Logging On: In This Issue

In This Issue

In the Topoi section, Ehren Pflugfelder considers the role of cell phones in students' everyday lives, using an actor-network approach to viewing people who use cell phones—including our students— as hybrid subjects. His webtext, "Cell Phones, Networks & Power: Documenting Cell Phone Literacies," presents a cell phone documentary that was shot on cell phones by students in a course called Language, Technology, and Culture, followed by a review of the literature about cell phones from rhetoric and composition scholars, ultimately offering conceptions of critical literacy and access helpful in reconciling their complex position in educational settings.

In the Inventio section, we present a three-part examination of digital composing practices by David Sheridan. His "Click to Add Ideas" provides both a narrative and a reflection on Sheridan's struggles to compose new media work alongside his students; along the way, he takes on various personas: technophile, technophobe, teacher, colearner, composer, prosumer, imperfectionist, & storyteller. Sheridan also provides detailed information about the composing infrastructure he used to carry out his project.

In the Praxis section, we have two complex, multivocal webtexts that are co-produced by faculty and students. The first of these, "ClarissaBlogs: Narrative, Writing, and the Self" by Debra Journet, Steve Cohen, Rachel Gramer, Megan Faver Hartline, Keri Mathis, Tony O'Keeffe, Kendra Sheehan, & Jessica Winck, reimagines Samuel Richardson’s 1748 epistolary novel Clarissa as a series of blog posts, to which the authors responded, creating dialogues with the original text. This piece uses both the idea of blogging and a blogging platform to enact a different kind of reflection upon the relationships between reading, writing, and composition theory. The second Praxis webtext, "The Mechanics of New Media (Science) Writing: Articulation, Design, Hospitality, and Electracy" by Nathaniel A. Rivers, Christopher Grabau, Kate T. Kavanaugh, & Katie Zabrowski showcases a multimedia projectthat "employs and performs the full etymology of articulation—the linguistic, visual, embodied, and mechanical—to describe an advanced undergraduate course in science writing, which focused exclusively on new media storytelling."

In the Interviews section, Stephanie Vie provides a series of interviews that focuses on members of the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), co-founded by Ken McAllister and Judd Ruggill. Members of the LGI who are interviewed here include a veritable who's who of rhetoric and composition scholars working on games: Ken McAllister, Judd Ruggill. Steven Conway, Jennifer deWinter, Kevin Moberly, Ryan Moeller, Mark Ouellette, and Jason Thompson.

We also have a review essay and three individual reviews in this issue: Amanda Athon and Lee Nickoson review Jay Jordan's Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities and Patrick Berry, Gail Hawisher, and Cynthia Selfe's Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times; Brandy Dieterle reviews Jody Shipka's Toward a Composition Made Whole; Jessi Thomsen reviews N. Katherine Hayles's Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis; and Logan Hudspeth provides a video review in "Deconstructing Composition: A Review of Patricia Suzanne Sullivan's Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies".

PraxisWiki

In this issue, we have three new works that focus on pedagogical activities. Nick Carbone provides a clear and thorough guide for teaching the genre of student evaluations of teaching (SET) in "Teaching Students How to Write Teaching Evaluations". Steven Corbett's "Great Debating: Combining Ancient and Contemporary Methods of Peer Critique" provides both a rational for and demonstration of using video for peer-critique debates. And "Procedures, Projects, and Programs: Florida State University’s Digital Studio Tutor Handbook," by Josh Mehler, Stephen McElroy, & Jennifer Wells, takes us on a tour of a key pedagogical tool used to train tutors at FSU's Digital Studio.

KairosCast

The KairosCast crew have produced three new episodes since our last published issue:
  • Episode 1.2 (aka Episode 2) considers the ALS ice bucket challenge, and hosts conversations with two of our KairosCast syndicated shows: Kyle Stedman of "Plugs, Play, Pedagogy" and Casey Boyle and Nathaniel Rivers of "PeoplePlaceThings."
  • Episode 3 includes conversations with Samantha Blackmon and Alex Layne from Not Your Mama's Gamer, and Amber Buck, Megan Condis, Kristin Prins, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Martha Webber—guest editors for a special issue on Crafting and DIY Rhetorics from Harlot of the Arts (CFP: deadline April 15 2015).
  • Episode 4 showcases a collaboratively written and performed 12 Days of Christmas parody, continuing a longstanding Kairos tradition of penning digital rhetoric-themed parody songs (cf: "El Paso, man", written by Mick Doherty and sung to the tune of Billy Joel's "Piano Man", performed at C&W 1995 by Corey Wick; "HTML" sung to the tune of the Village People's "YMCA," performed by the original Kairos staff at the 1996 C&W; and "Walk on the Wild Side (at CIWIC)," a parody of the original Lou Reed tune composed by Laura Bartlett, Chidsey Dickson, Doug Eyman, & Colleen Reilly. All of the above were published in Computers and Composition. Really.)