Staff News

Last week, Scott showed us how to use some of Flash's basic tools for drawing. This week, he will cover the basics of movie clips and graphic symbols, and how to nest them to create animations. If you weren't able to make it last week, no problem, as no prior knowledge is necessary for this week's workshop.

Don't miss this opportunity to make your pretty pictures move!

Matt King will be offering a workshop on gaming in the writing classroom.  This workshop will address some of the theoretical underpinnings of rhetorical gaming, and it will also offer more practical suggestions for incorporating games into your classes.  Matt’s presentation will draw on his experience with the DWRL’s own Rhetorical Peaks as well as his experience at this summer’s Humanities Gaming Institute at the University of South Carolina.  Not a gamer?  Not a problem.  You don’t need to have a female half-elf avatar named “Bead-Bead” to consider how gaming informs the work we do as rhetoricians and how it can contribute to our pedagogy.

Fac 9

The DWRL is bringing DJ Spooky to UT. Remixing is all the rage. But how do you incorporate remixing into the classroom? Come to this workshop to find out. We'll show you how to remix samples of literary and rhetorical texts to your favorite music. Then, we’ll cut those mixes down to ringtones. We’ll demo remixing ringtones lesson plans for your classes. And we’ll kick off a special contest wherein the best student-made ringtone wins a prize. (The winner will be announced at DJ Spooky's rip-mix-burn event on Oct. 12.) You are also a great candidate for this workshop if you:

* need a fun lesson plan to get over the mid-semester slump
* have a pal who is just too peculiar for a default ringtone
* are afraid to make remixes that are longer than 30 seconds
* like to combine things ill-advisedly
* like silly contests

 

Join the DWRL Design Specialist for this unique event in Fac 9.

Are you teaching a course in the Fall on the Rhetoric of French Horror Films Dubbed in Japanese? Would you like to get word out for a conference or workshop you're organizing? Are you interested in letting interested parties know that these unique and titillating events exist? Then you need a poster. Come to the DWRL's workshop on poster design on Friday, April 9 in FAC 9 at 1 pm. The workshop will cover using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to import images, create new images, manipulate text, format best printing quality, and design classy, yet unignorable posters that are sure to fill your classes and pack your events in minutes. With Summer and Fall registration just around the corner and end-of-semester and summer events just weeks away, this workshop will give you the skills you need to get the attendance you want!

At 500 billion gigabytes, if one were to print out the world's digital information and bind it in books, the resulting stack would reach from here to Pluto, 10 times. Institutions which are structured on analog-based technologies no longer can ignore the changed media landscape. Beyond scale and scope, the digital network substantially re-orders the archivization and dissemination of knowledge. While many Universities and scholars have begun to alter their practices, attempting to adapt to this re-ordering, more radical restructuring will be required. In order to remain relevant and engaged, academia will have to substantially rethink not only its goals but its means as well. Academia will perhaps even have to give up on many of its fundamental practices and ideologies—the book, tenure—which inform its existence.

Come join us in MAI 212

Check out Dr. Parry's online presence:

Outside the Text

Academhack

Twitter

Join the Visual Rhetoric project for this unique event.

The workshop will be focused on:

*Becoming familiar with online and institutional databases of images
*Developing standards for citing images and New Media
*Sizing and creating original images using Adobe InDesign
*Incorporating images in the rhetoric and literature classroom
*Uploading and managing images with Drupal

On a daily basis, most of us find ourselves uploading and downloading
images. While we may be proficient, there are ways to potentially
enrich our use of digital images in the classroom by advancing
technical skills, as well as becoming familiar with the best of image
databases. Join Viz. in FAC 9 on March 26 at 1 pm for a workshop
considering best practices for digital images. We'll tour several
private databases of images, such as ARTstor, as well as Creative
Commons images on Flickr and Google. We'll present some practical
skills, such as resizing using Adobe InDesign and html-coding images
for Drupal. The workshop will also involve discussion of intellectual
property and citation for images.

Here are some of the helpful pages referenced during the workshop:

This page lists important online image archives and database

Quickguides for Creating Web Images

Join the Geo-Everything project for this unique event.

