Responding to Chapters on Responding, Peer Review, Networking, etc.

First off, Kara Poe Alexander's assignment on technology and literacy exhibits some striking similarities with my Textbook Chapter assignment. Her assignment focuses more on writing within career fields whereas mine addresses both career fields and the writing expectations of advanced courses within majors; however, my presentation of the assignment tends to privilege career fields (which reminds me, I ought to include the sample interview questions that I created for my students as part of the assignment prompt). One slight criticism of her assignment, then, comes from my own experience with a similar assignment. Students are not accustomed to conducting interviews as part of their research, and many of them will instinctively wait till the last minute to make arrangements. Then, many of them will realize that making such arrangements cannot be done effectively at the last minute (because of delays in email correspondence, availability, etc.). I require students to interview a professor within their field, but Alexander discourages this, instead requiring students to interview a professional currently working within the career field. While I can see some benefits to this approach, it will almost certainly further complicate the already potentially complex process of arranging such an interview. Also, I would be concerned about reifying the notion that the academy is somehow removed from the "real world," or, even worse, encourage the belief that "those who can't do, teach." With that said, I was pleased to find such an assignment within the book as it gives me further encouragement to continue developing my own version of it.

Since I keep referencing the textbook chapter assignment, I thought that it might be helpful to provide an example of student work. Thus, I have posted a student's essay to my audience wiki after receiving written permission from the author.

I would also like to add a warning to the list of possible things that can go wrong with multimodal compositions. Sylvia Church and Elizabeth Powell's chapter again raises the issue of file types. People employing various types of video cameras should be aware that some cameras that save videos to an internal hard drive use unusual files types that will require conversion to more standard file types, and that conversion may itself be a complicated process. For instance, I know that some Panasonic and JVC camcorders save their videos as .mod files. and these can be difficult to convert to a more usable format. I say this from my own experience with a Panasonic camcorder, and it's something that you may want to mention to students if they're considering borrowing someone else's camcorder for a video project.

Lastly, the chapter on building bridges with writing centers raises some great points about how an informed writing center can be a valuable tool in helping students navigate a complicated project.

I always encourage students to utilize our writing center, and I have used it myself, but I have not had as much interaction with the staff or the administration as I could in order to further help them help my students. Perhaps encouraging more interaction between the English department and the writing center would be a good place to start.