Computers and Writing is always a fabulous conference but this year was especially wonderful. The beauty of UC Davis certainly played a part in that.
I so much appreciate how welcoming and encouraging attendees are. Whether one is a graduate student, like me, or a first-time attendee, or a seasoned pro, there are always opportunities for dialogue, for engagement, and for support.
At the start of the conference, Joyce Walker, who is moving to ISU, identified newcomers to the conference and encouraged attendees to do their best to support new attendees by attending at least one newcomer session. It is this type of sensitivity that makes this conference so very good.
At a Town Hall meeting, Jeff Grabill told us that he has been has been thinking a lot about sustainability. He talked about the need to have shared concerns and asked a number of questions: What is really at stake? What do digital processes look like? What is the value of the technological investment? What is precisely digital rhetoric? These are big questions that we should be thinking about. Grabill noted how we talk a great deal about applications but less so about platform structures and contends that we need to think more about platforms, particularly as they relate to sustainability.
I can understand Grabill’s concern. The lure of new technologies is great. So: to get it out of my system, I’ll list below some of the new applications and practices that really inspired me, while agreeing that we do need to continue to think about platforms:
1. Twitter
Many were twittering while people were presenting. Overall, this was quite fun. I am still learning twitter etiquette though. One thing I’ve been thinking about: twitter critiques don’t twitter away and need to be made with the same diplomacy that we use in ftf conversations. A new technology you might want to try is TweetDeck—http://tweetdeck.com/beta/. It can help you keep track of your tweets and your facebook postings too.
2. Barbara Ganley reminded us of the importance of playing with new technologies. She got me interested in Prezi — http://prezi.com/ — “the zooming editor for stunning presentations. All online. She told me that she had just begun using it. You’d never know this from looking at her prezi presentation — http://prezi.com/108186/ — “Ecotones and Crossroads: Reimagining the Spaces of Learning in an In-between Time” I really like the fact that she made her presentation available online. It gives us all a chance to think about some of ideas.
3. Madeline Sorapure also introduced me to some new tools. Her excellent presentation, “Playing with Data,” introduced me to a number of ways that students can visualize data. They can study their iTunes music habits and present them visually as well as study more global and social issues.
Her are some links (many more are included on Sorapure’s presentation.
• Microcosm — http://mycro.media.mit.edu/ —Microcosm allows you to share snippets of the minutiae of daily.
• Bedpost — http://www.bedposted.com/ —can give you some insight into your sex life. Not sure how useful this one would be in the classroom 
4. For those of you who would like to hear some of the sessions, you can do so at
the iTunes U archive of C&W sessions: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/ucdavis-public.2193375483.02193375496
June 25, 2009 at 2:00 am
[...] writing blogs I read, I suppose because a lot of that crowd wasn’t there. There’s this Computers and Writing post at a blog called “NWP Walkabout;” there’s this post at “Amber’s UIWP Blog;” and Dennis Jerz has lots and lots [...]
June 27, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I think the elision point/power/danger aptly characterizes the experience of the twitter feed during the keynote, much like a similar experience at SXSW with Sarah Lacy’s interview of Mark Zuckerman. A posting at Brad Ideas provides a view from inside the session, concluding that the session went awry for good old fashioned audience issues that were clear through good old fashioned backchannels like murmuring, body language, commenting. But unlike these channels, the twitter feed remains, creates its own sensation, and almost consumes the original event on its own rhetorical journey.
From Brad Ideas: “As backchannels grow, they might well make it easier to lose an audience. They can embolden hecklers who now will have the courage to know that others share their view. But to lose a whole audience you have to have to turn them against you in bulk.” I think this is largely true. So what is interesting to me is less the impact on the event (interesting as that is) and more the impact on the after-event. Part of the issue in these back-channel rebellions is the degree to which a sense of ‘we’ is formed among the audience. Twitter accelerates that for the audience in the moment (or, more properly, some of the audience) and allows for virtual participation in the ‘we’. I could imagine, then, that the twitter rebellion might be stronger in cases where a strong sense of common identity exists among audience members and followers, and of course contributes to its maintenance and development.
Does the twitter feed make a group more or less permeable to newcomers? More or less open to internal debate? More or less open to dialog with others outside the ‘we’? It will be interesting to watch this, I think.