Kairos Position Available: Praxis Section Co-Editor

Congratulations to the Kairos award winners, honored at Computer's & Writing 2009, for their work done in 2008.

GRADUATE AND ADJUNCT AWARD FOR SERVICE
Rik Hunter, University of Wisconsin–Madison

AND ADJUNCT AWARD FOR TEACHING
Annette Vee, University of Wisconsin–Madison

GRADUATE AND ADJUNCT AWARD FOR RESEARCH
Krista A. Kennedy, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

JOHN LOVAS WEBLOG AWARD
Jerz’s Literacy Weblog by Dennis G. Jerz, Seton Hill University

Is it just me or does anybody else see that mouse as a bike helmet? Every time I go to this page I mentally think it's about bicycling for an instant...

Looks like California may be the first state to really start hammering on open source digital textbooks, which the Governator thinks might cut spending by $350 million. Hilarious that this is happening in the Hollywood state. :)

No surprise: The long tail means that the top 10% Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets (this is the same distribution I've noticed in my student blogs, though my prolific students are also more likely to write *longer* posts, rather than *more frequent* posts)

In the Spring 2009 edition of Digital Humanities Quarterly, Eric Gordon of Emerson College and David Bogen of RISD write about “Designing Choreographies for the 'New Economy of Attention.'” This is one of the smartest pieces I've seen about the use of multiple forms of wireless media in the classroom because it goes beyond the old binaries of support/subvert.

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000049.html

Call for Webtexts
Computers and Composition Online Summer/Fall 2010 Special Issue
Open Source: Purpose, Practice, and Priorities
Special Issue Editors Lanette Cadle, Joe Erickson, and Kristine Blair

As shown in the upcoming Fall 2009 Computers and Composition Online special issue, Composition in the Freeware Age, open source projects are a significant part of social media, especially media intended for education. Although some of Web 2.0 is open source, that overlap barely begins to cover the purpose, practice, and priorities that comprise open source in academia, especially for those who teach and research in composition studies. This special issue invites submissions centering on open source as it connects to writing and the teaching of writing.

Even now, five years since Computers and Composition Online published Laurie Taylor and Brendan Riley's Open Source and Academia (Spring 2004), the open source movement grows in importance while at the same time remaining an under-the-radar stance, despite the significant inroads open source has made into writing pedagogy. At the heart of this lack of transparency is definition. What is or isn't open source remains slippery. Scholars may see open source in academia as primarily an intellectual property issue and advocate Creative Commons use and more openness in scholarly publication. Others may see it as a software accessibility issue and support alternatives to proprietary software used in teaching, i.e., using Moodle instead of Blackboard or Open Office over Microsoft Word. Still others look to the rhetoric beneath the stance and and see open source as a continuation of the fundamental idea of academic freedom: in order to have freedom of expression, academics need to also control the ways their works are expressed, not outsource intellectual work to for-profit corporations that usually have different agendas than academics.

In this special issue of Computers and Composition Online, editors Lanette Cadle, Joe Erickson, and Kristine Blair ask for webtexts that investigate the purpose, practice, or priorities needed for an open source connection with writing theory or pedagogy. For the purposes of this issue, we will be using the most inclusive definition of open source possible and will consider, especially in the Virtual Classroom section, webtexts depicting assignments using free software that may not be purely open source, such as Google Wave, which is part of Google, but has opened the code for independent developers to use. Here are a few suggestions divided by sections:

I know many of you have been keeping tabs on Wolphram|Alpha, the "long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone." Well, looks like Google has responded with their own tool called Google Squared. You can read up on Google Squared on the official Google Blog, but here's the scoop: