Computers & Writing 2008: Open Source as Technology and Concept
Location: University of Georgia, Athens, GA
Date: May 21-25, 2008
Abstracts accepted December 3, 2007-January 10, 2008 (see below for more information)
In 2006, Blackboard purchased WebCT, its closest competitor in the Learning Management System (LMS) market, and also filed a suit against rival Desire 2Learn, Inc. on a controversial claim of patent infringement. In response, at its October meeting Educause issued an open letter urging Blackboard to abandon its suit on the grounds that the suit will stifle collaboration and innovation. Blackboard of course, is not the only closed source LMS out there. D2L, Angel, Turnitin.com, E-College, Criterion, and all kinds of other products populate the educational technology landscape. However, Blackboard's lawsuit and its claims outraged technologists, and more importantly for many of us, heads of campus instructional technology units; that outrage sharply increased interest in the role that can be played by open source technologies and communities in the development of educational computing.
The concurrent growth of open source Learning Management Systems (LMS's) such as Sakai, Moodle, and Open Source Portfolio will not, in and of themselves, necessarily replace or change the reigning corporate and/or campus bureaucratic models for educational technology exemplified by Blackboard purchasing and support. Because something is open source doesn't mean that the open source process and models will automatically promote and enhance the values important to the Computers and Writing community and to composition pedagogy in general.
Ideally, open source development, as both a technology and a concept, is grounded in values of collaboration, interaction, and respect for the user; these same values have also informed writing pedagogy of the process and post-process eras. There is, therefore, an important and enduring connection between the values that inform open-source technology and composition pedagogy. That connection, nonetheless, doesn't matter if it isn't enacted. For our values to find a place, we need to define them, assert them, and to ask for them to be designed into the architectures, interfaces, and features of both open and closed source products. We need in short to be users, designers, critics, and philosophers of online learning systems, both open and closed.
We invite papers that go beyond the easy claim that because open source is open, it is necessarily good and better, or automatically in-line with writing practice and pedagogy. Instead, we hope to look at what we must do to make the open source possibility a reality in light of our understandings on the philosophy, ethics, and politics of using writing technologies within the academy and other workplaces. We encourage participants to range beyond the narrowest definition of "open source" to explore the values and practices collaborative ventures can promote when we also work with or influence developers of closed source systems. In other words, what can we learn and use from open source possibilities and practices to change our relationship to, and the design and implementation of, closed source and for profit systems.
Papers may consider one or more of the following topics:
--What are the differences in how we can use open source technologies to influence pedagogy as compared to how we might use proprietary technologies to do the same?
--We know that open source models open up new spaces for writing and collaboration, but how do these models work on an institutional level or programmatic level? What are best open source practices? How are decisions made? How are things made?
--How have open source technologies changed, maintained, and/or complicated our understanding of the relationship between ownership and authorship?
--What do you do if you do no not have the resources, time, access or means to use open source technologies instead of proprietary technologies on your campus? How do you make what you have to use, work for you?
--What has been the influence of such powerful proprietary technologies as Blackboard on Rhetoric and Composition as a discipline?
--Considering the trend toward portfolio-based evaluation in composition pedagogy, is the widespread adoption of Course Management Systems inevitable?
--Not all proprietary vendors and designers are the same. Many, for example, will adapt innovations created by open source projects into their own systems. Others will customize their product to meet particular department or institutional needs, often in a process that is as collaborative on some levels as one might find in the open source model. Given that, what influence can open source have on closed source?
--What are the virtues of pedagogical bricolage, using the systems and materials at hand in any given institution?
--What are some best practices for incorporating open source technologies in the classroom? Which open source technologies might be/have been appropriated for classroom use? How well do they work?
--What are the practical and political implications of adopting open source at the programmatic or institutional level?
--How do the philosophies behind open source technologies, as well the technologies themselves, encourage process-oriented writing practices?
--What do Learning Management Systems offer that more traditional teaching tools do not? What are the limitations of these systems?
--What opportunities does open source offer for putting development into the hands of educators, enabling writing pedagogies to drive development?
Submissions:
In keeping with this year's theme, the University of Georgia and the organizers of Computers and Writing 2008 have made a commitment to support open source technology. Towards that end, and in order to streamline the submission process, we will be using the <emma> open-source writing environment to collect proposals and disseminate information about the conference. In addition to accepting electronic submissions in more traditional proprietary formats such as Microsoft Word (.doc) and Adobe Portable Document Format, we are encouraging all potential conference participants to consider using OpenOffice (Windows) or NeoOffice (MacOSX) and to submit proposals as Open Document Text (.odt) files.
We will be accepting proposals beginning December 3, 2007; the deadline for submissions is January 10, 2008 at 11: 59 pm EST.
