The SWCA Awards Committee is pleased to announce the 2006 Tutor Award. This award is presented annually on a competitive basis to a student (undergraduate or graduate) or staff member who works in any capacity in a writing center at an educational institution in the Southeastern region. The SWCA Tutor Award recognizes the outstanding contributions of a student or staff member to her/his writing center, the SWCA, and/or the writing center community more generally. Significant contributions may include one or more of the following: peer tutoring, center administration, tutor training, campus workshops, writing center innovations, or other relevant work. The Awards Committee seeks to recognize the leadership, commitment, and overall excellence of a student or staff member in writing center work. The winner will be recognized with a plaque and a check for $250 at the SWCA conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, February 16-18, 2006.

The SWCA Awards Committee is pleased to announce the 2006 Achievement Award. The SWCA Achievement Award is presented annually on a competitive basis to a writing center director (or other leadership or supervisory position) at an educational institution in the Southeastern region for his or her outstanding service to the SWCA. Research and service contributions to the nominee's writing center and the writing center community will also be considered. The winner will be recognized with a plaque and a check for $250 at the SWCA conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, February 16-18, 2006.

Today's Tampa Tribune has a story, "Weaving Through the Tangled Web," that might be of interest to Kairosnews readers.

The reporter, Gary Haber, briefly references the ETS Information and Communication Technology Literacy Assessment and the Pew Internet and American Life Project, among others, and intermingles student perspectives with faculty and administrator views.

One thing that always interests me personally is the notion of "authority" and how it's constructed. I'd like my students to be able to think critically about what the encounter online, but I don't know that I necessarily want them creating a sort of good/bad binary based only on publisher and currency.

Call for Abstracts

Writing Centers and Disability

Deadline: October 1, 2005

Abstracts (approximately 500 words) for potential contributions are invited for a new edited collection tentatively titled Writing Centers and Disability. This collection will investigate the vital, but often ignored intersection of Writing Center Studies and Disability Studies.

Contributions will ultimately fall into three general categories:

• Research on tutoring writers with disabilities,
• Research and narratives of experience of making the writing center space accessible, and
• First-person accounts, both narrative and theoretical, of the experience of tutoring a disabled person or of being a disabled person who works in or uses a writing center.

I saw this story at Inside Higher Ed this morning and thought it'd be interesting for Kairosnews readers, given that it's about anonymous blogging, free speech, academic labor, and the teaching of writing:

"The Phantom Professor"
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/11/phantom

A pretty good discussion has developed around the story, with several SMU students (or respondents representing themselves as SMU students) posting. The anonymous blogger formally acknowledged her "real" identity for the story, too.

Jeff W, Charlie L, and I were talking on email, and we decided to move the discussion to Kairosnews to see what everyone thinks.

The topic: Should conferences that are hosted annually by different host groups make use of the organization's website as a central or "standard" location for each year's conference website, or should each hosting group develop something themselves to be hosted on various servers associated with each group?

Let's take the WPA conference website as a case since Jeff is currently hosting it for 2005. Since WPA 2006 will be in Chattanooga, I'll be working on the conference website for next year. Charlie has teamed with Dave B to introduce Digital WPA, the new website for the Council of WPA.

In the thought-this-was-interesting department . . . .

Although expressing one's emotions through writing has numerous documented health benefits, it appears to do little to ease asthma, new study findings show.

This research contradicts an earlier, but smaller, study that found that people with asthma breathed more easily after writing about stressful experiences than after writing about neutral subjects.

http://health.yahoo.com/news/58605

Of all things, this news is covered by the Associated Press and featured -- this morning at least -- on the front page of Yahoo.

Full story at the following URL:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041231/ap_en_ot/banned_wor...

Posting for Joe Wilferth, a colleague here at UTC . . . .

Call for Papers

Image Events: From Theory to Action
Eds. Joe Wilferth and Kevin DeLuca

In a world awash in images, in a culture wherein images constitute the most influential form of public discourse, constructing image events (namely staged acts of protest designed for media dissemination) has become a crucial rhetorical strategy for corporate hegemony and citizen resistance. Such events, as has been demonstrated by Greenpeace, by PETA, by the Truth campaign against big tobacco and so many more, aim to heighten public awareness and affect cultural or mainstream ideographs.

Announcement

Based on recommendations from Charlie and Clancy, Kairos is pleased soon to offer publishing with a CC license as an option for all authors who so choose.

This decision reflects an extending of Kairos' mission to include making scholarly knowledge accessible and portable and an explicit acknowledgement by Kairos of the important shifts ongoing on the intellectual property landscape. We believe that this decision reflects an important trend in scholarly publishing in the humanities, and we are eager to provide our authors with the best options for publishing their work with us.