This is the prose poem I presented at MLA 2015 in the early session on Writing Studies at the MLA. Some folks had asked for a copy, so here it is. Enjoy ;)

• MLA2015-asymptote

(2010, October 23). Making multimodal projects: Integrating digital rhetorics and literacies across the curriculum. Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference, Las Cruces, NM.

description (from proposal)
A collaborative session with two of my textbook co-authors (Kristin Arola and Jennifer Sheppard).

I will discuss the practicalities of writing a collaborative textbook project with authors who share a theoretical and pedagogical approach but who haven’t collaborated as a group and are not co-located. This presentation will discuss how the authors modeled their own textbook’s approach to designing multimodal projects, following the same mistakes and having the same successes our students have when writing. This speaker will provide a meta-narrative of the book’s coming to fruition (even as it is still a work in progress, and we invite feedback on its current iteration, to be shown in the panel). We will detail, for instance, some of the collaborative techniques and technological programs we used, our internal and editorial negotiations to determine the kind of textbook we wanted (materially, theoretically, and practically), and the realizations we made about our assumptions in teaching writing to English majors (even in new media ways, as we do), but how we mistakenly dismissed first-year students taking Writing 101 as a possible audience for our book in the quest of creating a book useful to our colleagues teaching multimodal projects in their business, politics, and biology classes. We will provide examples from our writing process, to show the book-in-progress, and to show how this narrative of writing for students is formed on the idea that, as teachers of rhetoric and writing, we can never divorce our theoretical understanding of writing and the research of writing from our pedagogical approaches, either in the classroom or in writing for the classroom.

(2010, September 4). Teaching undergraduates to compose and assess scholarly multimedia. Colloque Littéracies Universitaires/Academic Literacies Conference, Lille3, Lille, France.

description
I discuss an undergraduate writing class where students learn to read, peer review, and write their own digital scholarship that draws on multiple media and modes of production (audio, video, graphics, written text, HTML, etc.) to enact their arguments. I describe how students transfer their alphabetic writing processes to multimedia, using example projects and reflections to show their learning.

accompanying materials

English summary

French summary

citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2007, October 20). Bridging the comp/lit split with new media. The Purpose(s) of English: A Conference on the Future of English Studies, University of Illinois, Springfield, IL.

abstract
In “English Studies, Aestheticism, and the Art-Culture System,” Hardin (JAC: 1999) claimed that the split between composition and literature mimicked an unhealthy art-culture system of high (or valued) art versus low (or kitschy, nonvaluable) art within English departments. His purpose in making this comparison was not to say that composition studies, or its connection to rhetorical studies, was indeed a low form of art, but to suggest that English studies needed a bridge between low and high forms — one that would satisfy, or rather rectify, the traditional high/low, literature/composition, aesthetics/ rhetoric split but also one that would allow for students to take advantage of the both/and in their writing practices. New media production provides a 21st-century answer to this split. By having students produce new media texts, the departmental cultures of English studies can bridge the binaries of high and low, literature and composition, and aesthetic and academic discourse. In combining both aesthetic and textual (i.e., letterate) choices in meaning making, authors of new media texts draw on both academic and popular genres to make their points. I will demonstrate this possible bridge by discussing a student-produced new media text, focusing in particular on the rhetorical and aesthetic intentions the student demonstrated in his video, which uses academically styled voiceover, punk- and pop-rock soundtrack, original video and audio, and written text.

accompanying materials

• none available

see also

• “Combining Academic and Aesthetic Practices in New Media” (related talk; under Major Speeches)
• “Converging the ASS[umptions] between U and ME” (article that came out of this talk; under Peer-Reviewed Articles)

citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2007, May 18). How to get published in an online journal: An editors’ roundtable. Computers and Writing, Detroit, MI.

abstract
This roundtable/mentoring session offered audience members a chance to hear from online journal editors what distinguishes each of their publications from the other as well as basic principles for querying and submitting to online journals in rhetoric and composition. Time was left for each journal editor to meet in small groups with interested authors for a Q&A.

accompanying materials

• none available

citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2006, October 21). Report on a CCCC-sponsored survey of multimodal composition practices (But where are the two-year schools?). TYCA-West, Park City, UT.

abstract
A presentation on the results from the national CCCC Research Initiative grant survey about multimodal composition practices, with a particular focus on why there are so few community colleges represented in the survey sample. Time was left for audience response to gauge future projects assessing two-year school participation in multimodal composition.

accompanying materials

• none available

citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2006, October 13). The role of new media in student narratives. Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY.

abstract
In this presentation, I discuss some student-produced new media texts from a class I taught called Perspective on Writing and Rhetoric: Multimodal Composition, in which the students created a series of progressively more multimodal projects (written text, audio, static image, vog, video documentary). I discussed how students transformed the idea of “narrative” through unexpected visual techniques, especially in their filmic projects.

accompanying materials

• not available