It's been four years since our rowdy band of rhet/comp professionals last descended upon the Big Apple (and then, incidentally, a war broke out in Iraq...coincidence?). This time around, I had plenty of deja vu to contend with (LCDs in the conference hotel elevators, same old bars, same old city "aromas"), but enough novelty to keep me on my toes. Our conference presentation was especially well attended, with 50+ showing up to find out about multimodal composing and the challenge of assessment...I just hope they weren't looking for us to make the challenge disappear entirely, because that's not how we rolled. Instead, we offered various tales of wonder and woe about the different rubrics and other assessment tools each of us have used in conjunction with multimodal composition assignments (web-writing, audio essays, PSAs). The innovative part of our program, if I do say so myself, was that we strayed from the tired old panel presentation format, instead opting for a more interactive, hand-on discussion/workshop hybrid where we shared student work and talked about various strategies for evaluating it. Exciting times, indeed.
Other highlights:
Roy Haynes Quartet at the hallowed Village Vanguard (glad we finally made it).
Holy $@#!%!, is that Bill Clinton at the bar, not more than 25 feet from us?!? And Kevin Spacey, too?!? Secret Servicemen made it clear: these guys were not to be messed with.
My hotel room was, in the realtor vernacular, "cozy." Perhaps too trendy, too.
Mmmm...hot dog carts.
MOMA: Better than the Met? Well, at least you can get it all in in a day... (Jeff Wall exhibit = visually arresting, luminescent, even).
Tavern on the Green: Wow, are you kidding me? The decor of this place is straight out of the early 60s...the wait staff wear teal dinner jackets, for Pete's sake. Ginchy!
Rhetorical Visions seems to be a hit in the publishers' pavilion. I wonder how it's selling. I should have brokered a royalty deal...*sigh*
Visit my (somewhat meager) Flickr photoset of my Midtown travails.
It's Spring Break... so it must be time for the CCCC. Expect the usual post-conference blah-de-blah once I return. I'll be giving my presentation, "Multimodal Composing and the Challenge of Assessment" along with colleagues Susan Delagrange and Katie Braun on Thursday, 12:15-1:30. So if you're in the neigborhood, feel free to drop in on us. In the meantime, feel free to check out my newly redesigned site.
>>: Scribd is a site worth watching as it grows. Essentially, it's one of those Web 2.0 social network document sharing sites, and it has a really fast-loading, responsive PDF reader embedded on the site. On top of that, you can download documents in a variety of formats: TXT, DOC, PDF, and even MP3. Aside from the usual crap-tastic contributions (sophomoric slideshows and similar detritus), the number of quality full-text books is growing by the day.
>>: Fans of the panopticon will love this slick piece of digital animation by David Scharf called "Big Brother State." It's CC-licensed, and it deals with the issue of trusted computing along with more mainstream methods of state surveillance. Yet another great model text to show students in a course dealing with digital media production or analysis.
One of my long-time intellectual heroes, postmodernist and media theorist Jean Baudrillard, passed away today at the age of 77. And a day before my birthday, too...
(Read: "The Violence of the Global")