Author: Peter Haun

Paula Miller In the 1970s, freelance journalist Ralph Lee Smith referred to the internet as an “electronic highway,” and through the 90s, we called the internet the “information superhighway,” a place to link humans with knowledge on just about every topic imaginable. Since those exciting early moments, the ways we conceive of the internet has shifted, and while that information component is still strong, we’re living in an era of community-driven digispace, with human-centric tools (the writing studies tree, rhetmap) and meeting places (Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat) that are empty without their communities driving them. There are even those digital phenomena…

Here at the DRC, we are introducing a new series of posts featuring Digital Lesson Plans. The aim of our Digital Lesson Plan series is to solicit and share classroom activities and assignments that teach some aspect of digital rhetoric, broadly interpreted. These “digital lessons” have been designed and tested by instructors, and the hope is that they will serve as practical models and jumping-off points for readers to adapt to their own teaching contexts. The following lesson was developed by Kaitlin Clinnin of Ohio State University. Brief Description of Activity: Students practice Neo-Aristotelian criticism by analyzing the Twitter hashtag #ThanksObama. Through practice, students consider the affordances and…

Day: Thursday, April 14, 2016 Time: 7:00 to 8:00 pm ET Moderators: DRC Fellow Paula Miller (as @SweetlandDRC) Hashtag: #DRCchat Topic: Makerspaces and Digital Writing Introduction: Our recent Blog Carnival on Makerspaces and Digital Writing explored how a culture of making, crafting, innovating, and creating may be brought to composition classrooms, particularly in higher education.  Contributors have written about how and where making practices get encouraged, what kinds of making practices have helped composition students see valuable connections between innovation and composition, and what the implications are of bringing makerculture – often associated with neoliberal capital and start-up culture – to the university.…

Welcome back to Tool Review Tuesdays, a blog post series that explores how we can hack our classrooms and our research with composing, editing, networking, and other writing-related edtech tools! This is an extension of our Hack n’ Yack series, where the DRC fellows offer up some quick tips and perspective on tools they’ve found especially useful. Here at the DRC, we often host Twitter Chats to bookend and expand on our Blog Carnival themes. Twitter Chats are a great way to connect with other experts and practitioners, share resources, and ask questions. But what exactly is a “Twitter Chat”?…