Re: CCCC sessions

[becky.rickly@umich.edu (Becky Rickly)]

Thanks, Paula, for the kind words--I wish you'd come up and introduced
yourself after our session!  Just a note, too--we all hail from the English
Composition Board at the University of Michigan, not Western Michigan ;-)

I'm especially glad you found our session helpful--one of the presenters
was Marion Wilderman, our "head hootie" on our OWL, and an undergraduate
tutor (ok, she *just* graduated).  Also, our session, which I thought went
together quite well, too, was constructed almost completely online:  we
sent copies via email, and arranged our parts so that they *would* go
together well, then met Friday morning (alas, at the same time as the
Wcenter breakfast, so I missed meeting you all) to do a dry run and make
some last minute revisions.

I think the collaborative nature of our presentation AND the dry run really
helped us create something that was appropriate for our audience--one of
the problematic issues (ewww, that was *almost* "problematize, Carl!)
raised here on the list.  I wonder how many folks DO still have dress
rehersals, either of papers to be read or oral presentations?  Seems to me
if our papers will be delivered orally, we ought to hone our information
AND performance/delivery so that our audience will take away what we'd like
them to.  That just sounds like a necessary part of the revision process to
me, yet I can't help but think that a lot of folks don't bother....

One last comment re: the title of sessions.  I had my five month old with
me, so I had to be selective about which sessions I attended, and
frequently what I *thought* I was going to learn/hear about was nothing
like what I did hear about.  On one occassion, that was a happy
circumstance (a roundtable w/ Jeff Galin, Susan Lang, Susan-Marie
Harrington, and John Barber, I believe, that I sat in the outskirts of),
but on three occasions I was disappointed to find that the papers were only
remotely related to the topic.  Case in point:  I went to a session with
"wired, women, and the web" somewhere in the title, and the presentation I
sat through until Landon started to cry was all about exercises this person
used with basic writers (not gender specific) in her stand-alone computer
classroom....

--Becky

>I really enjoyed the presentation by the group from Western Michigan
>where they described their online writing and learning program.  We've
>heard part of it here from Becky Rickly, but it was good to hear more,
>and I admired the way the members of the group had planned their
>presentation together.  They had all their visuals on one laptop, and it
>was all so smoothly done.  Then they left plenty of time for discussion
>afterwards.  I learned a lot at that session.
>
>Paula Gillespie