News

To help familiarize folks with the basics of the Sophie program, Professor Justin Hodgson will be offering a short introduction/workshop. To find out more, click here to see the promotional video to get aquainted with Sophie.

What is Sophie?

"Sophie 2.0 is open source software for writing, reading and visualizing rich media documents in an interactive, networked environment. The program emerged from the desire to create an easy-to-use application that would allow authors to combine text, images, video, and sound quickly and simply, but with precision and sophistication. Sophie's users are interested in creating robust, elegant, networked, texts and multimedia works without having programming knowledge or training in the use of more complex and costly tools. such as Flash" (www.sophieproject.org).

To continue the conversation begun at last year's workshop Social Justice & Evidence Based Assessment with the Learning Record led by Professor Peg Syverson, the Communications project will host a workshop on the Learning Record.

Please join us to learn about the LR generally and to hear about the latest developments in the LR Online using PB Wiki.

Currents in Electronic Literacy (ISSN 1524-6493) solicits article-length submissions related to the theme below. Submissions are due by Friday, January 15, 2010.

Spring 2010 issue: "Gaming-Across-the-Curriculum: Playing as a Way of Learning"

“Good game design,” writes James Paul Gee in “Learning and Games,” “has a lot to teach us about good learning, and contemporary learning theory has something to teach us about how to design even better and deeper games.” The burgeoning field of pedagogical gaming has inspired emergent journals (GameStudies; Games and Culture), new institutions (e.g., the Game Studies Research Center at the IT University of Copenhagen), and interdisciplinary approaches. This issue of /Currents/ features guest editors Jan Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes of Clemson University’s Gaming Across the Curriculum (GAC) program, which examines current and potential uses of gaming within the academy. The issue will incorporate games created by students and faculty, best practices of the use of computer games in teaching, articles that theorize play and pedagogy, innovative approaches to cross-disciplinary collaboration using computer games, frameworks of GAC white papers, and so forth.

Currents encourages unconventional and emergent modes of scholarship. The editors solicit articles, games (with instructions and background), GAC curriculum designs, and other scholarly treatments of “gaming-across-the-curriculum.” All submissions should adhere to MLA style guidelines for citations and documentation. Submissions should state any technical requirements or limitations. Currents reserves all copyrights to published articles and requires that all of its articles be housed on its Web server. It is the policy of Currents in Electronic Literacy that all published contributions must meet the W3C accessibility standards. While all Currents articles are accessible, readers are advised that these same articles may contain links to other Web sites that do not meet accessibility guidelines. Contact: currents@cwrl.utexas.edu or interrobang@mail.utexas.edu.

Join us Tuesday, October 20 at 4 p.m. in the African American Culture Room (4.110) of the Texas Student Union to hear Cynthia Selfe deliver a talk entitled "Stories That Speak to Us: The Intellectual and Social Work of Literacy Narratives and Digital Archives."

This talk focuses on autobiographical literacy narratives from the Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN) and demonstrate the informational value of these vernacular digital accounts for students and teachers of composition, as well as members of the public. The DALN is a national archive of autobiographical recollections about how individuals learn to read and write; the conditions under which they continue to do so; and the influences and values which shape their literate practices. The DALN, like the Mass Observation project in Britain, depends on the voluntary contributions of individuals and traces the "everyday literacy practices of ordinary people" which often remain invisible in our culture—especially during times of dynamic change (Sheridan, Street, Bloome). These first-hand social media accounts—which exist in a variety of digital formats (e.g., print, video, audio) and are accessible to members of the public through a Web-based interface—constitute a valuable digital resource for research on literacy, for the teaching of composition, and for the public.

The CWRL is pleased to announce that Cynthia Haynes will be visiting the lab in October to give a talk titled “Avatar Nation Secedes, Cites Moral Panic as Grounds for Political Divorce.”

Haynes, who is an Associate Professor and Director of First-Year Composition at Clemson University, will discuss how ‘avatar nation’ is making headlines around the world. She will describe how the proliferation of avatars into mainstream culture situates academia on the bleeding edge of a nation desperate for someone to take the diplomatic lead in an historic rhetorical negotiation. In an unprecedented move, virtual citizens of World of Warcraft and Second Life have joined forces and seceded from all their native nation-states. According to her, the world is on the brink of an avatar mass exodus. It’s serious—it’s real. It’s going to tank the economy. It’s going to mean the end of the virtual world as we know it, right down to our Molten Core. If we don’t go virtual now, we will find ourselves on the threshold of rhetorical hell ... where only action heroes rule and hockey moms wait in the wings to take their place.

Haynes will speak on Thursday, October 9, 2008, at 4 p.m. in the Sinclair Suite (3.128) of the Texas Union on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. The talk will be followed by a question and answer session. Light refreshments will be served.