Revised 10 April 2005

Online Conference Theme

When Content Is No Longer King: Social Networking, Community, and Collaboration

CWOnline 2005 will focus on community and social interaction by examining the social/cultural/pedagogical implications and practices of both new and "old" electronic communication technologies.

Community wide public feedback to proposals: April 30-May 12
Formal Presentations and discussion: May 31-June 13
Interaction and discussion slated to continue through Stanford Conference with the addition of blogs focused on Palo Alto sessions.
Hosted at Kairosnews.org, the first community weblog in the field of Computers and Writing. (currently at http://kairosnews.org/cwonline05/proposal)

Date of Application: 8 March 2005, revised, April 10, 2005

Name of Organizing Committee Chair: Bradley W Bleck

Institution: Spokane Falls Community College and Kairosnews.org

Postal and Email Address

3410 W. Ft. George Wright Drive
MS 3050
Spokane, WA 99224
bradb@spokanefalls.edu
Phone: 509.533.3572 

Name, Affiliation, and Contact Information for All Other Organizing Committee Members

Matt Barton, University of South Florida
mbarton3@tampabay.rr.com

Samantha Blackmon, Purdue University
SBlackmon@cla.purdue.edu

Charles Lowe, Purdue University
cel4145@cyberdash.com

Clancy Ratliff, University of Minnesota
ratli008@umn.edu

Year to Organize Conference: 2005

Conference Media

What electronic media does your team plan to use? Blog and listserv primarily. MOO should a presenter wish a synchronous discussion/presentation. CW Online 2005 will be housed within Kairosnews where presenters, reviewers and participants may create an account to enable participation in the discussions or may merely "lurk" without creating an account, while being limited to observing only. Unless a presenter specifically requests a synchronous session, all presentations and discussion will take place asynchronously. Separate listservs and email addresses have been created for registration, questions, announcements such as cw05submissions@kairosnews.org. for submissions, cw05online@kairosnews.org for conference announcements, and technical support at techsupport@kairosnews.org. Those with news aggregators may subscribe to all weblog posts for the conference at http://kairosnews.org/taxonomy/term/89/0/feed.

How accessible are these media for computer users around the world? Please include hardware specifications and required software, if appropriate. For the most part, these will be pretty low bandwidth intensive, making them accessible to all users with internet access, even on slower connections. Only standard internet applications are expected to be employed.

What specific experience does each member of the proposed organizing committee have with each of these media? Charles Lowe will handle the technical aspects of the site for the blog and listserv. He has been managing the Kairosnews site for the past three years. (Kairosnews started when Charles Lowe and Clancy Ratliff were chosen as News Co-Editors of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. They decided to turn the news section of the journal into a weblog open to anyone who wants to contribute. Kairosnews went live on March 6, 2002.) All committee members have experience using and developing blogs for various needs. At least two have extensive MOO experience and all have listserv use experience and at least two with listserv management experience. 

What support structures are in place to ensure the successful operation of the specific technologies (servers, applications, etc.) to be used? Blog and listserv will be run from Kairosnews site. As Charles Lowe manages the Kairosnews site and has developed and supported countless Drupal based blogs, he will be the tech troubleshooter. Bradley Bleck will field email and blog questions related to registration, proposals, and general troubleshooting. Matt Barton will coordinate responses to abstracts, ensuring that each abstract receives at least two responses from committee members, recruited volunteers, colleagues, or interested individuals. As Response Coordinator, Clancy Ratliff will work with submitters and prepare "how to" support materials for presenters and follow-up response postings. Matt Barton will work with Clancy in both of these endeavors. Samantha Blackmon will be Presentation Coordinator, taking the lead to see that all presentations are up and running when it comes time. All committee members and recruited volunteers will work with presenters and applicants to get their material into the blogs as needed. Each committee member has considerable blog experience and will be able to provide support to presenters who are unfamiliar with blog technology. If used, MOO will be run from Purdue University's MOO. Bradley has worked in several MOOs, most recently in AcadianaMOO, but also in DaMOO and the recently defunct Connections. Volunteer help has been recruited to aid in the use of Purdue's MOO.

Along with providing written "how-to" documentation to most effectively post materials in the blog, each presenter will be assigned a "helper" from the conference committee or from recruited volunteers. Each helper has considerable blog experience and will be able to walk the presenters through the process.

Conference Program and Events 

Briefly describe your plans for the conference program--its structure and focus. What sorts of events will you host?

Structure

The online conference will be held during the two weeks prior to the face-to-face conference, May 31-June 13, and will continue in a scaled down manner during and after the face-to-face conference, providing for an active resource to continue discussions from concluded sessions and providing some follow-up and debriefing once face-to-face participants have headed home. Additionally, there is a pre-conference element where members of the Computers and Writing community will be invited to post responses to conference proposal. During each of these weeks, we will host presentations (which will be commissioned from an open call for participants, released once the proposal is accepted and approved). Before the conference, staff will work with presenters who need assistance with creating blog versions of the presentations, creating multimedia content, and otherwise creating pedagogically significant and engaging presentations. We will actively solicit both seasoned professionals as presenters and also student scholars.

