composition

Hi everyone. This is my first attempt at a vlog. It was an awkward experience talking to myself for 12 minutes, I admit. Also, I did no editing, so you will see all of my slip-ups (including saying that the "message is the medium" and then having to correct myself to say that the "medium is the message"). This video is just a quick run-down of some of the books I read for my comprehensive exam list on Digital Literacy and New Media Studies: On a completely irrelevant side note, I almost never wear glasses in public, and I rarely wear hoodies, so this is probably a poor representation of "everyday Nicole." haha

Today, in class, I assigned my students the following prompt : What is writing? Why do we write? What makes someone a writer? Do you consider yourself a writer? The following is the response I wrote for my class as part of my class-linked blog, but the ideas were ones I thought were worth sharing and getting responses from a larger audience: I think it’s safe to say that my answers to these questions– what is writing? why do we write? what makes someone a writer? do you consider yourself a writer?– are vital to my role as a Composition professor. They shape the way I teach, the way I think about my students’ writing, and the way that I educate myself. To me, writing is a social transaction; it is used to carry messages from one person to the next, from one generation to the next, or even to a single person from one moment to the next. I used to think it was something that happened when someone sat alone in a room and scribbled until they became a famous author, but I don’t think of it ...

This past weekend, I, along with two colleagues from St. John's University and one from Montclair State University, presented a panel at the Northeast Writing Center Association Conference (NEWCA). For those who have never been, I do recommend it. The atmosphere there is warm, inviting, and unlike other conferences that I have been to, very interactive. This year's theme was the Post 9/11 Writing Center. As soon as we saw the theme published in the fall, our small group started thinking about the policies in our centers that evolved out of 9/11, or at least 9/11 rhetoric. In particular, we were concerned with the terms "diversity" and "tolerance." Some of the questions we were wondering were: What did it mean to be tolerant or to promote diversity?  How did our mission to promote tolerance and show acceptance for diversity play itself out in our sessions?  Was demanding tolerance another form of censorship?  Who gets a voice when "tolerance" is dem...