In May, DWR instructors Brad Campbell, Jenny Jackson, Rachel Johnson, and Alice Johnston Myatt attended the Digital Media and Composition Institute in Columbus, Ohio. During the two-week institute, attendees return to the classroom to learn how to effectively use digital media in college composition classrooms. Topics included how to compose in digital media, assessment of digital compositions, digital pedagogy, understanding intellectual property and copyright issues, and how to recognize and respond to the needs of students who may need accommodation for specific needs such as autism or visual and auditory restrictions.

Brad Campbell, director of the Oxford campus undergraduate writing center, say about his time at DMAC, “DMAC was perhaps the most engaging experience I’ve had in my ten years as a faculty member. I completely transformed the way that I think about pedagogical approaches to multi modality and digital composition in the classroom, and I will use the knowledge that I gained from the institute in future classes in order to create more engaging and interactive assignments, to increase the accessibility and navigability of my courses, and to demonstrate how digital and technological processes influence students’ awareness of rhetorical situations across academic and professional contexts.”

Each fall as registration opens for DMAC, DWR chair Bob Cummings send out a general call to DWR instructors to apply for a seat at the institute. Those of us who attended DMAC this year agree with Brad Campbell’s opinion, “I can’t think of a better opportunity for professional advancement than DMAC, and I hope my current and future colleagues have an opportunity to attend as well,” and we encourage you to attend if circumstances permit. If you’d like to learn more about the DMAC experience, you’re invited to talk with this year’s attendees or Andrew Davis or Guy Krueger, both of whom attended DMAC in 2012.

In addition to hundreds of interesting panels related to post-secondary writing, this year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication in Tampa, FL featured more Special Interest Groups than ever.  One of those Special Interest Groups was a meeting to help sketch the beginnings of a conference on writing credentials, such as majors, minors, and certificates.  Guy Krueger, a Core Instructor and the Writing 101 Curriculum Chair, attended the SIG on behalf of the University of Mississippi.  Currently, UM’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric offers a Writing minor, but there is hope for a major in the near future.  An annual (or regular) conference devoted to what credentialing writing currently looks like at different institutions and, more importantly, how students benefit from writing credentials in school, on the job market, and in careers would be beneficial in a number of important ways: teachers and administrators would be able to see how successful programs recruit students, how to best market writing credentialing, what courses are most effective and why, what students gain both immediately and long-term from writing credentials, what standards are currently in place for credentialing, and what the future might hold.  The group ended with plans to work on holding a conference or workshops at the University of Texas-El Paso in 2016 and will maintain conversations regarding planning over the next several months.

At the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference in New Orleans, I chaired and presented on a panel about using Infographics in the Composition Classroom. My presentation focused on using infographics as supplemental materials for assignment sheets and I discussed how students used these infographics throughout the semester. The other two panelists discussed how using infographics as an assignment lead to students changing their writing process and conceiving writing in new ways. All in all it was a very successful panel that lead to a very good discussion about using visual texts in the composition classroom and how to navigate students’ expectations regarding non-traditional writing assignments. My fellow panelists and I discussed the possibility of exploring these ideas further and collaborating on an article, and, after a suggestion from an audience member, collecting our infographic resources on a website for other instructors interested in utilizing infographics in the classroom. In this panel and the others I attended, I learned a lot about the variety of teaching practices others are incorporating into their classes and ways to relate information to this current generation of students.