinmj@jmu.edu. Please indicate which type of format presentation your proposal addresses.

This is almost as good as a suggestion for a "spam casserole" recipe that appears after you open your spam box in Gmail. So, should I self-publish or not? Hmm...

Over the years, I have intermittently used audio to comment on student writing. I have used it in both face-to-face and in online classes. The students seem to like it, and there seems to be substantial research that supports the benefits of this way of responding, as opposed to scribbling notes on the margins, or even typing on a draft. The main benefit, according to this research, seems to be that student writers tend to see such aural feedback as more "holistic." They look for a "general impression" about their writing on the part of the instructor rather than getting stuck on mistakes and comments on writing's minutiae. Of course, there are stages in the writing process when you _are_ looking for them to pay attention to those minutiae, but not always. On the instructor's end, audio comments allow for more extensive and detailed feedback than typing or writing by hand would typically allow.

But how to do it technically? In the past, I have used drop.io, which is a free service which allows you to uploads large media files and then send the link to a an e-mail address. That worked file but I felt like the process of responding and sending the mp3 file links was sort of separate from the process of reading and seeing the paper online.

This time, I have been experimenting with Riffly, a Drupal module which allow to embed audio and video content into Drupal posts. I think I am going to respond to the next batch of student papers using Riffly right there, on my Drupal-powered class site. I am sticking with audio for this one, so no talking heads.

The second presentation today is by Scott Pobiner who is talking about designing for collaboration. So far, his argument seems to be that we need 3D spaces for effective collaboration, which is ironic because, through no fault of his own, he is speaking from behind a 2D interface of Adobe Connect. We are now looking at a picture of his face, Powerpoint slides, a chat box with a bunch of people chatting, and an interactive poll he created for people to chime in while he is talking.

This is pretty cool: he is analyzing different ways in which people create "physical interfaces" for work and collaboration, by using their bodies (hands, gestures, etc). I wonder if he is moving towards asserting that computer interfaces are too flat. Second Life anyone? I know, I know, it is fake...

So, yes, back to the thesis. It was that (that traditional interfaces are too "flat." But it was also that the physical spaces in which people learn matter. This may not be a new assertion to many readers of this post, but it will be new for some designers of educational buildings that I have worked in.

I know that this is probably Twitter material rather than a blog post, but I do not tweet, so here goes. There is something weird about those live/online events where a group of people gather in a room and watch/hear a presenter with a bunch of Powerpoint slides glide in front of them on a big screen. I am currently at the Educause ELI focus group conducted here at JMU through Adobe Connect. I am hoping for some lively face to face discussions with the people in the room, after the presentation is over.  I am wondering whether a better way for these types of events would not be a live video conference via Skype of some such application, rather than the sound/Powerpoint combination. Oh, and by the way, the topic of the current presentation is assessment of student work online. Also, it seems to me that people who give talks about, essentially, online instructional design, should design more engaging visual presentations than slide after slide of bullet point lists.

Now, to the substance of the talk. A significant part of the talk was dedicated to building trust among collaborating learners. I think this is a topic that is often overlooked in literature, with many scholars, especially in rhetoric and composition, tending to think about collaboration as this "warm and fuzzy" process in which everyone agrees on everything and things go smoothly. I am glad that this speaker mentions the notion that collaborating learners and writers "do not have to like one another" and still get the work done. Conflict and conflict resolution are important parts of the collaborative process. What is even more timely, that one of my graduate students who is also present at this session, jut blogged about this on our class's website.