Workshops will be on Thursday, May 19 and will cost $25.00 per workshop; attendees may choose from multiple morning and afternoon workshops (on-site and virtual), and a box lunch will be provided as part of the workshop cost for those on-site.
Morning Workshops
Thursday, May 19, 9:00 AM-12:00 PM
On-Site
1. Social Media Ethics as Methodology and Pedagogy: Reflections and Practices Toward Black Feminist Digital Ethics Frameworks
Workshop Facilitators: Nick Sanders, Ja’La Wourman, Constance Haywood, and Rachel Smith
In this half-day workshop, we ask participants to critically interrogate the ways social media ethics can be employed as a mechanism for digital activism that specifically engages Black feminist social media ethics in social media writing pedagogy and research methodologies. We ask: How do issues of social media appropriation implicate and complicate social media writing courses and social media writing methodologies? What concrete moves do we make as researchers and teachers to foster culturally-sustaining frameworks particularly around reciprocity, privacy, and surveillance? How might social media writing teachers and researchers critically imagine developing ethically engaged practices to empower students and communities to be thoughtful, human-centered users? Participants should expect to leave with a working understanding of Black feminist social media ethics, a specific heuristic for their work, and examples for engaging these issues pedagogy and research.
On-Site
2. Hacking AAEEBL’s Digital Ethics & ePortfolios Principles: Putting the Principles into Practice
Workshop Facilitators: Morgan Gresham, Sarah Zurhellen, and Megan Mize
For two years, a task force created by the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) has investigated digital ethics and ePortfolios. The work resulted in thirteen principles promoting ethical ePortfolio practices to educators, staff, students, and platform providers. In this workshop, task force members will briefly introduce the history and the evolution of the Principles and invite participants to hack the principles–what’s working, what’s not, what’s missing? How can we use these existing scenarios to generate new areas of research and practice with ePortfolios?
Virtual
3. Creating Text Adventure Games with Inform 7
Workshop Facilitator: Dennis Jerz
A half-day workshop will introduce Inform 7, a free tool for creating text-adventure games. A parser-based text game is an interactive story in which the computer prints out a few lines describing the environment. The user is a co-author, who types out a simple command such as “enter building” or “take lamp.” The computer responds with a description of how the player’s actions have (or have not) affected the simulated story-world.
The Inform 7 development environment is a free authoring system based on natural language, and can generate a playable game from the following very basic instructions:
Your Office is a room. In your office is a desk. On the desk is a fragile-looking printout. The description of the fragile-looking printout is “It reads, ‘Practicing Digital Activisims. Computers and Writing 2022. Deadline Nov 1, 2021.'”
These four English sentences are all that’s required to create a simple storyworld that responds predictably to predictable commands:
>examine printout
It reads, “Practicing Digital Activisims. Computers and Writing 2020. Deadline Nov 1, 2021.”
The workshop will introduce participants (coders and non-coders alike) to this powerful programming environment.
Afternoon Workshops
Thursday, May 19, 1:00-4:00 PM
On-Site
1. Composing and Publishing Digital Scholarship
Workshop Facilitators: Douglas Eyman, Cheryl Ball, Brandy Dieterle, Christina V. Cedillo, Lauren Brentnell, Kristine Blair, Julianne Newmark, Sidney I. Dobrin, Patrick Berry, Amber Buck, Tim Lockridge, Byron Hawk, Caddie Alford, and Kevin Brock
Editors from Kairos, Enculturation, Constellations, the Journal of Multimodal Composition, Computers & Composition Online, Trace, Xchanges, and the Computers and Composition Digital Press discuss digital publication authoring processes from the beginning of research projects to the publication stage and provide feedback and workshop opportunities to participants. Editors are particularly interested in projects that analyze or promote digital activism.
On-Site
2. We Interrupt This Syllabus: Using Podcasts as Networked Texts with Activist Potential in the Writing Classroom
Workshop Facilitators: Charles Wood and Devon Ralston
While podcasts permeate across writing studies curricula, scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines including media studies, communication studies, film and radio, and technical communication are actively considering how to engage in the potential benefits of turning student attention to sound. Our half-day workshop works as an interactive space challenging participants to focus on podcasts as texts and provides an opportunity to conceptualize podcast projects designed for courses they teach.
As Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O’Dell remind us “by broadening the definition of text, we connect our students so much more with the real world of writing. We prepare them for the world […] so that they can participate in that conversation.” We believe that part of such an intervention should be oriented to activism and advocacy. Ultimately, our half-day workshop invites participants to identify a course where teaching a podcast project intersects with activism and to develop a course plan for that project. In doing so, participants will make generative contributions to the scholarly conversations concerning podcasting, activism and the ways this intersection can be employed for social change.
Virtual
3. Instructor as Game Master: Applying Games’ Material Rhetorics to Writing Course Design
Workshop Facilitators: Erin Kathleen Bahl, Sergio Figueiredo, Jeffrey David Greene
A Game Master’s (GM) role parallels that of an instructor in several ways. This virtual half-day workshop invites participants to explore their pedagogical practices through the lens of game design (specifically, through the pedagogical implications embedded in the role of “game master”). Participants will:
-take up theoretical framing at the intersections of writing instructor, game master, and mannerist-rhetor (White, 1987), and align it with their respective pedagogical goals and experiences;
-customize gaming avatars to explore issues of representation in media and engage students in reflective writing;
-consider options for spatially based delivery systems that encourage nonlinear navigation and challenge defaults of traditional learning management systems.
Participants will utilize Storium and Black Desert Online to create avatars for discrete writing exercises that explore representation in mobile and desktop gaming.
Participants will use Roll20 and HTML templates to investigate options for exploratory maps that complement traditional learning management systems such as D2L.