Depending upon the number of accepted submissions, we will run several conversations at a time, plans call for starting at least one on the Monday of each week, another on Wednesday, another on Friday, and so on for duration of the online conference. The presentation and discussion portion of the online conference will run from May 31 to June 13. Presentations will be posted within the Kairosnews, and a discussion thread will be attached to each presentation for asynchronous discussion. The general process will be that after a paper/presentation is accepted, it will be posted with introductory comments by the presenter(s). Either the presenter, a moderator or conference attendee will then posit questions or line of discussion to be handled as responses to the presentation's blog entry. 

Prior to and during the Stanford conference, members of the blogging and/or CW community will be solicited to post session summaries and commentary in order to provide information to those seeking information they missed due to scheduling conflicts or providing access to the conference for those who are unable to attend in person. While a number of attendees will be posting to their own blogs, CW Online participants will be posting to the CW Online blog so there is a central repository of information. Once the Stanford conference has concluded, the online conference will host a post conference discussion and analysis, officially concluding on June 24 and unofficially as long as folks wish to carry on the conversation.

Focus

CW Online 2005 will echo the theme of the Stanford conference: NEW WRITING AND COMPUTER TECHNOLOGIES while focusing on community and social interaction by examining the social/cultural/pedagogical implications and practices of both new and "old" electronic communication technologies:

• Internet “social software” technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, social networks (orkut and friendster), social bookmarking (del.icio.us), etc.
• Mobile technologies such as wi-fi and smart phones.
• More traditional social, community communication spaces of email, discussion forums, newsgroups, listservs, and MOO's.

Presenters will be asked to focus on how various forms of electronic interaction does (not) affect classroom/educational participation, knowledge construction, attitudes toward teaching and learning and whatever else participants find pertinent. Who will you ask to review proposals to ensure high quality? As an acknowledgment of the value of social networks in creating discourse of and about scholarly work, CWOnline 2005 will follow a submission process using weblogs whereby participants will submit abstract proposals for public review and feedback. We will be asking academics and professionals in the field of computers and writing and social interaction to respond to proposals, group presentations, and chair sessions online. Presenters will received feedback from conference organizers (recruited reviewers and conference committee) and anyone on the internet via the comment boards. Presenters will also be expected to invite/solicit feedback from colleagues they know or from whom they would like to hear. Presenters will also be encouraged to respond to the feedback they receive regarding their abstract. They will be solicited via such lists as Techrhet, WPA-L and (we hope) the stable of Kairos reviewers.

An important part of hosting Online is collaborating with the on-site organizers. What specific options do you plan to propose? Blog discussions during the conference that feature conference presenters posting follow-up thoughts for those who are unable to make the on-ground conference or attend a particular session. A follow up discussion to the Stanford conference to conduct a meta-analysis. Blogging during the conference will be encouraged in several ways: those who have never blogged or have no blog of their own will be encouraged to blog on Kairosnews. Those who already blog will be encouraged to crosspost their notes on the sessions they attend to Kairosnews. Online conference organizers will pick up blog posts that are not cross posted and blog about them on Kairosnews. Finally, if wi-fi is available, attendees with laptops will be recruited and encouraged to blog sessions live. We will also encourage use of the expected "blogging stations" to be provided by the Palo Alto conference organizers. The central repository for this will be a "Blog Palo Alto/Stanford" collaborative book page in Kairosnews.

What specific features are you planning to make your meeting unique or to improve or enhance Computers and Writing Online? Along with the planned collaborative events occurring during the Palo Alto conference, the online conference's focus will serve as an acknowledgment of the value of social networks in creating discourse of and about scholarly work. CWOnline 2005 will follow a submission process using weblogs whereby participants will submit abstract proposals for public feedback. Conference organizers will encourage bloggers in the Computers and Writing community to act as reviewers. Proposals submitters are also expected to find at least one colleague to post an informed response to their proposal. Those who are involved in the reviewing stage will be encouraged to participate in the face-to-face conference as bloggers commenting on and blogging about face-to-face conference events. The above mentioned collaborative effort with the on-site organizers should be unique to CW Online 2005. Further, we will note that "Authors agree by posting that any original content other than comments, copyright owned by them, unless otherwise stated, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 2.0 license for others to use."

Conference Management 

What kind of help or advice from past organizers would you find most useful? Right now I'd say our biggest concerns is lining up enough proposal reviewers. While we hope that much of the review process is spontaneous and voluntary, we will also need to have reviewers lined up in case this doesn't work, or lined up to "jump start" the spontaneous reviews. We have arranged for the use of server space at computersandwriting.org for multimedia presentations we don't have the space or capacity to host.

Would you be willing to serve on the CCCC's Committee on Computers and Composition for the year preceding and following your sponsoring the conference to receive and then provide counsel about sponsoring the conference? Yes

Which previous Computers and Writing Online conference components have members of your organizing team attended? 

• Bradley Bleck has attended all on-ground C&W Conferences since Utah State, with the exception of Gainesville, and participated as a mentor in several of the most recent CW Online Conferences.
• Samantha Blackmon has attended Ball State, Illinois State, Purdue and, Hawaii. Planning Committee Member for Purdue. MOO helper at last three CW Online Conferences.
• Charles Lowe has attended Ball State, Illinois State, Purdue and Hawaii C&W Conferences.
• Matt Barton attended Purdue C&W
• Clancy Ratliff attended Purdue C&W

Please add any other comments you might have regarding plans for Computers and Writing Online. We will need help getting the word out about the conference and the CFP. We likely will also need some help with recruiting volunteers to respond to submitted abstracts.