Further information about the submission process can be found at
CFP: Spring 2008 Issue of Praxis – Authority and Cooperation
Praxis: A WritingCenter Journal welcomes submissions for its Spring 2008 issue. Although we welcome essays on a wide range of topics related to writing centers, we especially encourage submissions on this issue’s theme: Authority and Cooperation. Many writing centers try to create a collaborative space free from the hierarchies of knowledge and power that characterize the classroom and the university in general; yet difficult issues concerning authority, hierarchy, and cooperation inevitably develop in individual writing consultations and in the larger physical and institutional space of the writing center. We invite contributors to interpret the theme of Authority and Cooperation broadly; however, some possible applications include
• Directive/Non-directive approaches to consultations
• Undergraduates consulting undergraduates
• Using writing manuals/style guides as authoritative arbiters of writing style
• Issues of power, gender, class, race
• Overall writing center philosophies
• Navigating professors’ authority
• Creating collaborative spaces within the writing center’s administrative
hierarchies (and within larger institutional hierarchies)
Submission guidelines:
Recommended article length is 1000 to 2000 words. Articles should conform to MLA style. Send submissions as a Word document e-mail attachment to Jeremy Dean, James Jesson, and Patricia Burns at praxis_at_uwc.utexas.edu. Also include the writer’s name, e-mail address, phone number, and affiliation. Because Praxis is a Web-based journal, please do not send paper; we do not have the resources to transcribe printed manuscripts. Images should be formatted as jpeg files and sent as attachments.
Deadline for Spring issue: February 1, 2008
Praxis: A Writing Center Journal ( is a biannual electronic publication sponsored by the University of Texas Undergraduate Writing Center, a component of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. It is a forum for writing center practitioners everywhere.
We welcome articles from writing center consultants and administrators related to training, consulting, labor issues, administration, and writing center news, initiatives, and scholarship. For further information about submitting an article or suggesting an idea, please contact the editors at praxis_at_uwc.utexas.edu.
Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value
April 11-13, 2008
University of Minnesota
Deadline for Submissions: January 15, 2008
The university is in crisis. This crisis, evident in the everyday transformations of higher education, is made most visible during moments of labor struggle. Like universities across the world, the University of Minnesota has recently experienced an explosion of labor struggles, themselves symptomatic of the tendencies existing in this increasingly neo-liberal institution. Unfortunately, our struggles have been hampered by an intellectual and organizational lag, which has made it difficult for us to adequately respond to these crises. As a result, at key moments we have been unable to rethink fundamental assumptions about the university and, as a result, have fallen back on idealist notions of a university somehow removed from the world, have reproduced the language of an already existing "public university," and have sought comfort in legislative and institutional remedies.
It is because of the need to radically rethink our political strategy that we invite you to join us in the project of rethinking the University of Minnesota as well as the concept of "the university" itself. It is our belief that a militant struggle over higher education requires a militant rethinking of the languages, organizations, and foundational assumptions upon which the battle over higher education takes place. To this end, we want to collectively think about questions such as: What is the role of the university in the production of value within contemporary capitalism? What is the relationship between academic labor and various other forms of labor at the university? How can we reconsider the status of academic knowledge, research, and pedagogy in this context? How can we remake universities as agents for changing this context? What forms of university governance, collectives, and subjectivities would best facilitate projects for constituting the common world that we desire?
The purpose of this inquiry is not only to produce critique, but also to generate sites of resistance and viable alternatives to the corporate university. As such, we invite diverse responses to these questions including collaborative works, workshop presentations, and art (e.g. photo-essays, performance art, and film/video pieces), as well as traditional essay presentations. In addition to presentations that engage the problem of the university in late capitalism more generally, we also invite presentations that treat the specific case of University of Minnesota. We hope to put into conversation workers of all types: university staff, artists, lecturers, union organizers, students, professors, and community activists, all of whom have a stake in shaping the future of the university.
Potential topics might include (but are not limited to):
radical pedagogy
corporate funding, branding
labor organizing in the university
students as consumers
intellectual property
immaterial labor
student and faculty activism
issues of access
class, gender, and race
casualization of labor
histories of the university
Please send questions and submissions (up to 500 word abstracts, workshop, or project
proposals) to: morgan_adamson_at_yahoo.com
Call for contributions to a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Language
Shakespeare had a lifelong interest in the various problematics inherent to language per se and his own innovative uses of language still baffle us, modern-day readers of his texts. Following our seminar in London in 2006 at the international conference of The European Society for the Study of English, we are currently looking for contributions in English to a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Language, to be published in 2008.
Papers are welcome on various techniques of textual investigation developed in such fields as stylistic close reading, corpus linguistics, cognitive, authorship studies, lexicography, stylometry, etc. Papers will be refereed by an international committee.
Please send 500-word proposals with some bibliographical references and a brief c.v. to:
mireilleravassat_at_yahoo.fr
Deadline for abstracts : 10 January 2008
If you plan to submit a manuscript, please let us know as soon as possible. We will only take into consideration papers which have not been published yet.
Deadline for submitting papers: 30 March 2008.
------
Dr Mireille Ravassat
Senior Lecturer
Department of EnglishStudies
University of Valenciennes (France)
i_hate_shakespeare.com: Shakespearean Authority in the Age of Computers
Call for contributions for an edited essay collection, in honour of Dr. Michael Bristol (11/30/07).
