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Journal of Writing Research
(JoWR, http://jowr.org/)

Special Issue:

Exploring a Corpus-Informed Approach to Writing Research

Call for Proposals:

Since the development of the Brown Corpus in the 1960s, leveraging language corpora and corpus-based methods to analyze and to describe spoken and written language has become an established tradition within the broad field of linguistics.

Deadline for nominations: April 5, 2008

The CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication will honor an innovator in our community at the 2008 Computers and Writing Conference in Athens, GA, and we need your help to identify a person who has pushed our field regarding excellence in teaching, more rigorous scholarship, and deeper levels of service.

I've been researching the most effective way to use podcasting to reinforce freshman composition learning. I know that merely podcasting entire lectures is not the best solution for basic writers. Moreover, as a creative writer, I know that some few tasks can be reinforced through the passive repetition of listening on a loop (e.g., memorization tasks related to writing, like that bugaboo "grammar in isolation," which is completely necessary in early stages of learning a foreign language), but that others develop slowly and incrementally (writing as a process, for example). I also know that students need to be active participants if they are to learn anything--especially in freshman composition--and that they are resistant to reading and to going to the writing center for help.

**Technology Innovator Award**

Deadline for nominations: April 1, 2007

The CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication will honor an innovator in our community at the 2007 Computers and Writing Conference in Detroit, MI, and we need your help to identify a person who has pushed our field regarding excellence in teaching, more rigorous scholarship, and deeper levels of service.

Computers and Writing 2007: Virtual Urbanism

May 17-20, 2007
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan

Deadline for proposals: midnight, December 20, 2006.
Website for proposal submission and information:

I invite your thoughts on the C&WOnline 2006 conference this year. I encourage you to share what you have gotten out of the conference and what you felt like was significant to you in this conference. But I also encourage you to share your thoughts on the conference format and presentation tools. Any thoughts or suggestions you might have for future C&WOnline conferences will be welcome.

What skills of digital writing (e.g., creation of web sites, work with wikis) would faculty in various disciplines like their entering students to have? We have WAC programs in part because writing is the lifeblood of the curriculum: for learning, for assessment. HOw could teaching and assessment in various disciplines be enriched if faculty could make assignments that required at least some skill in digital writing? The TLT Group, a non-profit that works with colleges and schools, has been collecting examples of such assignments, and inferring from them the kinds of digital writing skills that might be most advantageous for upper division courses in various disciplines. The work is still at an early stage. Please share your suggestions with us, using forms on the web site! Thanks! http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/gx/Digital-WAC.htm

Scholars and teachers of composition, rhetoric, and professional communication who use computer technology in research and instruction need to be aware of the trends in e-work. Such awareness will help them better understand the directions of professional applications of Online Communication Technologies (OCTs) and to help them better prepare their students to understand and use these technologies in the professional world. This knowledge can also help students participate more effectively in greater global discourse conducted via online media.

My presentation is available (in .ppt and .mov formats) here: http://condor.depaul.edu/~sslatte1/CWO2006/. And see Pavel Zemliansky & Kirk St. Amant's co-presentation "Online Work: Theories, Challenges, and Perspectives." Then let's start the conversation.

I look forward to the feedback on my work-in-progress: "(Com)posers or Consumers? A Reconsideration of the Impact of New Media Writing Technologies on Today’s Composition Students." My goal is to conduct a series of student surveys that investigates how students use and don't use different technologies today. Here is the first such survey.

Read “(Com)posers or Consumers? A Reconsideration of the Impact of New Media Writing Technologies on Today’s Composition Students” by Dr. Randall McClure, Minnesota State University, Mankato. Then include your comments on the question posts below to engage in a discussion on the presentation.

Our next forum, “(Com)posers or Consumers? A Reconsideration of the Impact of New Media Writing Technologies on Today’s Composition Students� by Dr. Randall McClure, Minnesota State University, Mankato, explores composition students’ relationship with new media.

Marc Pietrzykowski received an MFA in 2003 from Georgia State University where he currently teaches, pursues his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition, and serves as Assistant Director of Lower Division Studies. In this capacity he assists GSU's various teaching assistants and instructors by developing a variety of tools, both online and traditional. In all of his spare time, he writes marvelous poetry that he publishes in places like Pleiades, Diagram, the Red River Review, and the Antioch Review among others.

This week he will be presenting with Michael Haynes, No More Grocery Store Tomatoes: Using Homebrewed Content Management Systems in the Writing Classroom

Welcome to Computers and Writing Online 2006. We are looking forward to four weeks of viewing and listening to the informative and entertaining presentations we've got lined up this year.

If you've never attended an online conference, our conference committee chair, Lennie Irvin, has developed a guide for you at
http://english.ttu.edu/cw/CWO2006/CWonline2006_ConfGuide.pdf.
Please peruse the guide if you have any questions.

Greetings to all who stop by. I am delghted to now be a member of the 2006 C&W. It was Tari's announcement of a Tuesday Cafe reunion that motivated me to sign on. Looking forward to being a part of

If evidence from journals and listservs such as TechRhet are any indication, more and more RhetComp academics are becoming involved in the construction of Content Management Systems, whether building them from scratch or modifying existing open source packages. The reasons for using existing open source packages or building a CMS from scratch are various and include affordability, flexibility, and access to the distributed support system that is the raison d’être of the open source community. Each of these benefits are useful topoifor arguing against the implementation of for-profit systems such as Chalk and Wire and Blackboard.

The 2006 Computers & Writing Online conference begins in one week. If you have not yet registered for the conference, or if you wish to see more details about the conference, please visit

http://english.ttu.edu/cw/CWO2006/

A Conference Attending guide is now available:
http://english.ttu.edu/cw/CWO2006/CWonline2006_ConfGuide.pdf