The CWRL Game Design/Virtual Communities work group is currently working on a video game called "Rhetorical Peaks." The game will allow students to navigate a murder mystery narrative and collect evidence about "Who killed the Rhetoric Professor?"
CWRL Lecture Series: Peg Syverson
On November 9 at 5:00 in FAC 9, Dr. Peg Syverson will deliver our third lecture in the CWRL Lecture Series. Dr. Syverson will talk about the Learning Record Online (LRO), a portfolio-based assessment tool that provides a "a simple, yet powerful model for accounting for learning in complex systems." The LRO is funded by a Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services grant, and it is an approved assessment tool at UT and a number of other universities.
Pedagogy Roundtable: Virtual Communities
As a follow up to Dr. Jerry Bump's lecture about Second Life on September 14, the CWRL will host a pedagogy roundtable about strategies for online communication. We will discuss ways to apply virtual communications and communities in the classroom. The Roundtable will take place on Wednesday, September 20 at 5:00 in FAC 10.
CWRL Lecture Series: Laura McGrath
Online Writing Instructors: Preparation, Development, & Support.
On November 14, Laura McGrath, an Assistant Professor of English at Kennesaw State University, will be visiting the CWRL as part of the Lab's Lecture Series. The lecture, entitled "Online Writing Instructors: Preparation, Development, & Support," will take place at 3:00 in the Texas Union's Asian Culture Room.
Dr. McGrath will present the results of her national and a local survey of online writing instructors. The purpose of this study was to gather information about online writing instructor preparation, development, and support. In order to make informed decisions about training and support, stakeholders need to know what online writing instructors are saying about these matters. Although survey results reveal some differences among three populations of online writing instructors (graduate TAs, instructors and adjuncts, and tenure-track faculty), many of the survey respondents report similar challenges, concerns, and experiences.
CWRL Lecture Series: Brian Bremen
Blogging as an Effective Classroom Practice
Please join us on Monday, April 16 at 5:00pm in FAC 9 for the final lecture of our 20th Anniversary series. Dr. Brian Bremen will discuss the state of Literary Studies in an increasingly participatory culture. Moving from Wordsworth and Arnold to Eliot and Frost, he will explore the "function of criticism" in the 21st century. Looking at sites like the Electronic Literature Collection, Poems that GO, Wikipedia, and TextArc, he will talk about the ways in which electronic environments have altered -- if not dissolved -- both the objects and the subjects of literary studies. Participants are invited to bring in their own favorite (transformative) examples.
Brian A. Bremen is an Associate Professor in the English department, specializing in American Literature, Modernism, and Literary Theory. He also incorporates various information technologies in his "Masterworks of Literature" course.
CWRL Lecture Series: Lester Faigley
On October 5 at 5:00pm in FAC 9, Dr. Lester Faigley will deliver a lecture about his work in the field of visual rhetoric. Dr. Faigley is currently teaching a graduate seminar in visual rhetoric. He has been influential in visual rhetoric pedagogy by dealing extensively with the topic in Good Reasons - a textbook he co-authored with Jack Selzer and The Penguin Handbook - a writing handbook for undergraduate composition students. Dr. Faigley's has also published research on visual rhetoric including "Material Literacy and Visual Design" and Picturing Texts.
Congratulations to the Textualities Workgroup!
The CWRL's Textualities Workgroup took third place in the "Most Commercially Viable" category in the Second Annual Game Court competition sponsored by UT's Science, Technology, and Society program (STS) and the UT Electronic Games Developers Society (EGaDS!). Congratualtions to Jeff Howard, Ingrid Devilliers, Greg Foran, Joey Taylor, and Kyle Edwards.
A Message from the Feminist Pedagogy Workgroup
As we continue redesigning and adding content to our website, the feminist pedagogy workgroup asks our colleagues for insights, assignments, and other materials. Primarily, we would like lessons and assignments that, to quote our website, "urge students to deeply question the politics of domination. Doing so first and necessarily involves asking students to question the instructor's own power over them as a teacher inside the classroom. In theory, doing so is the initial step towards encouraging students to question the politics of domination outside of the classroom." If you have created anything for your classroom that fits this description, we would love to send it into cyberspace via our website (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/feministpedagogy).
Alternate Realities in the CWRL
Recently, the textuality work group in the CWRL has discovered an arcane and mysterious set of websites resembling an educational Alternate Reality Game (also known as “viral marketing”). This game is a quest to interpret and interact with literary texts through the study of both bibliography and reception. The bibliographical components of the game involve exploring variants of a text and searching for an “authentic” or “true” text among different editions. At other times, the game enacts issues of reception, illustrating how readers transform or assign value to texts through their interpretative predispositions. The game appears to be composed of a set of 5 interrelated mini-games with varied and immersive formats. These include web sites about a crux from The Tempest, two web-based scavenger hunts involving Alice in Wonderland and Edgar Allan Poe, a small 3-D world based on Chaucer, and a meta-game with puzzles that have some connection to The Crying of Lot 49. The creators of this game have embedded their pedagogical adaptations of texts within a mysterious frame tale in which a secret society of literary interpreters named The Exegetes invites English students to join their ranks. Rumor has it that this secret society may include Ingrid Devilliers, Kyle Edwards, Greg Foran, Joey Taylor, and Jeff Howard. Keep an eye on http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~howard/arg/index.html as this mystery unfolds (best viewed with a PC). For more information on alternate reality games, see the Alternate Reality Game Network (http://www.argn.com) and Dave Szulborkski’s This is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming.)
Blogging Pedagogy
In past years, the CWRL and the Division of Rhetoric and Writing have developed tools that allow for collaborative teaching. By encouraging instructors to share assignment ideas, the lab and the division have embraced the idea that pedagogy should always be reflexive. In keeping with this tradition, instructors in the DRW have developed a new blog called "Blogging Pedagogy" in which teachers can share ideas and assignments.
"Blogging Pedagogy" is similar to the assignment database that the DRW has maintained for many years (the "Blue File" system), but the blog format also adds to this model. The new blog allows for more conversation about both assignments and broad pedagogical issues. In addition, it allows instructors to share ideas in narrative form, giving the assignment a more situated feel. Assignments can now be presented as part of a teaching philosophy, and this gives instructors a better sense of how an assignment or in-class activity might work (or not work) in their own classroom. Users posting to the blog are participating in a community text while also developing a small archive of their own teaching progress (each post is part of both the community blog and a user's individual blog). This allows for both peer review of assignments and personal reflection about teaching.