Google “Shakespeare” and you will get a staggering 51 million hits. That’s more than “Jesus Christ,” “Adolph Hitler,” and “Tom Cruise” combined. We seek original critical essays that explore the interfacing of computer technologies and the Shakespeare metonym: what does it mean to study or do Shakespeare in the age of computers? How has Shakespeare’s cultural and institutional authority been challenged and/or reinforced by listserv discussion groups, websites, search-engine categorization, hypertext versions of the plays, digital archiving, essay bank services, and the advent of networking utilities like Facebook? What new cyberspace economies of knowledge and material exchange are now enabled by the Bard’s dotcom presence? Has Shakespeare’s new digital iconicity reshaped the reception of Shakespeare (and his works), especially when students first encounter Shakespeare mediated by the internet?
Please send 500-word proposals and a brief c.v. to either Dr. Bradley D. Clissold (bradleyc_at_mun.ca) or Dr. Jennifer Lokash (jlokash_at_mun.ca) by 30 November 2007.
Poetry and the Trace: An International Conference
Monash University, Australia July 12-14 2008
Venue: State Library of Victoria
Confirmed Keynote speakers: Susan Stewart, Joan Retallack, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lionel Fogarty.
Convenors: Ann Vickery, Rose Lucas, John Hawke
Poetic language speaks of the elusivity, the impossible seductions of the trace – trace of memory, desire, the dreams of an impossible language which encompasses, of a presence which underpins…
The language of poetry, with its rhythms of pulse and silence, the reflective pause of metaphor and the capacity for representation, is inextricably related to the language of memory and desire – both subjective and social. This conference broadly investigates the relationship between poetry, trace and memory and whether collective and private pasts and subjectivities can find articulation through the flexible forms of poetic language. Is poetry a mode which at least partially restores the fragments of the past or transforms them to new political and ethical ends? How does poetry negotiate bad histories and bad timing? Whose memory is being voiced or heard? What is the relationship between memory and feeling? How might new technologies impact on structures of memory? Is poetry possible today and if so, what is its future? Can poetry evidence a archaeology of desire while engaging in a politics of ethical relationship?
Papers are invited which consider the theme of the trace in relation to poetry of any kind from classical antiquity to the contemporary. The following list suggests some possible areas for development, but proposals in any area relating to the conference theme of poetry and the concept of trace will be welcome:
Trace; aura; fragment
Mourning and melancholia
Is Postmodern Poetry Beyond Mourning?
Canon, Reputation, and Institutionalisation
Is poetry possible in the new millennium?
The Unrecoverable: Gaps, Absence, Silence
The making of history
Memory, repetition, and seriality
Electronic Dreams: Digital memories
Whose memory?: Historicising poetic movements and coteries
Memory, nation, identity
Memory of sensation/the sensation of memory: Rethinking the Relationship
between Word and Affect
Memory and the Body
Memory and Desire
Belatedness
Bad history; bad timing
Poetic compost: recycling the past for present and future uses
Collective memory; cultural memory
Disputed memory; false memories; error and memory
Fugitive memory and the fugacious
Conference papers are 20 minutes in length. To submit a proposal for the
conference, please forward a 200-300 word abstract and brief biographical
note as an email attachment to either:
Ann Vickery: Ann.Vickery_at_arts.monash.edu.au
John Hawke: John.Hawke_at_arts.monash.edu.au
Rose Lucas: Rose.Lucas_at_arts.monash.edu.au
A website address will be posted shortly.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 1 February 2008
Notification of acceptance: 1 March 2008
This conference is being held jointly by MonashUniversity’s School of
English, Communications and Performance Studies, and the Centre for
Women’s Studies and Gender Research.
Call for Papers
PEDAGAOGY/METHODOLOGY Area
2008 Film & History Conference
“Film & Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond”
October 30-November 2, 2008
Chicago, Illinois
Second-Round Deadline: May 1, 2008
AREA: Pedagogy/Methodology
This call for papers seeks proposals for individual papers or complete sessions (3-4 papers) on any aspect of pedagogy related to teaching and learning about science, scientific or technological history, or themes of scientific progress/development in the past through film, at the elementary, secondary, or postsecondary levels. The pedagogy area is one of several areas for the conference. Suggested topics include but are not limited to:
• The benefits and pitfalls of using film to teach science
• How films construct notions of technology and scientific progress in human civilization
• How films portray scientific figures, ideas, or themes fromhistory
• Empirical scholarship on how students make sense of variousscientific topics and concepts through film
• Effective classroom practices with documentary and feature film
• Using film to explore the history of science
Please send your 200-word proposal by May 1, 2008, to one of the area
chairs:
Ron Briley or Alan Marcus
rbriley_at_sandiaprep.org alan.marcus_at_uconn.edu
Assistant Professor, Curriculum &
Instruction
249 Glenbrook Road Unit 2033
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT06269
(860) 486-0281