CWOnline 2006 begins today!

The first E-Forum session runs from 2/6-2/10:
"No More Grocery Store Tomatoes: Using Homebrewed Content Management Systems in the Writing Classroom." Michael Haynes and Marc Pietrzykowski, Georgia State University.

Visit the ComputersandWriting site to read the first post by the presenters: http://computersandwriting.org/ (The abstract of their presentation is included below.)

Also, make plans to visit the Tuesday Night Café Reunion tomorrow evening, Tuesday Feb. 7th, from 8-9 (EST) in TTU English MOO http://moo.engl.ttu.edu:7000/
Tari Fanderclai will host this event!

The Graduate Research Network forum is also open for grad students to post summaries of their research and receive feedback. (Also available via the c&w.org site).

If you haven't already, please register for the conference (so that a TTU English MOO character can be made for you).

We look forward to your participation in this year's conference, and we hope it is engaging and enlightening for you.

Cheers,

Lennie (on behalf of the CWOnline 2006 Organizing Committee)

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"No More Grocery Store Tomatoes: Using Homebrewed Content Management Systems in the Writing Classroom." Michael Haynes and Marc Pietrzykowski, Georgia State University.

If evidence from journals and listservs such as TechRhet are any indication, more and more RhetComp academics are becoming involved in the building of information systems, whether building them from scratch or adding to an existing CMS like Drupal, PHPNuke, or XOOPs. In fact, composition-oriented content management systems built by independent professors for classrooms have even become relatively high-profile mainstream media items, with USA Today, C-Net, and Wired all featuring articles in early 2005 regarding this trend, focusing on one of the more successful "homebrewed" systems, Qualrus.
What we'd like to propose is a forum discussion of content management systems made by Rhetoric and Composition professors. The discussion would include topics ranging from practical coding issues to the political aspects of dealing with administrations that want to use proprietary software. The delivery system for this online panel will be forum software that allows discussions on various aspects of creating and using a CMS in an academic environment to take place over the five days of the conference. We would like to host this discussion on our own server while simultaneously mirroring the discussion on the C&W site, so that participants can use either portal for entering the discussion. Discussions will be prompted and spurred on by questions we will present, but participants will be encouraged to start their own threads on topics they are interested in.

Allowing participants to aid in defining the conversation is part of a larger strategy. On our server, the discussions will take place in a XOOPs-based CMS. All participants will be given administrative rights to the site and will be invited to take a hands-on approach to the site, allowing them to explore a CMS they might no be familiar with as well as providing them with places to blog about their experiences and link to their own software for feedback. These discussion can then be mirrored using RSS feeds onto the C&W site, and vice versa.
We hope our discussion will generate enough useful data to then develop a web-based resource for other professors interested in building their own information systems.
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For a full conference attending guide, visit:
http://english.ttu.edu/cw/CWO2006/CWonline2006_ConfGuide.pdf

The conference home can be viewed at
http://english.ttu.edu/cw/CWO2006/