Douglas Eyman is Director of the PhD in Writing and Rhetoric, the MA concentration in Professional Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), and the undergraduate Professional Writing Minor at George Mason University. He teaches courses in digital rhetoric, technical and scientific communication, editing, web authoring, advanced composition, and professional writing. His current research interests include investigations of digital literacy acquisition and development, new media scholarship, electronic publication, information design/information architecture, teaching in digital environments, and video games as sites of composition. Eyman is the senior editor and publisher of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, an online journal that has been publishing peer-reviewed scholarship on computers and writing since 1996.
Anna S. Habib, Associate Editor, CWCAC
In this post, I hope to provide some concrete advice for working with multimedia and multimodal projects in the writing center, but I should start by noting that my advice (and even my definition of “writing”) comes from my work as editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and from my research interests in digital rhetoric – I’m not a scholar or practitioner of Writing Center pedagogies, but I am an ally and supporter of the great work that Writing Centers accomplish. I’ll start with some history and some context; feel free to skip down to the “Advice and Preparation” section to get straight to the practical bits.
A Bit of Context: Histories and Scholarship
In some ways, I trace my career in writing studies to my experience as a peer-tutor in my undergraduate writing center. It was there that I first became interested in the teaching of writing specifically (a topic about which my school had no course offerings beyond the class that served as a pre-requisite for working in the writing center itself). At the risk of sounding just as old as I am, in those days (around 1989-90) computers were just starting to be used by students, and we didn’t see their effects in the writing center until many years later. Similarly, when I worked in the writing center as part of my teaching assistantship for my MA program, there were no classes teaching multimedia or multimodal composition (the closest was the FYC course I taught at the time, which included basic web page design the year that the first graphical web browser was available). Fast forward to 2003 when I started my PhD program at Michigan State, and the whole field had shifted from distrusting computers as depersonalizing machines that came between the writer and the text to nearly ubiquitous use for drafting, revising, and editing. And in this program, I did not work in the writing center, but I did use it as a patron – both for traditional, textual writing, and for multimedia work. Continue reading “Multimodal and Multimedia Projects in the Writing Center by Douglas Eyman”