Call for Brown Bag Proposals Spring 2010

Call for Proposals:
CWP Brown Bag Talks 2010
Creative Assignments

The Campus Writing Program invites proposals for Brown Bag talks for Spring 2010.

The Brown Bag talk is an excellent venue for sharing with the campus community teaching experiences, ideas, theories, and research about writing.

Brown Bags also give faculty the opportunity to learn from one another in ways not traditionally supported in the university.

The theme for Spring 2010 is Creative Assignments. We invite you to present on innovative Writing Intensive ssignments you have taught or are planning to teach. All topics from all disciplines are welcome.

Please send proposals/ideas/questions to Jeff Rice, Director, ricejr at missouri dot edu

Information is Beautiful

The teaching of argument, persuasion, narrative, scientific reporting, and so on often involves the visual. From the Power Point to the website to the poster to the written text, visuality plays a key role.  Information is Beautiful, http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/,  is a weblog with excellent examples of how the visual affects written communication. These examples can be used to inform one’s teaching or one’s own research.

CosmoLearning

CosmoLearning is a website devoted to free education. It is an interesting model for aggregating information for students to learn from because:

• It was formed by two high school students (for homeschooling purposes) and shows what students are capable of creating with free software.
• It counters many of our narratives regarding doing research on the Internet (i.e., that we should discourage students from doing Internet research) since the site is rich in high quality materials.
• It provides an example for our own classes (can we create similar sites with Ning or related free software so that students can create their own learning modules for writing in our courses?).  How can we tap into students’ creativity to produce content that will help them learn?

Using Wikis in the Classroom

From the website, Profhacker, some thoughts on using wikis in the classroom. The Campus Writing Program encourages you to use its wiki, http://cwp.missouri.edu/wiki/.

CWP Ranks as Top Program in U.S.

In its 2010 listing, US News & World Report ranks the Campus Writing Program as one of the best Writing in the Discipline programs in the country.

We Are All Writers Now

Anne Trubek, Director of Composition at Oberlin, offers a compelling discussion of writing and online applications in this essay, “We Are All Writers Now.”

Take the “25 Things About Me” meme that raged around Facebook a few months
ago. This time-waster, as many saw it, is precisely the kind of brainstorming exercise I used to assign to my freshman writing students decades ago. I asked undergraduates to do free-writing, as we called it, because most entered my classroom with little writing experience beyond formal, assigned essays. They only wrote when they were instructed to, and the results were often arch and unclear, with ideas kept at arms length. Students saw writing as alien and intimidating–a source of anxiety. Few had experience with writing as a form of self-expression. So when I stood in front of a classroom and told students to write quickly about themselves, without worrying about grammar or punctuation or evaluation—”just to loosen up,” I would say—I was asking them to do something new. Most found the experience refreshing, and their papers improved.