Blog

Beginning Fall 2013

Posted on August 21, 2013 at: 12:55 am

We’ll be back at school in a week for Fall 2013. I’ll be teaching a section of first-year writing, like I always do, in part because I like working with new students and in part because I can test and refine Writer’s Help. I’ll be mentoring a new grad student, Kiley Dhatt, who did her undergraduate work at U Washington. She has interests in writing studies, so it should be fun to work together.

Writer’s Help is doing well, with program adoptions at some flagship universities: Florida, Illinois, Georgia, Washington, Colorado. We’ve also got strong adoptions at important community colleges and the University of Maryland University College, which is their long-established online education program. Bedford is migrating WH to a new “Platform X” server, which should give us increased flexibility for interface, interactivity, and new content.

I had a long  review article published in College Composition and Communication in the recent Spring issue: CCC0644Review.

I’ve also got chapters published in recent anthologies. I write about “Teaching Visual Rhetoric” in Designing Texts: Teaching Visual Communication, edited by Eva Brumberger and Kathryn Northcut (Amityville, NY: Baywood Press 2013, 301-310). Writing this gave me a chance to work with Eva Brumberger, who was my student at New Mexico State.

I also have a chapter on the development of Writer’s Help in a new volume on software applications in teaching writing, likewise published by Baywood with a 2013 imprint:

“Developing a Web-Served Handbook for Writers.” In Designing Web-Based Applications for 21st Century Writing Classrooms. Edited by Baotung Gu and George Kennedy. Amityville, NY: Baywood Press. 2013: 155-174.

Some upcoming travel will include Cincinnati in September, for a roundtable on health discourse, moderated by Lisa Meloncon. In November, I’ll return to Oahu to evaluate their English department, which I first did 7 years ago. I’ll attend a training course in DC later that month for a workshop on evaluating critical thinking using the CAT Test, which is part of our NSF TUES grant. In January, I’ll present at the PAN PBL conference (problem-based learning) in Concepcion, and travel around Chile a bit. Later in spring, I’ll be at Purdue as an external review team on their English department.

It should be a good year…