Workshop will focus on:
· Downloading, installing, and navigating in Google Earth
· Making basic and customized placemarks
· Working with data templates
· Embedding text, images, links, video, and audio
· Creating collaborative maps
· Incorporating Google Earth into the rhetoric and literature classroom

Description:
Google Earth is a free and easy-to-use software program for building maps and spatially representing many kinds of data -- text, images, audio, video -- that can be aligned with a geographic location. These maps are three-dimensional and dynamic, and readers can interactively zoom and rotate as well as add layers of information in order to view the mapped locations, called placemarks, from a variety of perspectives, from the local to the global. Within the rhetoric and literature classrooms, the software is useful for many kinds of writing. It facilitates invention, as students visually identify intriguing linkages; acts as a medium for visual writing, as students transform words into images; and encourages collaboration, as students work together to chart and connect meaningful locations, thus organically and/or deliberately synthesizing arguments.

DWRL Google Earth Workshop Handout

Google Spreadsheet Mapper Instructions

DWRL GeoEverything Spreadsheet Mapper Instructor Guidelines

To help familiarize folks with the basics of the Sophie program, Professor Justin Hodgson will be offering a short introduction/workshop. To find out more, click here to see the promotional video to get aquainted with Sophie.

What is Sophie?

"Sophie 2.0 is open source software for writing, reading and visualizing rich media documents in an interactive, networked environment. The program emerged from the desire to create an easy-to-use application that would allow authors to combine text, images, video, and sound quickly and simply, but with precision and sophistication. Sophie's users are interested in creating robust, elegant, networked, texts and multimedia works without having programming knowledge or training in the use of more complex and costly tools. such as Flash" (www.sophieproject.org).

To continue the conversation begun at last year's workshop Social Justice & Evidence Based Assessment with the Learning Record led by Professor Peg Syverson, the Communications project will host a workshop on the Learning Record.

Please join us to learn about the LR generally and to hear about the latest developments in the LR Online using PB Wiki.

Currents in Electronic Literacy (ISSN 1524-6493) solicits article-length submissions related to the theme below. Submissions are due by Friday, January 15, 2010.

Spring 2010 issue: "Gaming-Across-the-Curriculum: Playing as a Way of Learning"

“Good game design,” writes James Paul Gee in “Learning and Games,” “has a lot to teach us about good learning, and contemporary learning theory has something to teach us about how to design even better and deeper games.” The burgeoning field of pedagogical gaming has inspired emergent journals (GameStudies; Games and Culture), new institutions (e.g., the Game Studies Research Center at the IT University of Copenhagen), and interdisciplinary approaches. This issue of /Currents/ features guest editors Jan Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes of Clemson University’s Gaming Across the Curriculum (GAC) program, which examines current and potential uses of gaming within the academy. The issue will incorporate games created by students and faculty, best practices of the use of computer games in teaching, articles that theorize play and pedagogy, innovative approaches to cross-disciplinary collaboration using computer games, frameworks of GAC white papers, and so forth.

Currents encourages unconventional and emergent modes of scholarship. The editors solicit articles, games (with instructions and background), GAC curriculum designs, and other scholarly treatments of “gaming-across-the-curriculum.” All submissions should adhere to MLA style guidelines for citations and documentation. Submissions should state any technical requirements or limitations. Currents reserves all copyrights to published articles and requires that all of its articles be housed on its Web server. It is the policy of Currents in Electronic Literacy that all published contributions must meet the W3C accessibility standards. While all Currents articles are accessible, readers are advised that these same articles may contain links to other Web sites that do not meet accessibility guidelines. Contact: currents@cwrl.utexas.edu or interrobang@mail.utexas.edu.

Join us Tuesday, October 20 at 4 p.m. in the African American Culture Room (4.110) of the Texas Student Union to hear Cynthia Selfe deliver a talk entitled "Stories That Speak to Us: The Intellectual and Social Work of Literacy Narratives and Digital Archives."

This talk focuses on autobiographical literacy narratives from the Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN) and demonstrate the informational value of these vernacular digital accounts for students and teachers of composition, as well as members of the public. The DALN is a national archive of autobiographical recollections about how individuals learn to read and write; the conditions under which they continue to do so; and the influences and values which shape their literate practices. The DALN, like the Mass Observation project in Britain, depends on the voluntary contributions of individuals and traces the "everyday literacy practices of ordinary people" which often remain invisible in our culture—especially during times of dynamic change (Sheridan, Street, Bloome). These first-hand social media accounts—which exist in a variety of digital formats (e.g., print, video, audio) and are accessible to members of the public through a Web-based interface—constitute a valuable digital resource for research on literacy, for the teaching of composition, and for the public.