MnCUEW, HO!

A group of my colleagues and I submitted a panel proposal to the Minnesota Colleges and Universities English and Writing (MnCUEW) conference at the end of February. We were informed that all the panel positions were filled, but just a few days ago we received e-mails informing us of the time our panel was to present. Yikes! While I regret that I have little time to prepare—the conference is in one week—I am thankful that I already know my topic quite well due to this class and this blog. After all, the panel is called “The Multimodal Classroom: Old Lesson Plans in New Ways.”

I will be presenting about my incorporation of texting and Twitter in my composition classroom. There being five of us in the panel, I will only have about ten minutes; so the piece will be succinct and svelte. I haven’t finessed all the details yet, but most of them will come from my blogging and my classroom experiences with the lessons. Basically, I will briefly explain my justifications, my goals, the lesson itself, and then share some of the results.

Having never presented at a conference, I have to say I am quite anxious. While I am relatively at ease speaking in front of a crowd, I do get antsy when it comes to big "to-do’s.” From my understanding, conference presentations can sometimes have only a handful—or less—audience members; but despite any unease on my part, I hope we get a good turnout: I’d love to make a grand entrance into the spotlight of discourse in my discipline.

On an unrelated note, today I found the perfect segue for my thesis paper. One of my favorite machinimator’s blogs held the key to linking machinima as a medium to machinima as a rhetorical tool. The journal length paper I wrote for Dr. Moberly’s rhetoric class last fall was heading towards that direction, but I hadn’t found a great way to show the art medium as rhetorical vehicle until this morning. Olibith—the machinimator whose blog I read, coincidentally also referenced in my paper—discussed in his blog how WoW game developers incorporated a character from one of his films into their game. Exciting!

This is exactly the evidence I was looking for to start analyzing machinima as a rhetorical interaction between players of the game and the game makers. It is proof, small as it may be, supporting the position that consumers are also producers (Baudrillard’s System of Objects).