CCCC 2006: Day Three

It’s been an oddly hard day. I feel so disconnected from the CCCC world. Maybe it’s just that all my work is K–12. Maybe it’s that I’ve not been here in so long. I dunno.

I went to a Computer Connection session during the I session time, primarily to hear what Bradley Dilger had to say about access issues. There were other presenters there as well, so I heard John Walter and Gina Merys’ presentation, “Developing a Local Digital Culture: A Grassroots Initiative,” which primarily explored the recommendations to help their university’s program meet graduate (and eventually undergraduate, by extension) needs for computer interaction, exploration, and pedagogical investigation. It seems to be a fairly complete proposal.

In discussion of various resources, wikis came up and John recommended schtuff.com as a free host site. During the workshop on Wednesday, someone suggested pbwiki.com. Maybe I can choose one and start investigating myself.

Bradley’s piece of the session was “Thirty Minutes to Better Web Accessibility.” Working off Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility, Bradley’s 30-minute outline proposes “five ‘quick fixes’ for making your site accessible.” Easily the best overview of the issues I’ve heard. Though, okay, I admit that I haven’t run out to revise the accessibility of any of my sites. Surely I can put that off a few more days. I really wanted to consider a ReadWriteThink lesson plan based on his discussion, but the most obvious one that I could think of would have relied on a free screen reader, and such a thing doesn’t exist. I’ll have to think on it more to figure something out. I’m sure that we should have a lesson that explores these issues. It’s just a matter of figuring out what and how.

Next, I was off to Session J.11: What’s Queer about Writing Program Administration? New Research from the Field, with Will Banks, Martha Marinara, Jonathan Alexander, and Samantha Blackmon. Selfishly, I went to the session to see Will and Sam, but expecting to be bored out of my mind. I really don’t need info on WPA work. That’s just too far away from anything I’m doing now or likely to do anytime in the future. Happily, it turned out to be a great session. The group of them had done an analysis of FY comp readers, evaluating them for inclusion of explicitly queer material. The findings were probably predictable. GLBT folks aren’t identified in biographical notes. When their texts are included, they are frequently texts that do not focus on the queer issues for which they are known. And overall, the biggest relevant issue was a recurring gay marriage debate in the various argument sections. The findings were really quite in line with the various race, class, and gender analyses that I did of texts and syllabi in the late 80s and early 90s. You’d think things might progress, take a different path. You’d think we’d learn lessons and make things better; but everything seems to follow the same, tired, slow-paced progression.

I finished off the evening with the Fifth C SIG, which went well. Again, I’m just there as an ex officio observer, so I don’t actually have to do anything :) After that, I just wandered off back to my room, where I frittered about till 9:30 when the Rock and Roll Party started. I went down to the party for about an hour. Nothing like watching comp/rhet people dance.

I saw good people and some good sessions, but I hate this part where I’m alone—like dinner, waiting, parties. I’m so bad at everything social, and the end result seems to be that I’m alone by my own failure. Stupid me.