a continuation of my previous two posts:
Friday:
F.06 old + old = new: Writing Multimedia, Remixing Culture, Remixing Identity
Some graduate students and an undergraduate student from Michigan State shared some really interesting ideas and experiences of their own literacy and analyses of some digital artifacts that interrogated issues of copyright, remixing, design, race, and culture. I thought a lot of their ideas were pretty interesting, and they shared their bibliography (yay!), but I didn’t take great notes. I might email one of them, Matt Penniman, and ask a question regarding remixing and cities, since his talk was pretty interesting and made me think about top-down approaches to city-planning and the valuation or devaluation of local cultures and economies (he drew from Richard Florida’s Cities and the Creative Class).
G.06 The Rhetoric of Recovery: Reconstructing Palestinian History Before 1948
I didn’t write down which speaker I took notes from, so it was either Anis Bawarshi (University of Washington, Seattle) or Matthew Abraham (DePaul University, Chicago), but his discussion of the marginalization and stigmatization of academics in the USA who discuss Palestine and speak against Israeli imperialism was pretty interesting. He made the case that perhaps Palestinians and Arabs serve as the “new Jews,“ and that perhaps Israel now serves as a wall for Europe against the East/Orient.
H.04 Representing Identities in Religious Discourses: Proclamation, Silence, and Social Responsibility
I went to this talk to listen to my professor Vicki Tolar Burton and her talk “Community Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: New Lives for the Poor.“ I’d say the talks during this session were interesting and well-presented, but I didn’t really take notes on it, and nothing inspired comes to mind.
I.31 Rhetorical Agility and Online Identity
Sara Jameson and my talk, “Who Are We/Who Are They? Self-Presentation by GTA’s Online“ (subtitle different from that printed in program), was first. I’ll post our talk at some point.
Thomas Burkdall (Occidental College, Los Angeles) shared some of the ways he’s used podcasting in the classroom, and our explored what exactly a podcast was defined. He proposed terms such as audio esssays, commentaries, and narratives, but then settled on viewing podcasts as thoughtcasts, a word suggested by one of his students. I liked that he stressed that podcasts brougth the canon of delivery back to rhetoric.
Melanie Kill‘s (University of Washington, Seattle) talk “Rhetorical Agility and Online Identity: Composing Self on MySpace“ was about the multimodal work that is done by agents online who create MySpace pages. It was pretty informative, and she shared images of MySpace pages and explained what all went into them.
The question and answer session that followed was fun, and we got to share experiences with Blackboard, MySpace, and Facebook.
J.16 1963: The Origin of Modern Composition, Part 1
In his engaging talk “Writing Classroom as Warhol’s Factory,“ Geoffrey Sirc (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis) lamented that description and narrative had been removed from the writing curriculum in 1918 by Kurl (I think that’s the name I heard, though I should research to find it I’m right); the focus of the writing classroom became exposition. Sirc argued (as he often does) for the “writing classroom as collection depot.“ He quoted from Baudrillard that the best criticism is fun, amusing, and entertaining, and asked (I think this is a Baudrillard quote), “Can you imagine a dandy talking to the public without scoffing at them?“
Anne Wysocki (Michigan Technological University) spoke on “Inventing Humans: Computers, Metaphors, Writing, 1963.“ She explored science fiction books and nonfictional texts on computers in 1963 and the metaphors they used. I seem to have not taken as many notes on this talk as I should have…
