The Department of English was well represented at two back-to-back conferences in San Francisco, March 11-14. The entire delegation participated in the 60th annual Conference on College Composition and Communication. This year’s theme was “Making Waves.” Faculty members included Andrew Mara, Miriam Mara, Bruce Maylath, Kelly Sassi and Amy Rupiper Taggart. Lecturers included Jo Cavins, Louise Hanson-Dittmer and Maureen Scott. Graduate students included Katherine Dunlap and Katie Gunter.
Taggart helped lead a special interest group meeting on “Service-Learning and Community Literacy.” Her presentation titled “Collaboration 2.0: Using Google Documents for Scholarship and Teaching” was given by a colleague because Taggart was unable to attend.
With Dunlap and Gunter, Andrew Mara led a panel titled “Posthuman Desire and Breaking Disciplinarity,” which included discussion of Gunter’s paper, “The Evolution of Classicism and the Onset of Digital Anxiety;” Dunlap’s “Beyond a/s/l: Embodied Online Dating in a Posthuman World;” and Mara’s “The Structures of Posthuman Desire in Technical Writing.”
Maylath and Sassi led a panel titled “Collaborative Wave Making with Communication Technologies.” The panel included discussion of papers by Sassi, titled “Fear of Making Waves in Cross-cultural Collaborative Groups;” and by Maylath, titled “Using Technology in Trans-Atlantic Collaboration: Virtual Teaming of U.S. Writing Students and European Translation Students.” They also delivered doctoral student Melissa Vosen’s paper and accompanying PowerPoint presentation titled “Making Waves in the ‘Technological Kool Aid:’ Using Facebook to Promote Collaboration in Homogenous Groups in Hybrid Upper Division Writing Courses,” as she could not attend.
Maylath and Andrew Mara also participated in the annual conference of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing on March 11, where Mara delivered a paper titled “Playful Innovation in Emerging Technical Communication Genres.”
April 22, 2009